‘A movie in bronze’

Master sculptor Sabin Howard shares his journey of creating sacred art for America’s World War I Memorial

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.

Read the entire article on the American Legion website here:

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