Stolen art in France ended up in canal

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Offbeat
Stolen art in France ended up in canal
By IHT.com
May 17, 2002, 8:58am

In a case unprecedented even in the shadowy underworld of art theft, the French police have arrested a French woman who has admitted destroying or throwing into a canal an estimated $1.4 billion worth of paintings and art objects that her son had stolen from dozens of museums in France and five neighboring countries over the past eight years.

The case has stunned art experts because paintings destroyed by Mireille Breitwieser, 51, include works by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Corneille de la Haye and Watteau. No less puzzling, Breitwieser's son, Stephane, 31, who is in jail in Switzerland, made no effort to re-sell the 60 paintings and 112 art objects that he has admitted stealing.

"I have never heard of anything like this before," said Alexandra Smith, operation manager at the London-based Art Loss Register, which records and tracks stolen art. "I think he was just an eccentric kleptomaniac who loved 17th and 18th century art. A lot of people expect works of art to be well protected with alarms and clamps, but he clearly worked out that most are not, so he took what he wanted."

Stephane Breitwieser kept his stolen art works in a bedroom at his mother's house in Mulhouse, in eastern France. After he was arrested last November while trying to steal a bugle from a museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, his mother immediately decided to rid herself of the incriminating evidence. She has told the police that she did so because she was angry with her son.

According to French police, she has admitted chopping up the paintings, many of which were on wooden panels, which were left for collection as garbage. She said the art objects, which include silver and ivory statues, 18th century porcelain and medieval weapons as well as ancient musical instruments, were then thrown in the Rhine-Rhone Canal, which passes close to Mulhouse. The police in Strasbourg, who are in charge of the French side of the investigation, said that some objects were found in the canal by hikers on Nov. 27, just one week after Stephane Breitwieser's arrest. Subsequently, the police dredged the canal and found a large number of art objects. They also contacted the Art Loss Register, which was able to identify some items as having been stolen from European museums. But it was only when the Swiss police requested permission to interrogate Mireille Breitwieser in France that the connection was made between her son and the pieces found in the canal. Mireille Breitwieser, who was arrested Tuesday along with her son's girl-friend, Anne-Catherine Kleinlauss, appears to have had no inkling of the value of the works that she tried to destroy.

Smith of the Art Loss Register said that the French police had given her an estimated value of between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion, although a detailed list of the art works involved has not been drawn up. "It's difficult to gauge their value without a full list," she said, "but some paintings, like Cranach's 'Princess of Cleves,' are worth a great deal. In reality, because they are irreplaceable, they are priceless."

The French daily France-Soir, which first reported the story Wednesday and appears to have received a detailed briefing from Strasbourg police, said destroyed works included Brueghel's "Cheat Profiting From His Master," stolen from a museum in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1997; Watteau's drawing of "Two Men," stolen from a museum in Montpelier, France, in 1999; Francois Boucher's "Sleeping Shepherd," stolen from a museum in Blois, France, in 1996; De la Haye's "Mary Queen of Scots," also stolen from the museum in Blois in 1996, and the Cranach stolen from a museum in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1995.

Quoting the French police, the newspaper said that most works had been stolen from museums in France and Switzerland but that Breitwieser also had taken objects from museums in Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

According to France-Soir, Breitwieser, whose grandfather was a painter, liked to describe himself as a self-taught art lover. It said that in his early 20s, he began stealing from auction houses and antiquarian shops. Later, while working as a waiter in Switzerland, he began stealing from museums. The newspaper quotes him as telling the police that he always did so "in broad daylight, without break-ins, during visiting hours."

The stolen objects were invariably small, which made it easier for him to carry them out of museums under overcoats. The police say that, with paintings, he would wait until museum guards were out of galleries, then swiftly cut them from their frames, roll up the canvases under a coat and walk out. It said that he frequently had the paintings reframed before they were stored in his mother's house.

So far, no traces of the destroyed paintings have been found, although many of the metal art objects dredged from the Rhine-Rhone Canal can apparently be saved. But some objects, like a 17th century violin stolen from a museum in Basel, Switzerland, are apparently beyond repair.

While no one could imagine destruction of art works on this scale, the case has nonetheless drawn attention to the lack of adequate security in many small European museums.

"It simply costs too much for them to secure everything," Smith said, noting that Breitwieser pointedly avoided trying to steal from major museums in Paris and other large cities. Certainly, the art theft business continues to flourish in Europe, with chateaux and private mansions targeted as often as small museums. But while police estimate that some $8 billion worth of art and art objects are stolen in Europe every year, they also believe that most thefts are carried out by gangs in league with crooked dealers who are in turn skilled in exporting stolen European art to the United States.

"Looking back on this case, there was a pattern of just one or two objects being taken from different museums," Smith said. "But we thought it was the work of a gang. What happened here was simply unimaginable."

Source: IHT.com