Posted on 02/08/2013 4:30:17 PM PST by nickcarraway
Looking to own an iconic piece of American military history? You’re in luck.
A statue of the famed photograph of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the stars and stripes over Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima will be auctioned off at the end of the month by Rodney Hilton Brown, a collector of American war artifacts and a military historian.
The piece Brown plans to sell is the smaller forerunner to the 32-foot-tall Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. At 20 feet high with the flag — 12 feet, two inches without it — the statue weighs 10,000 lb, according to Anne Wilson of Bonhams New York, the auction house hosting the sale.
“There’s nothing like this,” Wilson said of the statue, which will sell as part of a larger event called World War II: The Pacific Theater on Feb. 22. ”This is the original of this incredible symbol of history, of bravery of the Marine Corps and of World War II.” Bonhams describes the piece as “the original Iwo Jima monument, cast stone over a steel skeleton welded to a steel base, the monument finished with a bronzed lacquered layer.”
Brown told ABC News he acquired the statue from its creator, Felix de Weldon, while working on a biography of the artist in 1990, in exchange for a violin, a sword and an amount of cash the two agreed to keep secret.
De Waldon also designed the Equestrian of Simon Bolivar Statue on Virginia Ave. in Washington, D.C.
Brown’s website, a virtual museum devoted to the vestiges of war, shows his lifelong fascination with the country’s ferocity in battle. He said he began collecting artifacts as a child of 10 or 11 years,
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
According to news I saw this morning it is expected to bring in around 2M dollars.
Odungo will buy it and promise to have it displayed in DC......Then he’ll melt it down to make a foot bath for the WH.
My dial up system messes up linking. This is about the 4th time this story has been posted in FR but none show the photo. Know what the original photo prototype is but not the sculpture. Could you post a pix of the sculpture
“Odungo will buy it and promise to have it displayed in DC......Then he’ll melt it down to make a foot bath for the WH.”
I don’t think he would do that much. He would either blankly claim that it was racist for us to be shooting at the Japanese, or have every member on the statue heads replaced with African American looking heads.
Thanks nickcarraway, but really, honestly, this statue emphasizes how little sensitivity we Americans have for the feelings of those who identify with the group who got the hell kicked out of them by the US in a war they started with us.
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