The Art Thief Quotes

“Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital frontal cortex of the beholder.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“It isn’t action, he suspects, that usually lands a thief in prison. It’s hesitation.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The painting seems to have a bubbly effect on both of them, aesthetic champagne.”
― michael finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Knowing when not to take an item, however deflating, is mandatory for a thief expecting career longevity.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Von der Mühll devotes almost all his time to the case, trying not to be overly menacing or judgmental. “I can’t excuse that, but I can understand,” is a phrase the detective is fond of saying.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Museums are secular churches . . . and to steal there is blasphemous.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Art may in fact have a Darwinian basis, perhaps as a way to attract a mate, though many art theorists now believe that the reason for art’s ubiquity is that humanity has overcome natural selection. Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“In the eyes of the law, how a thief steals is more significant than what’s taken: robbing a candy bar with a gun is worse than carrying off a Cranach painting unarmed.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“As an adult, he feels the same about cell phones, email, and social media. Why make it easier to be bothered by others?”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“His favorite art-heist movie, he later says, is The Thomas Crown Affair, with Pierce Brosnan.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The story of art, Breitwieser says, is a story of stealing.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The museum will permit close access to priceless objects that are marginally secured. And the public, in turn, will leave these objects undisturbed, respectful of the idea that works of communal heritage, often suffused with spiritual significance and a sense of place, should be open and accessible to all. Breitwieser, with the support of Anne-Catherine, is a cancer on this public good. He rewards himself and deprives everyone else.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Protecting a museum can feel paradoxical, because its mission isn’t to conceal valuables but to share, in a way that makes you feel as close to a piece as possible, unencumbered by any security apparatus. Permanently ending nearly all museum crime would be easy: lock the works in vaults, and hire armed guards. Of course this would also mean the end of museums. They’d now be called banks.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“museums struggle to offer intimate encounters with art. Adding more guards, more security cordons, more fortified display cases, more glass-fronted picture frames, and more electric eyes is not likely to improve the experience.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, in the early sixteenth century, ravaged the Inca and Aztec. Queen Christina of Sweden seized a thousand paintings from Prague in 1648 and paid her generals in artwork. Napoleon stole to endow the Louvre, and Stalin to stock the Hermitage.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Harboring stolen art absolves Breitwieser of the needless interactions that he’d at one time endured, when he still had thoughts of assimilating to the world—hanging out, drinking beer, gossiping, and other small pleasures of life that he sees as absurd. “Art has taken the place of society for him,” says the psychotherapist Schmidt.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Then they huddle on the bed and remove Sibylle of Cleves from the catalog and balance the painting intimately on their palms, no frame, no glass, no crowd, no guards. They regard the back of the portrait too, embossed with wax seals, each stamped with the coat of arms of a family that had owned it, charting the 450-year journey from Cranach’s hands to theirs. Holding the piece, the one and only copy that will ever exist, he’s infused with happiness, he says, released from the stress of the crime and able at last to fully savor a gift they intend to keep hidden from everyone else.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Breitwieser understands the bind in which he’s trapped his mother, pressed to choose between her son and the law. She seems incapable of severing ties with her only child.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The tapestry looks valuable, so the driver turns it in to the district police, who assume it’s a cheap rug junked by a litterbug. It is colorful, though, and the officers place it on the floor of their break room, tucked beneath the billiards table, and walk on it for weeks, until they learn of the canal find and contact French authorities and Von der Mühll. The seventeenth-century tapestry is shipped to the same museum where the canal pieces are stored.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Schmidt says that Breitwieser is a narcissist; he’s an art thief who believes he is a literal seer, one of the chosen few who can perceive the true beauty of things, and thus entitled to all he desires, legal or not. Breitwieser disregards civility and law, Schmidt adds, without concern for others or remorse. And because Breitwieser never steals from private residences and does not incite violence, he sees his crimes as victimless.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Great paintings,” says Meichler, who agrees to a lengthy interview, “transport you to a place of luminance and memories. Inside of paintings is where I keep my second home.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“He’s amassing art, not adventures; the optimal crime, to Breitwieser, is the most boring one possible. If you want skylight entries and infrared sensors, download a movie.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“many art theorists now believe that the reason for art’s ubiquity is that humanity has overcome natural selection. Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“A total of 107 items emerged from the water, which the district police stored in an empty jail cell at the station.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Bastian estimated the total value at fifty million dollars. Police transported the lot by armed convoy to a secure storage area at a museum in the nearby city of Colmar, where each piece was diagnosed for restoration and photographed.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“He confesses to dozens more thefts, though none that Von der Mühll doesn’t first prompt. Breitwieser generally hews to honesty, except about Anne-Catherine. He repeatedly describes her as an innocent bystander who was using the bathroom while he stole, or was in another gallery, and never knew what he was doing. He’s trying to minimize her potential punishment. In his cell, he keeps a sheet of notes, written in code and stashed in a book, recording what he has said about Anne-Catherine’s location in each museum or auction house. That way he won’t contradict himself in future interrogations or at a trial. His mother, he emphasizes, was completely unaware of his actions. “I’m the only one responsible,” Breitwieser says several times, throwing himself under the bus.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Before Breitwieser can filter out the truth, it slips pridefully through. He admits that he has stolen sixty-nine Renaissance paintings.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“In the 1970s, Graziella Magherini, the chief of psychiatry at Florence’s central hospital, began documenting instances of visitors who had become overwhelmed by art. Symptoms included dizziness, heart palpitations, and memory loss. One person said she felt as if her eyeballs had grown fingertips.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession