When art goes to war
Published: 25 January 2025
By James Panero
via the New Criterion website

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Sabin Howard, A Soldier’s Journey, 2024, Bronze, National World War I Memorial, Washington, DC.
On Sabin Howard’s new World War I memorial.
Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South Bronx and found him surrounded by a pantheon in plaster and bronze (see “Gallery chronicle,” May 2007). At the time, Howard was completing a statue of Apollo. As with all of his work, this multiyear labor, built up through tens of thousands of hand-applied dots of plasteline, was destined to be cast in an alloy, one might say, of his own autobiography. Howard sculpts in epic and myth, including his war against our cultural status quo. He has long approached the plastic arts as if he were a Prometheus, a fallen god out to redeliver that creative fire from Mount Olympus.
I doubt I was the only observer who felt a mixture of elation and apprehension when, in 2016, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission selected Howard out of some 350 submissions to design the centerpiece for its new war memorial on the Washington Mall. Here was a creative battle to end all art wars. I feared one unelected agency after another would wear down this aesthetic belligerent to a stalemate, if not gassing him into unconditional surrender.
It did not help matters that the designated site of Pershing Park, just around the corner from the White House, already contained a design from 1981 that had been the result of an earlier competition involving no less than Robert Venturi, Richard Serra, and M. Paul Friedberg—establishment grandees all. True, their site had been in decline for decades. First it was shoehorned into a sunken ice rink, then a swamp designed by the firm of Oehme, van Sweden, and finally a brownfield site of broken water features, abandoned postmodern pavilions, and a derelict garage for the Zamboni. Despite the sorry state, preservationists were quick to panic in this needle park as they dug up Kodachromes from opening day, 1981. Any commission would need to accommodate Pershing Park’s bones—including its existing monumental plaza dedicated to General John J. Pershing, which had been designed by Wallace K. Harrison with a statue by Robert White from 1983—even as it looked to create something revivified and new.
The location of the memorial site was just one of Howard’s many troubles. Our nation’s art-and-architecture insiders were sure to see the selection of Howard and his competition partner, Joseph Weishaar—a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Arkansas, an architect who did not yet have his license at the time of the announcement—as interlopers in what was supposed to be an exclusive lawn party for pedigreed insiders. After all, the last starchitect to dip his beak in the National Mall was none other than Frank Gehry. In 2020, he left it with an anti-monument made of chicken wire, purportedly dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Of course, the war over the National Mall goes back much further. In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, submitted when she was an undergraduate at Yale (whew!), was a minimalist broadside against the capital’s classical aspirations. The assault was only somewhat countered two years later by the addition to the site of Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculpture of multiracial brothers-in-arms.
Sure enough, as I tuned in to view the endless agency meetings in the years following the commission announcement, it seemed as though Howard and Weishaar’s concept, called “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would be bled through a thousand bureaucrats. What initially called for three walls of engravings, all designed to surround a freestanding battle sculpture and an elevated lawn, was eventually reduced through eighteen different iterations to a single wall of sculptural relief less than sixty feet in length. Weishaar’s elevated lawn, meanwhile, returned back to Friedberg’s sunken plaza, now merely modified and tidied up, with Howard’s sculptural frieze essentially replacing the old Zamboni dock. (GWWO Architects, meanwhile, stepped in as managing architects, with David Rubin Land Collective serving as the landscape designer.)
The pressures might have been enough to shell-shock any creative soul. For Howard, it appears to have fired up some essential distillation, encouraged by his commissioners, including Edwin Fountain, as well as by Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society. Relief sculpture going back to antiquity has a special ability to convey the cycles of war. Unlike freestanding statuary, its program can be episodic. Rather than a single moment, relief can contain many moments across a single frame progressing from left to right, as for example up the spiral of Trajan’s Column in Rome.
Read the entire article on The New Criterion website here:
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