‘Venus’ by Australian Sculptor Stolen; Loss May Be $650,000

The Venus de Milo is missing her arms.

But the Venus de Brett-Livingstone Strong is missing, period.

She is not quite a pocket Venus, a 30-inch marble-painted statue carved from a plastic resin matrix by Strong, the Australian who created the life-sized bronze John Lennon that once bestrode a City Hall courtyard and who chipped out the great stone face of John Wayne from a 12 1/2-ton Malibu boulder.

This sculpted lady vanished a week ago from her granite pedestal under a three-foot glass display case at Splash, a Malibu restaurant whose owner is offering a $25,000 reward for the Venus redux.

“There was a night porter on duty; we had two armed guards outside” from a Paramount Studios filming earlier, explained owner Richard Chesterfield. “But they (the thieves) still managed to come in.”

The burglars broke the French windows and bypassed the Ertes and the Salvador Dalis hanging on the wall to make straight for the Strong. When they were done, the thieves replaced the heavy glass case on the granite stand.

“It’s like your life that you’ve lost there,” said Strong, who had loaned the piece to the restaurant until it could be cast in bronze a few weeks hence. “I had organized everything to remove it; I just ran out of time.”

Carved in 1972, back when Strong was emerging from cemetery stonecutter to artist, “Venus and the Sculptor” was modeled from “a few” of Strong’s old girlfriends, and he lugged it with him when he came to America.

“It was a real favorite piece of mine,” he said. “I’ve never exhibited it before until now, and the worst thing about (the theft) is that besides not insuring it, I’ve got an edition of 25 (copies)” promised, in brass and gold, and many had already been signed for, at $25,000 each.

So Strong figures, dolefully, that “$650,000, including the original, is what I’m out.”

The piece is a long-haired standing nude, a woman “perhaps even a little more” zaftig than the famous armless lady of the Louvre, says Chesterfield. And on the back of her left leg is Strong’s puckish motif: a minute figure of himself on a ladder, carving his initials into Venus’ monumental ankle.

Work Lost 15 Years

Only one previous piece of Strong’s has been stolen. It was another of his nude series, and the marble torso disappeared 15 years ago from an Australian gallery, where it was being exhibited with Henry Moore works--and has not surfaced since.

Earlier this year, the Lennon bronze, which had stood near Splash’s entryway for several months, was sold for $475,000 and is destined to be set up in London.

Strong agrees with Chesterfield, that “the news of its sale and the price it brought got around and someone . . . thought they’d have this.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. John Flaherty says flyers are going out, alerting pawnshops and other law officers to the burglary.

“Yet whoever stole it, I don’t know what they could do with it,” Strong puzzled. “Even if somebody stole it and they broke it . . . I would pay to have the pieces returned. I could still put it together; there would still be a reward.

“That was a work of love, that piece to me.”