The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
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Michael Finkel on The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A last sentence that changed everythingFinkel had already spent years writing about people who operate entirely outside society’s expectations: a murderer who stole his identity, a hermit who vanished into the Maine woods for 27 years. When he came across a small item in a French Alsatian newspaper about Stéphane Breitwieser, an art thief who had robbed more than 200 museums without selling a single object, the last sentence of that article stopped him cold. Breitwieser had taken the art home.
I had done a book about a murderer, so I’m kind of finished with violence. I was intrigued by Breitwieser’s claim that he stole for love, without selling anything. The story is not just about the thefts; there’s a love story shot through the middle of it. That combination of action and emotion is like pure journalistic catnip.
The story had been sitting in plain sight for years, entirely inaccessible to an English-speaking audience. When a French journalist friend told Finkel that Breitwieser had never once spoken to an American journalist, his response was less calculation than reflex.
Oh, game on!
That gap in the record, a complete blackout for English readers on the most prolific art thief in history, was itself part of the draw.
How he wrote it
Eleven years, a handwritten letter, and 800 pages left on the floorGetting Breitwieser to talk required bypassing every modern shortcut. The French thief spoke no English, had never agreed to an American interview, and had recently been released from prison. Finkel’s opening move was a letter written by hand in French, sent through Breitwieser’s French publisher, followed by months of waiting.
I have no real secrets about how to get someone to speak to me except for one, which is that I really like writing handwritten letters to people. I don’t really like to give that secret away because it’s so dang simple. But I think in this day and age, when everybody texts and sends email, to send a letter — and then just have patience — can work.
Once the interviews were underway, Finkel set terms that were non-negotiable and stated them at the outset: everything on the record, no payment, no editorial control. But he gave Breitwieser one form of agency in return. If Breitwieser declined to participate, Finkel would walk away from the project entirely. That offer mattered to someone who felt the world had been deciding things about him for years. The preparation surrounding those interviews was similarly extensive: Finkel spent roughly a year doing nothing but reading before he wrote a word of the book.
I probably read 150 books and 5,000 newspaper or magazine articles to prepare for this... I probably could have written an 800-page book about what we like about art. Ultimately, maybe two paragraphs of that ended up in the book. But readers are sharp people. Whether or not I’m showing off on the page, I think they sense whether there is a knowledgeable and competent person behind the prose.
Conducting every interview in his second language turned out to reshape the dynamic in ways Finkel hadn’t predicted. French social norms make direct questions about money or motive nearly impossible for a native speaker to ask without giving offense. As a conspicuous outsider, Finkel could play ignorant and push harder than protocol would normally permit.
I found it, instead of limiting, I weirdly found it freeing to speak in French. [paraphrased from audio]
The writing itself happened almost entirely at night. By the time Finkel reached the final draft, he had relocated from France to Park City, Utah, where he rented a small studio above O.P. Rockwell on Main Street. His family was asleep; the building was quiet. The sessions ran long enough to qualify less as late nights than as full inversions of the working day.
I wrote every word of the final draft of The Art Thief from a small studio above O.P. Rockwell. I must have pulled at least 50 all-nighters.
The draft Finkel started with bore almost no resemblance in length to the book readers eventually received. He describes his method as sculpture rather than composition: accumulate an enormous mass of material, then cut until the shape appears. The ratio for this particular book was more severe than anything he had attempted before.
I usually start with a huge draft, which I call my ‘block of granite,’ and carve my book out of that. So I’m really cutting prose as much as writing it. For The Art Thief, my block of granite was more than 1,000 pages long. The final book is scarcely over 200 pages. So that’s a ton of cutting and honing.
promotingcrime.blogspot.com, “Promoting Crime Fiction : Interview: Jill Amadio talks with Michael Finkel”What he wants us to sit with
A criminal who taught him to lookFinkel resists resolving Breitwieser into a clean moral category, and he is explicit that the resistance is deliberate rather than evasive. His own feelings about the man shifted across the eleven years of reporting: admiration at some moments, genuine dislike at others. What he consistently refused to do was spare his readers the discomfort of that same instability.
I honor my readers by letting them decide whether or not he’s a good guy or a bad guy. [paraphrased from audio]
One consequence of following Breitwieser through museums was that Finkel’s own relationship to looking at art changed permanently. Breitwieser interrupted Finkel’s habit of narrating paintings in art-historical terms and insisted he simply describe what he saw. The interruption landed. Finkel now seeks out smaller, off-circuit museums, finding things extraordinary that he would previously have walked past without pausing. What he wants readers to carry away from the book is something of the same reorientation.
He’s definitely a criminal and immoral, but he also had this incredible sensitivity to things he found beautiful. I found his reaction to something beautiful, kind of beautiful in itself. Spending time with the world’s greatest art thief made me appreciate works of art all the more.
The admiration has a boundary Finkel makes clear he will not let readers cross with him. Breitwieser did not steal from private collectors or wealthy individuals. He stole from public museums, which means he stole from every person who might one day have stood in front of those objects. Finkel states the consequence of generalizing Breitwieser’s behavior without hedging.
If everyone behaved like Stéphane Breitwieser, there would be no museums, there would be no modern society.
Breitwieser himself, for his part, has never quite accepted that framing. He prefers a different self-description, one that Finkel renders with audible dryness: he would like to be called a collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. [paraphrased from audio]