Stéphane Breitwieser at the book fair in Colmar, (Haut-Rhin, France)
Stéphane Breitwieser is a sophisticated art collector and aficionado... but also a serial thief. The man is known as the "Arsène Lupin of Alsace" was arrested in 2001 and has since committed several art thefts around Europe.
The art of theft and the passion of art. In a voyage that took him from museum halls to prison, Stéphane Breitwieser merged the two. This young Frenchman, a connoisseur, passionate, and then obsessive, crisscrossed the museums of various European nations (France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and others) at the end of the 1990s to steal hundreds of works of art. He acted in broad daylight, without breaking and entering or violence, with a little knife to remove the paintings and a bag to load the things. His activities were so vigorous that estimating the value of the plunder is difficult.
Stéphane Breitwieser, 30, confessed after being arrested in Switzerland in 2001 for stealing a horn from a museum in Lucerne. He admitted to a string of robberies of artworks and other valuables. He has converted two rooms of the family house in the little village of Eschentzwiller, near Mulhouse, where he lives with his mother and her boyfriend, into true private museum rooms... An amazing collection of stolen items that, for the most part, will vanish.
Stéphane Breitwiser's mother, enraged by her son's obsession with these items, takes drastic measures: she destroys numerous costly paintings before discarding them. She then flung dozens of artworks into the Rhine-Rhone canal. The gendarmes were able to collect roughly a hundred artifacts worth 10 million euros from the muck. The courts convicted Stéphane Breitwieser, first in Switzerland, then in France. He wrote a book and did interviews after his release from prison. "I avoid rubbing shoulders with that world because it saddens me to see works of art that I want and, if I had the means, I would buy them," he confesses in one of them, a few meters from the entrance of a museum, in 2006. But I'm afraid I won't be able to. But soon, he succumbed to temptation. Stéphane Breitwieser has now fallen off the wagon, first for stealing clothes from a store, then for stealing from museums again a few years later.
Jean Dubreil