I respect all of the reviews here (well, almost all), and I hope that the art thief's incredible crime spree, and his equally spectacular crash, capture your interest. It was a bizarre experience, to say the least, to tour an art museum with one of the world's greatest art thieves. The art thief himself, Stéphane Breitwieser, granted me dozens of hours of exclusive interviews, and even visited a couple of museums with me. Though 'The Art Thief' is a short book (just over 200 pages), I worked on the project for more than 11 years, trying to make sure that everything in this wild and unpredictable tale is true - and also, to the best of my abilities, entertaining to read. This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop-until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money.

In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years-in museums and cathedrals all over Europe-Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion. In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser’s strange world-unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.įor centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser.

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