NEW YORK: A statue depicting soldiers raising the US flag at Iwo Jima in 1945 is going on sale.
The original smaller version of the iconic statue is expected to fetch up to $ 1.8 million later this month at a New York auction dedicated to World War II artifacts.
That such a statue even exists is news to all but the most ardent history buffs.
Most Americans are familiar with the 32-foot (10-meter)-tall Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Felix de Weldon’s 1954 bronze depicts five Marines and a Navy Corpsman raising the flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi as Allied forces struggled to capture the Japanese-held island.
Less well-known is the 12.5-foot (4-meter)-tall statue created soon after the event.
De Weldon, a young sculptor serving as an artist in the Navy, became instantly transfixed by an Associated Press image of the Feb. 19, 1945, flag planting, which would earn photographer Joe Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize and resonate around the world.
De Weldon canceled a weekend leave to model a wax sculpture of the photo to present to the chiefs of staff. Congress soon called for construction of a large statue. But burdened with war debt, it could provide no financing and de Weldon agreed to fund it himself.
Completed in just three months, de Weldon’s cast stone monument was erected in Washington, D.C., in front of what is now the Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue. It remained there until it was removed in 1947 to make room for a new building.
At about the same time, the government authorized a foundation for de Weldon to build a much larger flag-raising statue in bronze — the 32-foot (10-meter) Iwo Jima monument in Arlington.
The 12.5-foot (4 meter) version was returned to de Weldon, who covered it with a tarp behind his studio. It remained largely forgotten for more than four decades.
The story of how military historian and collector Rodney Hilton Brown came to own the statue is, like Rosenthal’s photograph, one for the history books.
In researching material for a biography on de Weldon, Brown learned about the old studio and amazingly found the monument still covered by the tarp. He purchased the 5-ton monument from de Weldon in 1990, paying with “a Stradivarius violin, a 1920s solid silver Newport yachting trophy and a lot of money.”
But years of neglect had taken their toll. The joints of the sculpture’s inner steel skeleton suffered extensive damage. Brown was told by a restoration house that it could build a brand-new monument for a quarter of the cost that it would take to restore it.
Brown unveiled the restored version of the statue in 1995 on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima. It remained on the aircraft carrier until 2007 and was then moved to a storage facility in Connecticut.
Brown, 70, founder of the New York-based Virtual War Museum, said he wants to sell the statue now because “it doesn’t fit in my living room. I want to find it a good home so we can pass the flag onto somebody else.”
It will be brought out of storage for display in a sculpture garden adjacent to Bonhams auction house in Manhattan before the Feb. 22 sale.
Original Iwo Jima statue to be auctioned
