The Art Thief

Between 1995 and 2001, a French waiter living with his mother in a modest house outside Mulhouse stole more than two hundred and thirty artworks from museums and small galleries across seven European countries. Renaissance panels. Drawings by Watteau and Brueghel. Ivories. Tapestries. A flute. Crossbows. Pieces from local museums in towns nobody had heard of, and pieces from the Rubens House in Antwerp. The estimated total value of what was eventually catalogued from his bedroom walls was in excess of one billion euros.

He never sold any of them. He hung them on the walls of his bedroom, in his mother's house, and looked at them.

The waiter from Strasbourg

Stéphane Breitwieser was, in most respects, unremarkable. He had been born in Strasbourg, had trained at nothing in particular, and worked as a waiter at a hotel restaurant in Switzerland, near the French border. He drove a small car. He had no obvious source of additional income. By his late twenties, he and his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus had developed a weekend habit of visiting small provincial museums.

They were extremely well-presented. Both were dressed in the kind of clothes that suggested educated middle-class tourism. They visited during quiet hours. They selected objects on impulse — drawings, small panels, things that fit in a coat or a backpack. He picked. She acted as a lookout. He removed the piece. They left. Most of the museums he hit were small, provincial, underfunded; cameras were either turned off or recorded over within a week, display cases were unlocked or held by simple cabinet keys he had taught himself to pick.

He was not, in any of the technical senses of art crime, a heist operator. He was a hoarder. He was in love with the objects. He could not, by his own subsequent admission, stop.

The bedroom

The works went home. Not into a vault. Not into a fence's hands. They went into his bedroom in his mother's house in Eschentzwiller, France, where he hung them, floor to ceiling. The room, when French police later searched it, was described in court documents as a small private museum. Renaissance panels next to seventeenth-century landscapes next to sixteenth-century Flemish miniatures. Some lit by a single lamp. Some stacked in corners. The room had no climate control. The conditions were, conservators later noted, catastrophic.

By 2001 there were over two hundred and thirty pieces in the room. None had appeared in any auction catalogue. None had been listed in the international stolen-art databases for transactional reasons — there were no transactions. The case confused investigators across Europe. There was no fence. There was no money trail. There were just empty walls, and a method.

Lucerne

He was caught in November 2001 in Lucerne, Switzerland. The piece was a small nineteenth-century military bugle, taken from a museum he had visited the previous day and revisited the next. The museum's curator, who happened to be in the lobby that morning, recognised him from the previous visit. He saw Breitwieser walking towards the exit with the bugle concealed in his jacket. The curator confronted him. Breitwieser tried to walk away. The police were called. He was searched. The bugle was discovered.

Within hours of his arrest, Breitwieser confessed to many other thefts. He gave the Swiss authorities his mother's address. The address was in France. Coordinating a search across the border took days.

The mother

Mireille Stengel, his mother, was at home. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus had phoned her in a panic from Switzerland. To protect her son — and, possibly, herself — Mireille made a decision. She would dispose of the artworks. Over several days, in stages, in her own kitchen, she did so.

Smaller items — drawings, ivories, small panels — went into the sink waste-disposal unit. Larger items, including framed paintings, were cut up with kitchen scissors. The pieces went into bin bags. The bin bags went into the household rubbish. Some of the larger paintings, particularly oils on canvas, she rolled and threw into a section of the Rhone-Rhine canal a few kilometres from the house, late at night. The wood stove ran continuously for two days. By the time French police arrived, most of the bedroom walls were pale rectangles where pictures had hung.

Around sixty paintings, plus dozens of decorative objects, were recovered intact, mostly because Mireille had not had time to reach them. Around a hundred and ten works were recovered in pieces. Approximately seventy-five works are believed to have been completely destroyed in the stove or lost in the canal. Some of the destroyed works had survived plagues, wars, the dissolution of monasteries, the French Revolution, and two world wars. They did not survive the kitchen of a small house outside Mulhouse, in 2001, because a son had asked for help and a mother had said yes.

Trials

Breitwieser was convicted in Switzerland in 2003 and in France in 2005, on the destruction charges and in respect of the French museum thefts. Mireille Stengel was convicted in France of receiving stolen goods and destruction of cultural property and given a partially suspended sentence. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus was convicted as an accessory.

Breitwieser has been arrested several times since his original conviction, most recently in 2019, for further thefts of artworks from museums in France and Switzerland. The pattern is essentially unchanged. Visit, take, hang at home. He has, by his own admission in subsequent interviews, never been able to stop. The canal section into which his mother threw a number of canvases on a particular night in 2001 has been searched, and most of what was found was unrecoverable. There are, somewhere in that water, fragments of paintings that no one will ever see again. They are, technically, still there.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 9. Stream the episode here.