NYT Magazine has an interesting profile of Noah Charney who’s completing a PhD in history of art theft;
“Charney is completing a doctorate at Cambridge University in a field he appears to have invented: the use of art history, combined with the more conventional tools of criminology, psychology and deductive logic, to help solve modern-day art thefts and to prevent future art crimes. The stolen-art trade is now an international industry valued as high as $6 billion per year, the third-largest black market behind drugs and arms trafficking. Yet the solution rate in art crime is reported to be a startlingly low 10 percent. Investigations are hampered by the cult of secrecy within the art world itself — museums sometimes don’t report thefts, fearing to reveal their vulnerability to future crimes and thereby hurt their chances of receiving new donations. “The art trade is the least transparent and least regulated commercial activity in the world,” says Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that maintains a leading database of stolen artworks...
More than anything, Charney is interested in understanding the motivation and mentality of art criminals, an area that has traditionally received little attention from the police. He has scrutinized the biographies of famous collectors like the financier J. P. Morgan, as well as legendary art thieves like the Victorian-era burglar Adam Worth, looking for ways that the details of their emotionally charged, obsessive psyches might help investigators understand the criminal mind — and, specifically, the art-criminal mind. He has also studied Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, whose conception of Aryan supremacy, according to Charney, led him to loot even second-rate works by northern European painters rather than genuine masterpieces by “degenerate” artists like the French Impressionists. Both collectors and collector-thieves sometimes form a bond with an artwork that is as intense as a love affair. According to Charney, several owners of Ghirlandaio’s “Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni,” the famous profile portrait of Lorenzo Tornabuoni’s young wife who died soon after she sat for the painting, have said that she reminded them of their own deceased wives. And Stéphane Breitwieser, the French waiter arrested in 2002 for stealing some $1.5 billion in art from museums and galleries in seven European countries, declared that he was fascinated by the eyes and the beauty of the woman in the first painting he stole, who reminded him of his grandmother.”
Related; Scientists explore the frightening world of psychopaths
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