'A movie in bronze'

More than 2 million people have visited the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C., since a U.S. flag was raised at the site in 2021. Visitors walk the plaza, reading engraved quotations and descriptions of battles and campaigns in which American troops fought. They reflect at the Peace Fountain, and gather at the flagpole at 5 p.m. every evening to hear a bugler sound taps. And soon, they’ll gaze at the memorial’s long-awaited centerpiece: a 60-foot sculptural tableau titled “A Soldier’s Journey,” represented now by a canvas stand-in.

Said to be the largest freestanding bronze relief in the Western Hemisphere, the piece comprises 38 larger-than-life-size figures, all created by master sculptor Sabin Howard in his Englewood, N.J., studio in just four years. He picked up his tools in 2019 and set them down last January, taking no time off in between. What he did, Howard says, was “superhuman.”

When he and architect Joe Weishaar won the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission’s memorial design contest in 2016, Howard saw an opportunity to do heroic art in the classical tradition – and held fast to that vision when federal agencies tried to shrink it.

On Sept. 13, his finished work will be unveiled at a “First Illumination” ceremony, concluding a 10-year effort to honor the 4.8 million Americans who served in World War I – and the 116,516 who died – with a memorial in the nation’s capital.

As installation of the sculpture neared, Howard spoke to The American Legion Magazine about the making of "A Soldier's Journey.”

In the decade since the design contest, how did your approach to the project change?

Here’s the thing I have figured out: I am making art that has to be understood by people who are not going to museums, who are coming to this memorial to see the history of our country. Everything I came up with is connected to Western civilization and the great history of art. That whole year of 2016 was devoted to coming up with a composition the Centennial Commission could live with. I did 12,000 shots with my cellphone of people dressed in real uniforms from World War I, and we acted out those scenes. I did, I think, 25 iterations to get to “A Soldier’s Journey.”

This project is indebted to my having studied the history of art from the Renaissance forward, and the sense that, OK, you’re doing a memorial to something very sacred, you need to depict it in a very sacred fashion. This is a deeply rebellious act against the way art is portrayed and done today. That’s the big difference.

Describe the story connecting these figures.

What I did is, I made a movie in bronze that moves from left to right. The first scene begins with a daughter. The alpha and omega of the whole composition is that daughter, because she is the next generation. They inherit what happens because of war. She hands her dad a helmet. He kneels in front of her, and behind him is his wife. This whole scene is very peaceful and calm. It is before this massive change in the way the world sees itself.

The next scene is the heroic mom on one side representing the United States, the father in the middle, and on the other side he is called forward by his brothers in arms. It’s a tug of war between service to country and family. Next, you go into a trench, which is the Atlantic Ocean, and you have this battle team that is completely cohesive. It’s like the most massive animalistic kinetic energy moving forward, called to advance by the father, who is the commander and leader of this group. He is at the very middle of the composition, and his pose is reminiscent of Dan Daly, the famous Marine who yelled, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” It’s the Battle of Belleau Wood.

After that scene, you have the cost of war. The father and soldier and America come out transformed, and a shell-shocked soldier walks directly out at the audience. On the left, a nurse helps a gassed soldier who is clutching his eyes, his hands outstretched in massive fear and panic. The nurse on the right carries a soldier who cannot walk on his own.

After the shell-shocked figure, which is the transformation of this country and the whole world transformed from divine order to modernism and alienation, you move into what I call the superhero section, and it is that nurse carrying the soldier. In the next group, there is a soldier looking over his shoulder at what he has just left, and that is the shell-shocked soldier.

Next is a parade scene with the soldier carrying the flag, arm in arm with another soldier and a woman, all returning home. And the final scene is the father handing his daughter the helmet. He looks down at her, and she looks into the helmet, divining the future. She is the next generation, World War II.

You used veterans as models. What qualities did they bring to the process?

When we had gotten to the midway point of sculpting – the commander leading the charge – I went out and found models who were veterans. They were Marines, Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, and they’d all been in combat. Their faces tell the story of what they went through, and why is that any different than what happened a hundred years ago? This memorial tells the story for the doughboys, and it also tells the story for the guys in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea. Any veteran who visits will be acknowledged because their faces are on that wall. There’s a lot of brutality there, and pathos, and that’s the real significance of what it means to go to war.

Each one of us is a history of what we have gone through in our life. And if you are enlisted and you become government property and you get shipped to foreign lands and thrown into the horrors of war, it will show up on your face. Those faces are a recorded history of the traumas of war, about proceeding into the mouth of hell. I am an outsider, but I looked inside, and I did my best to show in those faces that experience of going to battle and serving one’s country. This is not like most memorials out there that are peaceful and don’t show the real humanity behind the story.

Tell us about the race against time to finish the sculpture. What were your days like?

I took the design I was given when we enlarged and made the foam armatures we’re going to put the clay on. Then I designed each figure on the fly, cutting and chopping and moving and three-dimensionalizing to an even greater degree. So if I screw up, and I’m on a timeline, I can’t fix it. I had to hit the mark every single day. And the sculptors I got at the beginning were inadequate because they had to learn to sculpt in a more developed style than they were used to, and this was not a commercial piece of work. By the first year and a half, I had fired three of them and I was left with just Charlie Mostow. The project was on-the-job training, and Charlie was the only one able to hang on and learn and grow in the process.

You rise to the occasion or you crack, and I didn’t crack. I took care of myself physically. I worked Monday through Friday only and went to bed early. Saturdays and Sundays I spent with my family and the Lord, and during the week, I went to the studio, and I slammed. COVID was a blessing for me because nobody could come in and bother me. We had to regulate it so I could get this piece done correctly and properly.

What happened in the life of your family during that period?

My wife, Traci, who’s a super genius, came to work for me. She did the administrative part and was in the shop with me every day. She also started to do something I think is really cool. She’s a novelist. She changed her work habits, and now all of a sudden she’s a documentarian. She videoed every single day in the studio and is going to release a documentary called “Heroic” in the spring. It’s an intimate look into the artist and the process and the steps we took to deal with the problems we had. And they were interminable. Traci is able to tell a really fascinating story.

What changes were necessary as your work progressed?

A lot of sculptors will take those armatures and foam enlargements and just skim the surface and not make radical changes. I completely ripped that up and used it as my armature to sculpt on top of.

Restructuring was massive. I’m limited because I have only 60 feet of sculpture. So I made the figures as three-dimensional as I possibly could. And they break the boundary of the wall they stand on, so they look like they cannot be contained. This actually enhanced the design, because I had to be creative about how I could make these figures as emotionally poignant and visceral as possible – not change the composition too dramatically, but make them so expansive it looks like they’re exploding off the wall.

Talk about the fight to preserve your vision.

Edwin Fountain on the Centennial Commission was kind of my regulator. His litmus test for this project was the (Henry) Shrady sculptures in front of the Capitol. That was what he said: “I want it to look like this.” Now that’s a great thing, because that’s the best sculpture in all the United States. So that’s where we’re starting.

So now we have to go through agency approval by the Commission of Fine Arts, and they’re asking me to minimize, minimize. And I refused to compromise on the composition. That lasted a year and a half.

I’m a visionary artist, and I went through a process that is committee-oriented. It was one of the most difficult things I did in my life. I felt like I was going to trial, because I stood in front of a microphone and explained that I had a project for “we the people” – not for myself, in the studio – and that I had given every ounce of my heart and head and hands to it, and I’m presenting to these seven commissioners who know nothing about figurative sculpture.

The one thing I had to give away was the scale. The scale of the figures was diminished to 6’6” on average, and that is small for exterior. The figures should have been 7 feet 5 inches minimum to 8 feet, which would have meant the wall would have been closer to 72. It would have made a world of difference. I’m still proud of it, but it’s their loss. The argument was that the memorial could not overwhelm the park. From my perspective, that’s why people will come to the park, to see the memorial.

How is this war memorial unique among those in Washington, D.C.?

There’s a lot of symbolism here, not just in the sculpture itself, but in the classic style rather than abstract art. My launching point was “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. I wanted to make a piece in that great tradition. World War I is the turning point from a universe unified in its design to modernism – isolated individuals in a universe driven by chaos. I made a sculpture that returns to the concept of a unified whole.

How did this project change you?

I transformed my whole artistic style on this project to make something in service of the veteran, the country, visitors to Washington and Western civilization. I became a servant of something greater than myself, and that empowered me in a way I couldn’t imagine. I had to grow so much as a human being to perform this feat, to succeed in making sacred art on sacred land. Isn’t this where people come to look at what their country is about?

This national memorial is a clear statement about heroism and not victimization. It’s about responsibility to oneself to proceed forward and create and not destroy. I’m picking those words carefully. Modern art speaks about destruction, but it doesn’t replace that void with anything. I am saying history is important and needs to be passed on to the next generation.

Matt Grills is managing editor of The American Legion Magazine.