Librado Romero/The New York Times
The Iwo Jima sculpture at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in May 2003.
Posted on 08/01/2007 8:27:18 PM PDT by neverdem
A 62-year-old sculpture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima is getting the heave-ho from the museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid while the ship is docked in Staten Island for an overhaul, museum officials and the sculpture’s owner said yesterday.
The five-ton sculpture, which served as a model for the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum since 1995. But museum officials, who are starting to renovate the ship’s interior, said they declined to buy the sculpture from its owner, Rodney Hilton Brown, and asked him to remove it from the ship by September.
Mr. Brown, a Manhattan mortgage banker who acquired the sculpture from its creator, Felix de Weldon, is now searching for another museum that will make space for the piece, which is 16 feet long and, with its flag, 20 feet high.
The sculpture commemorates the planting of the American flag on Mount Suribachi in February 1945, during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. The moment was captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph and has since become the iconic image of the Marines of that era.
The sculpture on the Intrepid, which is made of cement and plaster over a steel skeleton, was used in the 1940s to promote the sale of war bonds by the Treasury Department. Another, which Mr. de Weldon carved out of limestone, sits at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. After making those two pieces, Mr. de Weldon, an Austrian-born sculptor, oversaw production of the 100-ton Marine Corps War Memorial, which was cast in bronze in Brooklyn, then installed in Arlington in 1954.
Mr. Brown said he obtained his sculpture from Mr. de Weldon in exchange for a violin that Mr. de Weldon...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Mayor Takes the Subway — by Way of S.U.V.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the better pic!
Post or FReepmail me if you wish to be enlisted in or discharged from the Navair Pinglist.
This is a medium volume pinglist.
Sounds like this historical, mythic icon clashes with their redecorating vision. Perhaps it will make way for a more upbeat sculpture of marines in blue UN helmets shooting at doped up African warlords.
But I seriously doubt, with all the towers of industry and the halls of government riddled with former U.S. Marines, it will take long to find a fitting home for this incredible national treasure.
How about putting it in Fremont in Washington State next to that damn statue of Lenin??
Ping
This looks like the one my Mom posed near that was used for bond drives then.
But, The one im my Mom's photo does not have the rocks at the base like the one here.
ping...
Hell I’d buy it if I could afford it
Women, children and minorities to suffer most... 
Film at 11!
There really is a statue of Lenin at Washington State?
Why hasn’t someone demolished that?
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