Narrative
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Michael Finkel paints an investigative portrait of the burglar who invoked a love of art to justify the theft of nearly 200 paintings and sculptures from museums.
When the caretaker of the Rubens House in Belgium leaves his chair to go to lunch, Stéphane Breitwieser walks towards a statuette “25 centimeters high.” The Swiss Army knife is at the bottom of his coat pocket, he is about to remove the two screws from the plexiglass display case when Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus coughs. Her companion, dressed in Chanel and Dior, is watching “sometimes standing, sometimes sitting on a bench; she always displays a kind of detached indifference while ensuring she has a clear view of the corridor.” Nobody notices him placing the sculpture by Georg Petel between his shirt and his trousers, Adam and Eve It was only after reaching his room on the top floor of a “modest house” […] in the suburbs of Mulhouse» that he takes pleasure in observing her. He reaches out to her bedside table to caress “the waves of Eve’s hair, the scales of the serpent, the knots of the tree” ; the ivory freezes his fingers. He seeks warmth in the ochre tones of the stolen paintings by Cranach, Van Mieris… hanging on the walls. There is no longer a blank space, everything is covered with “portraits, landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, allegories, rural scenes, pastorals” dating mainly from the late Renaissance.
