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).