A SCULPTURE by the late British artist Lynn Chadwick has become the twentieth theft of large bronzes in and around the capital during the past six months.
In the grounds of a London university thieves carved through the legs of one of the three giant abstract figures in The Watchers and carried it off during the night, almost certainly to melt it down for scrap, police said.
The most famous sculpture taken in recent thefts was Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, which was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, on December 15.
Police are not linking the crimes, but they are concerned that the sort of monumental works of art that had always been regarded as too difficult to move are apparently now being routinely stolen.
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Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, head of the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiques Unit, said: “For many years these objects have been considered unstealable because they are so large and heavy, because they are on public display and because they were seen as unsaleable. They weren’t considered a great risk. Now it seems they are.
“The people perpetrating these crimes appear to have no appreciation of, or respect for, the objects they are stealing.
“In the case of The Watchers, the thieves have stolen one third of an artwork, so it’s probably not been stolen for its artistic value but rather as a lump of metal to be scrapped.”
He said that despite offering substantial rewards for information, police were no nearer to solving the mystery of the disappearing bronzes, which ranged in value from a few thousand pounds up to about £3 million for the Henry Moore.
“We are concerned about the number that are being stolen. We are receiving no information about where they are going and we aren’t recovering any of them.
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“There’s definitely a possibility that they are being stolen for the raw materials because the only common link between them is that they are heavy lumps of bronze.”
The figure, one of three which make up the £600,000 sculpture The Watchers, was stolen on the night of January 10 from outside Downshire House, a Grade II* listed building in the grounds of Roehampton University in southwest London. It was one of only three such pieces in the world. The others are in Loughborough and Denmark.
A member of staff said: “The statue was outdoors but it was very physically big. It consisted of three large figures made of bronze, each of them about 7ft tall and weighing about a third of a tonne.”
The thieves are believed to have scaled a fence in the garden and climbed over a 4ft wall to reach the statue, which had stood on the site since 1963.
Art theft is a thriving industry, which the FBI values at $5 billion (£3 billion) a year. Interpol ranks it fourth among the highest value criminal activities, behind drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering.
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William Webber, of the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest database of stolen art and antiques, said: “We have over 170,000 missing pieces registered with us, quite a few of them large-scale sculptural and architectural works such as pillars, reliefs from the Middle East and fragments from Cambodian temples.
“They are often taken from country houses and gardens because they are islolated, exposed and unpoliced, so they are easier targets. On the other hand they are usually heavy objects and heavy machinery is required to move them.”
Such pieces are rarely stolen to order for a James Bond-style villain with a discriminating taste for art, Mr Webber said. More often they are used as collateral in other criminal deals or melted down for their base material.
Lynn Chadwick was born in London in 1914 and studied drawing, watercolour and oil painting before working as an architectural draughtsman in London from 1933 to 1939 and gaining a commission with the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War.
He came to sculpture relatively late, holding his first exhibition in London in 1950, but his reputation grew rapidly. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the XXVIII Venice Biennale in 1956 and was appointed CBE in 1964. He died in April 2003.