Stéphane Breitwieser’s seven-year spree across museums in Europe remains one of the greatest art thefts in history. Here is how Michael Finkel tells the story of his rise and fall in his book, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
On a crisp autumn day in the Alsace region of France, a young waiter named Stéphane Breitwieser slipped into a small museum in his hometown of Mulhouse and slid an eighteenth-century flintlock pistol beneath his jacket. It was 1994 and what seemed like a juvenile impulse would unfold into a seven-year spree of theft that traversed Europe, targeted over 170 museums and culminated in what many observers estimate to be the greatest art haul in history.
Breitwieser does not fit the profile of the brazen burglar. As Michael Finkel records in The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Simon & Schuster India, 2023), his first loves “were pottery shards and tile fragments and arrowheads.” As a child in Alsace, he called his hunts expéditions, clambering through medieval ruins with his maternal grandfather, Joseph Stengel, “who might have sparked a two-billion-dollar string of heists with the tip of his cane.”
When the old man’s walking stick tapped the soil, the boy dug with his hands. “Unearthed remnants,” Finkel writes, “felt to Breitwieser like private messages that had waited centuries specifically for him.” He sensed that keeping them was probably forbidden, but his grandfather’s nod overruled conscience. He kept every find in a blue box. “Objects that held my heart,” he would later say; opening the lid could make him tremble and cry.
Taking refuge in the past
Born in 1971, the only child of a nurse and a department-store manager, Breitwieser grew up in Wittenheim, near the French-German border, a region that has been a “stolen property itself,” wrested back and forth five times in 150 years. Their house was filled with old armchairs, Empire dressers, and antique weapons. On the walls hung canvases by a distant relative, the Alsatian expressionist Robert Breitwieser, who painted a portrait of toddler Stéphane before dying in 1975.
By adolescence, Breitwieser was moody, anxious, allergic to modern life. “I took refuge in the past,” he told Finkel. Museums steadied him. When his parents dropped him off for an afternoon alone, he would seek the quietest corner and touch the bronzes, tracing their “witness marks,” the tiny ridges that prove a human hand. Once, at Strasbourg’s Archaeological Museum, his finger snagged a loose fragment from a Roman coffin. A coin-sized bit of lead broke off. He pocketed it reflexively and later placed it in the blue box. It might have been his first theft, though he called it “a personal gift from the antiquity gods.”
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His father’s death in 1991 — and the loss of every painting, ivory, and weapon in the house — marked him more deeply than any reprimand. “My mother bought furniture from Ikea, and this crushed me,” he said. He began shoplifting. After being caught, he drew a single lesson: never get caught again. A short stint as a museum guard taught him the choreography of security, and provided another souvenir: a Merovingian belt buckle he hid into his pocket. The blue box moved with him from basement to bookshelf; people could leave him, but objects never would.
The coup de cœur and the girl
When Breitwieser met the introverted Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus in 1991, both were 20 and adrift. “I loved her right away,” he told Finkel. She was pixieish, five-foot-three, blond, and calm; the last quality would become the ballast to his volatility. “She had impeccable taste,” he said; together they wandered small museums in reverent silence. He called her Nena, she called him Steph. Friends found them inseparable, if unhealthy. “She fell in love with him, totally and sincerely,” said her lawyer Eric Braun; “she isn’t someone who does things half-heartedly.”
His first coup de cœur for an object came soon after. At a tiny museum in the farming village of Thann in Mulhouse, he had frozen before the flintlock pistol, walnut and silver, finer than anything his father had taken away. He whispered to Anne-Catherine, “It would be the ultimate f*** you to my dad.” “Go ahead,” she said. “Take it.” He did. Back home, he buffed the metal with lemon juice — citric acid for shine — and placed it beside his bed. “I was terrified,” he admitted, but no police came. Fear turned to relief, relief to pleasure. He began sleeping beside the gun, sometimes kissing it. “Fou de joie — crazy joy,” he called the feeling.
From pistol to crossbow to painting
The progression was swift. A medieval crossbow taken from a frigid castle museum; a portrait of an old woman by Dietrich stolen on a skiing detour in Switzerland. Each job honed and his system. He worked by instinct, improvising with a single tool, a wide Swiss-Army knife. He memorised guard rotations and camera dead zones. He chose pieces small enough to slip beneath his coat. He left frames behind, “so the painting would breathe.” He would later deride the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner thieves as “savages.” “Deliberately slicing or breaking a painting should still be immoral,” he told Finkel. “A thief must protect art.”
He claimed each theft began as sightseeing, a “psychological trick” to stay calm. But once the coup de cœur struck — a tremor in the fingers, a “buzzy current over the skin,” the heart’s blow — his choice was sealed. “Art is my drug,” he said. He never smoked, drank, or used narcotics. Beauty alone intoxicated him. Scholars called it Stendhal syndrome; the police called it self-mythology. “I exclude a diagnosis of kleptomania,” concluded the Swiss psychotherapist Michel Schmidt in 2002. “He truly steals for the love of art.”
A museum of its own
He stole the ivory Adam and Eve by German sculptor Georg Petel (1627) from the Rubens House in Antwerp, Belgium in 1997. “Approaching the museum, ready to hunt, Breitwieser clasps hands with his girlfriend, Kleinklaus, and together they stroll to the front desk — a cute couple,” writes Finkel. They buy two tickets in cash and enter Rubens’s former home, now a museum. He has already scouted the flaw: two screws at the rear of the plexiglass case protecting Adam and Eve. Guards, he’s observed, thin out at lunch hour.
In a room hushed by the noon lull, he stands before an oil painting, posing like any art lover, hands clasped behind his back, heart racing. Anne-Catherine hovers by the doorway. A cough means pause; silence means go. He kneels, flicks open the Swiss-Army screwdriver, and turns the first screw, then another. “It isn’t action,” he reminds himself, “that usually lands a thief in prison. It’s hesitation.” Ten minutes later the sculpture disappears beneath his coat. He slips out a staff door, re-enters near the lobby, and walks into the Antwerp streets at a tourist’s pace. No one stops him.
That night, in the attic of his mother’s house, he places Adam and Eve beside his bed. “Sometimes he brushes his fingertips over the carving, across the ripples in Eve’s hair, along the serpent’s scales,” Finkel writes. Around him gleam ivories of Diana and Cupid, Gallé vases, a gold tobacco box once commissioned by Napoleon. “Just the contents of his nightstand could stock a museum exhibit of its own.” He calls museums “secular prisons for art.” In his attic, he tells himself, art can finally breathe.
His private Louvre
By 2001, he had robbed 172 museums and galleries across Europe — roughly one every three weeks — and amassed nearly 300 objects worth over $2 billion. Their attic in Mulhouse was filled with a gold tobacco box once commissioned by Napoleon, Gallé vases, pewter chalices, Roman coins, goblets, silver urns, religious icons, a violin, a bugle, even medieval weaponry and Flemish landscapes by Brueghel and Boucher.
“The rooms seem to swirl with colour,” Finkel writes of the attic, “amplified by the radiance of ivory, multiplied by the glitter of gold.” The attic had become a secret museum of Europe’s past, a Louvre of larceny built on obsession with beauty. Breitwieser had become the world’s most prolific art thief and its least practical: he never sold a thing. “I enjoy art,” he said in court. “I love such works of art. I collected them and kept them at home.”
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In a home video, Anne-Catherine, his muse and collaborator, lounges on red satin sheets and purrs, “This is my kingdom,” referring to the attic lair, with velvet curtains, candlelight, and walls of stolen beauty. He laughs from behind the camera. Breitwieser loathed the idea of commerce. “Stealing art for money is disgraceful,” he said. “Money can be made with far less risk. But liberating for love feels ecstatic.” He called himself a “collector with an unorthodox acquisition style,” or, grander still, “an art liberator.”
How it all ended
It ended, inevitably, with hunger, not his, but a guard’s. In 2001, during lunch hour at Lucerne’s Richard Wagner Museum, he lifted a sixteenth-century bugle. A guard recognised him. The Swiss police traced him to Mulhouse. When they arrived, the attic was bare. His mother, in a panic, had shredded paintings and dumped treasures into the Rhône-Rhine canal. “Never have so many old masters been destroyed at the same time,” investigators said. Three days of dredging recovered a hundred objects, water-damaged beyond repair. The rest were gone.
At his 2002 trial in Switzerland, Breitwieser was as meticulous as he had been in his crimes. He interrupted prosecutors to correct them, not about guilt, which he freely admitted, but about the artworks themselves: a title mispronounced, a century misdated, a dimension off by an inch. It was, as one observer noted, “the thief lecturing the museum.” He was sentenced to just under three years in prison, of which he served about twenty-six months before being extradited to France. His mother, Mireille, received a suspended sentence for destroying the collection — a loss the art world has called one of the gravest cultural self-immolations in modern Europe — while Anne-Catherine served a shorter term for complicity.
Even prison didn’t alter the coordinates of his belief system. Breitwieser continued to insist he had never stolen for profit, only for passion. “I am not a criminal,” he told interrogators. “I am a collector.” To him, confinement was simply another museum with locked cases and limited hours. “A secret life,” he once said, “is an ideal life.”
After his release, he was arrested again many times: in 2019, for stolen Roman coins, and in 2022, for fresh burglaries — a pattern of relapse and denial. In March 2023, a French court in Sarreguemines sentenced him to 34 months for thefts committed between 2014 and 2019, of which 22 months were already served. He was ordered to complete the remaining year under electronic monitoring — house arrest with an ankle bracelet — and banned for several years from entering museums, auction rooms, or places of worship. By mid-2024 the confinement had ended. Today, he lives quietly in northeastern France, but the bans are still in force. “Art has punished me,” he told Finkel.
