Dueling sculptors

Five years ago Wednesday, US troops in Baghdad toppled (as the media called it) the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fidos Square. Pitiful bronze dictator- blindfolded by the American flag (shape of things to come) yanked to the street with his boots still standing on the pedestal (a tragic foreshadowing of the most popular motif of Iraq War monuments and graves in the US....) and his head used for a kickball by the locals.

I won't go into the fraud and politics of the whole event at this stage, but I began to wonder about the sculptor. Who did the piece? What did he think/feel about the whole epsiode? So I put on my google suit and started digging. Now sculpture.net has a mighty fine forum and I soon ran across not one, but two sculptors who claim the honor. One is Indian, a real Liberace of a guy who is into flash and dazzle for the long haul. He claims he got the commission, but is a bit hazy on the details of how, and received the undying gratitude and a huge diamond necklace from the dictator. The other is an Iraqi who was persuaded by government types to do the piece. He never saw Hussein, worked from photos, and never received a word of thanks for his time, much less a diamond pendant, though he assumed his boss was pleased, since he was never jailed or damaged in any way.

Who do we believe? Hey, I'm just at the beginning of this trail, and I'm checking out the Indian claim at the moment. But I can tell you this, Liberace has made plenty of statues of plenty of unpleasant and unpopular pols around his home country, and they are all almost identical to the demised dictator. Arm outstretched, eyes locked straight ahead, you get the gist. He’s pretty amusing, unbelievably corrupt and would do even Huey Long proud, if he’d only been given half a chance. His biggest boast is that he won the undying love of his main patron by taking on the job of providing a 17 foot bronze in 15 days. “Everyone else said it was impossible,” he boasted. Actually, it was. He provided a plaster of Paris piece on the deadline that was tinted to look like the real thing then replaced it with the bronze later on. Ummmm…. What’s wrong with this picture? And- he got paid for both statues!!!

So after over a month away from working on the book, I’m back in form, ready to go and am rewarded by the research gods with one of the most amusing stories of the century.