Vincent Noce, La Collection Egoiste (The Selfish Collector)

Extract

Vincent Noce, La Collection Egoiste (The Selfish Collector) pp. 328. J. C. Lattès, Paris, 2005. ISBN 2-7096-241-9.

Few people who follow cases relating to the illicit trade can have missed the celebrated case of Stéfane Breitwieser, the Alsatian misfit who stole, over a period of 8 or so years, hundreds of objects from museums and churches to squirrel away in his attic rooms, or that of his mother Mireille Stengel, who destroyed almost all of it by disposal in the family garbage bin or by throwing it into a canal. This book, however, shows just how much a dedicated investigative journalist can add to the record, details that are not only useful in trying to understand the mentality of Breitwieser (by no means an isolated case as this account shows) and even more useful in showing the loopholes in the investigations, the lack of coordination between countries, and the sheer ineptitude of many institutions in securing their collections. Noce, editor of the cultural section of the French newspaper Libération, has joined the select company of Karl Meyer (articles in the New York Times) and Peter Watson who have added greatly to our knowledge of how the illicit trade works. French journalists, too, are greatly helping expose the unsavory details of these activities (see Noce's previous book Descente aux Enchères and that of Emmanuel de Roux and Roland-Pierre Paringaud, Razzia sur L'art).