The mother of Europe’s most prolific art thief was in court in France on Thursday, charged with throwing many of the invaluable paintings her son had stolen into the local canal.
When Mireille Breitwieser, a former nurse, found out that her son Stephane (33), had been arrested on suspicion of stealing paintings worth hundreds of millions of rands from museums across Europe, she rushed into his bedroom and started chopping up all the canvases she found there, prosecutors said on Thursday.
On the same day in November 2001, she also allegedly forced works of art down the waste-disposal system at their home in Alsace, eastern France, put others out for the rubbish collectors to take away and hurled the rest into the Rhine-Rhône canal near the Swiss border.
Police later managed to fish out about 100 badly damaged art works, but a Brueghel painting was never recovered.
She appeared in court on Thursday alongside her son, who has already been sentenced to four years in prison in Switzerland after admitting stealing 239 paintings and other items from galleries, auction houses and museums in six European countries between 1995 and 2001.
The most valuable painting he stole was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sybille, Princess of Cleves, valued at about £4,5-million (R51-million).
Mireille (53) told investigators she had wanted to ”punish” her son when she found out what he had done, by destroying what was most dear to him.
She faces charges of concealment and destruction of stolen goods, and risks five years in prison if the court in Strasbourg finds her guilty. Her son’s former girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, was also in court on Thursday, charged with handling stolen goods.
Breitwieser, a former waiter who was extradited to France from Switzerland this year, is standing trial for a second time, in connection with the theft of 26 art objects that he stole in France, Austria and Denmark.
In his defence on Thursday he insisted that he acted out of a passion for art rather than from an attempt to make a profit.
”I’ve only stolen what interested me for my collection,” he said.
”There was no desire for cupidity, no desire for lucre,” his defence lawyer, Joseph Moser, said on Thursday. ”In this case, he never resold or sought to resell a work of art … This was truly passion in its purest form.”
Of the 240 pictures and pieces of art he stole, only 112 have been recovered, with works by Watteau, Boucher and Dürer still missing. Many of those rescued were badly damaged during the theft and concealment — although Breitwieser insisted that he had tried to ”restore” the works in his collection.
”I think Mr Breitwieser will go into the record books, not only for the number of thefts he committed, but also for the destruction of art works,” said Bernard Darties, head of France’s central office for the prevention of art theft.
Breitwieser usually slipped the stolen items under his coat, waiting for the museum guards to be distracted. From his prison cell in Switzerland, he wrote to a number of the small museums that he had targeted, offering them advice on ways they could improve security. — Guardian Unlimited Â