Sculptor's works fetch $32,000 at auction

Mar. 8--CRANSTON -- The remnants of a great sculptor, Felix de Weldon, whose pieces grace parks and museums around the world but who died broke in 2003, were laid out on warehouse folding tables yesterday and sold at auction for more than $32,000.

More than 80 prospective buyers, some dressed in camel hair, others wearing John Deere tractor caps and cowboy hats, clamored up the metal stairs of the warehouse, where for more than 11 years, a dozen or more of the Newport artist's plaster busts and clay models had collected dust and unpaid storage fees totaling $8,772.

In about an hour's time they were all claimed, along with his workshop desk, an unsigned painting, a wooden model of the U.S. Treasury building, and a set of clay-encrusted sculptor's tools.

Prices ranged from $300 for the unsigned painting found in the studio of his former 20-room waterfront mansion, to $3,000 for the bronze family bust of polar explorer Adm. Richard Byrd.

One white plaster bust sold for $2,000 and drew the most interest, not because it was one of de Weldon's best -- it was actually a bust of him, done by one of his students -- but because of the small woman in the ski parka who raised her bid several times to own it.

His widow, Joyce de Weldon.

"I wanted to have the memory of Felix with me," said Joyce de Weldon, formerly of Virginia but who has lived in Warwick since her husband died. "I met him in 1967. I was 24. He was 59 and I'm pretty sure that was about the time this bust was done.

"And so I just had to take him home with me."

Joyce de Weldon was one of several people who described the warehouse scene as sad.

"I lost Felix in 2003 and you start to move on and then this just bring back all the terrible things: all the bankruptcies. We lost everything. Furniture, cars. It was terrible."

De Weldon created more than 1,200 public sculptures, his most famous perhaps, his Washington monument of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

At one time, his worth was more than $8 million and was known around Newport as the sculptor who drove his own Rolls-Royce about town.

But by 1993 he had racked up debts totaling about $4 million, much of it, he told The Journal at the time, for the treatment of his first wife, Margot, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. He said he stopped working for almost three years to spend time with her. Though she had no medical insurance, de Weldon said his wife's medical bills amounted to $500 a day. Her last months were spent in a Bellevue Avenue nursing home with round-the-clock care.

"It's really weird for someone to have an $8-million estate and lose it all," said Eleanor Thompson of Cranston, before the bidding began. A retired high school art teacher, Thompson said she hoped to buy a few of de Weldon's tools -- "depending on what's affordable."

"It's not every day you get to look at all the things in a famous person's studio," she said, "let alone get a chance to buy them."

Ed Lemire, of Cranston, an executive headhunter, was in the market for a de Weldon bust.

Unbeknown to him, it was Joyce de Weldon who he got in a bidding war with for the piece.

Afterward he felt terrible. "Had I known, I would have stopped a long time ago" rather than drive the price up to $2,000.

Fran and Bart Hey, of Foster, came to the action as curiosity seekers, intrigued how a world-renowned artist had been diminished to the point of selling off the last few pieces of his art at auction.

"All that money of his seemed to just blow away because of one fiasco after another," said Bart Hey, sporting a black cowboy hat. "I think too many people got their hands into the pie along the way."

Gigi Tollefson and Brian Sullivan, of Newport, said they had come not to buy, but to celebrate de Weldon's "playful spirit."

Sullivan borrowed Hey's cowboy hat and posed in front of a four-foot model of de Weldon's Minuteman sculpture as Tollefson took his picture.

"We knew Felix very, very well," said Sullivan. "He saw Newport as a place of great culture, and he had great style -- an artist through and through. We're here to pay homage to that and hope that he sees the fun we're having here."

Prior to the pieces being auction off separately, auctioneer Skip Ponte directed a bidding war for the entire collection of works and belongings. The bidding began at $5,000 and grew for several tense minutes up to $30,500, until Ponte declared the entire lot sold to a man identified as Harvey Smith, the owner of a furniture company in the Foxboro area.

But that bid was nullified after the sale of individual pieces raised more than $30,500.

Profits from the auction will go to Consumers' Moving Co. Inc., which had stored de Weldon's work.

With staff reports from Tracy Breton.

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