And now, a smaller statute of this famous flag raising is up for sale at Bonhams, New York auction house on February 22, 2013, expecting to pull in Cdn/US $1.8 million (¥167,000,000).
The original photograph was taken by Joe Rosenthal showing five U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the fierce Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II between Allied forces and the Japanese.
The men in the photo are, PFC (Private First Class) Franklin Sousley, Corporal Harlon Block, Saergeant Michael Strank—who gave their lives in the battle—and PM2 (Pharmacist's Mate Second Class) John Bradley, PFC Rene Gagnon, and PFC Ira Hayes.
As for the statue - a 12-1/2 foot (3.81 meter) high version was actually created by Felox de Weldon, a sculptor/artist working for the U.S. Navy. He saw the photo and over a weekend created a wax image of the event to give to the U.S. Chiefs Of Staff.
Editor's Comment: "Yeah kids, I was in the navy during the War! I killed four Japs when a statue I made tipped over onto them while they stopped to take a photograph of it in 1978."
Editor's Comment: Sorry.
When Congress saw the statute, they asked de Weldon to create a larger one for them, but said 'because we're at war, we can't give you any money, so there.'
So de Weldon financed it himself, and created the larger cast stone statue within three months time.
The 5-ton cast stone statue was placed in from of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC - but was removed in 1947 when a new building was built.
de Weldon then moved on to bigger, but not better things, as the U.S. government commissioned him to create a larger bronze version of the statue that would later become the 32-foot (9.8 meters) high monument in Arlington, Virginia.
But what happened to the one that was in front of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington?
Perhaps because de Weldon paid for the statue himself, it was given back to him. He placed it back into his art studio and covered it up with a tarp—where it was unseen for four decades.
And so… that's why when it was announced that this statue was up for sale, even World War II buffs went - "Huh?"
The iconic statute is currently owned by Rodney Hilton Brown who was writing a biography on de Weldon and went to see the old studio still owned by the artist.
Amazingly enough, the statue was still under a tarp. So he purchased it in 1990 paying him with, according to Brown: "a Stradivarius violin, a 1920s solid silver Newport yachting trophy and a lot of money."
I'm guessing Brown was a rich enough guy to be a military historian writer.
But, despite getting his hands on what one can only assume is a national treasure, Brown soon learned out that the constant moving of the statue from studio to site to studio to Brown's place—along with neglect—had caused a lot of damage to the statue.
Apparently the joints of the sculpture's inner steel skeleton suffered extensive damage.
How much damage?
If it was human, it would have been dead years earlier. 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!
While Brown was told he was crazy to have it restored, he didn't care.
"They said, 'You're crazy.' And I said, 'You're right, I'm crazy. I'm crazy for my Marine Corps. I'm crazy for my country," Brown says. "This is the original first Iwo Jima from the last year of WWII and it's going to get restored."
Yup… Brown has some serious cash.
So… this restored version was fully restored, unveiled and placed upon the aircraft carrier museum the USS Intrepid in 1995 until it was moved to a storage unit in Connecticut in 2007.
People - stop moving the poor statue!
Brown, now 70, says he wants to sell 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."
Brown says the winning bidder will get the statue plus the tools de Weldon used to build it, the sculptor's drawings, sketches and photos of the monument. Also included is the June 4, 1945, orders for Rosenthal and de Weldon to report to the White House to present a model of the monument to President Harry S. Truman.
Here's a link Bonhams auction house video on the Brown and the art and other pieces up for sale - HERE.
http://content.bitsontherun.com/previews/V1PYjd6Z-87CCpqk8
Cheers,
Andrew Joseph
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