Sabin Howard is a Renaissance man.
As an artist, his sculptural work recalls the classics such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini, the influences – or “guiding principles” as he calls them – of his ethics. His exhibition space in Kent, Connecticut, Features numerous pieces that examine and celebrate human dignity and try to Transcendentalnamely the true, the good and the beautiful.
Although Howard is a follower of tradition, his art is not aesthetic imitation. Nor is he merely reflective. He is forward-thinking, seeking to highlight and preserve for future generations “sacred values” that he believes have been lost in the modern art trends of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“The sense of community is destroyed and the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself,” Howard told the Yankee Institute. “My definition of the sacred is that you believe in something bigger than yourself. That is sacred.”
Nowhere is Howard’s philosophy and mission clearer than in his latest project A soldier’s journey – a nearly 60-foot-long, massive bronze sculpture featuring 38 figures depicting an American soldier’s call to duty from home to the Western Front during World War I. The sculpture will be the centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial in Pershing Square Park in Washington, DC, when it is unveiled on September 13.
The sculpture is already described as “Masterpiece.” But at a time of political polarization and rampant concerns about artificial intelligence in art, Howard strives for the monument to serve as an uplifting and unifying reminder to visitors to the National Memorial of Americans’ sacrifice in World War I.
“The most important purpose (of the sculpture) is to represent our country united, because the soldiers, nurses and children standing on that wall all entered that war not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans,” Howard said. “Our identity is united and cohesive under that flag in the sculpture.”
The journey of an artist
In truth, Howard never intended to be an artist when he was young. Born in the 1960s, he grew up in two worlds: New York City and Turin, Italy, the son of two doctors interested in the intellectual life. During his stays abroad, he admired Turin’s classical art – but he remembers his grandfather’s war stories touching him on a “very personal level.”
“My grandfather – an Italian – was a prisoner of war in Libya, Africa, after a huge battle against the British,” Howard told the Yankee Institute. “And then he escaped, traveled across the Sahara, across the ocean, back to the Strait of Messina and then walked, hitchhiked all the way back to northern Italy.”
Even in the USA, the Vietnam War left deep scars on him as a child, after See the harrowing news coverage, especially of the villages shelled with napalm. The war left its mark on him, but the study of World War I, like art, came later in life, as history classes in high school focused primarily on the Great Depression and World War II.
“We’re not that deep into World War I,” Howard told the Yankee Institute. “I think if you ask a millennial on the street in America, ‘When was World War I fought?’ they’ll say, ‘What is World War I?’ They don’t even know what that is.”
Howard discovered his appreciation and talent for the arts after dropping out of college. Building a portfolio of drawings, he was accepted at the Philadelphia College of Art and subsequently earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the New York Academy of Art. Since then, he has taught at graduate and undergraduate level; was elected to the board of the National Sculpture Society; received numerous commissions and showed his work in more than 50 solo and group exhibitions; and wrote The art of living with his wife Traci Slatton. Some of hisis most notable works are heroic scale Representations of Hermes, Aphrodite and Apollo. In total, he worked with living models in his studio for almost 80,000 hours.
His years of work prepared him for the competition for the World War I memorial commission in 2015. At the time, the World War I Centennial Commission was evaluating more than 360 designs for Pershing Square Park, named in honor of General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Despite the odds, Howard instinctively knew he would be chosen because the commission members “liked the sculpture in front of the U.S. Capitol.” Ulysses S. Grant by Henry Shrady.
“I made drawings with multi-figure compositions that were completely different,” he told the Yankee Institute. “They were about brotherhood in arms and the connection between people.”
Howard’s design won the competition. The work would cost him almost ten years of his life.
In the service of truth
There were 25 design iterations before Howard settled on what would become A soldier’s journey. Rather than basing the work on the story of a specific American soldier, the Connecticut sculptor decided to transform the artwork into an allegory that summarizes the shared experiences of the more than 4 million men mobilized by the end of the war on November 11, 1918. (Of these 67,000 was from Connecticut.)
For inspiration, Howard studied the classics, the Italian Baroque artists and even the The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. In one example, the shocked figure in the composition was directly influenced by statues from ancient Greece, as well as John the Baptist by Auguste Rodin. As for the story, Howard Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journeywhich the sculptor stresses is “the only story we really have”. The sculpture depicts three different scenes: a father leaving home to go to war; a battle on the Western Front and then the return home.
However, the focus of the story is a father-daughter relationship.
“My protagonist is the father, a soldier and an allegory for the United States,” the artist explained to the Yankee Institute. “He leaves home, family and the Victorian era and finds himself in a conflict between home, family and service to country.” The conflict is “the core of the whole person,” while the aftermath shows the “price of war in which he is transformed after the battle.”
“It’s the transformation of a man, soldier and country as we move from divine order to chaos and modernity,” he added. “In the final scene, he hands the helmet to his daughter. She is the next generation. She is World War II. She is defining the future as she looks down into the helmet.”
The project cost $12 million, but unlike most artistic ventures, Howard controlled the budget and schedule. He used American veterans as models, took 12,000 photos for poses and even flew to New Zealand, where he worked with members of Weta Workshop, the visual effects company that was involved with the Lord of the rings Trilogy and the documentary about the First World War, You will not grow oldTo effectively cast the work in bronze, Howard had to call upon the skills of a British foundry, Pangolin Editions, since none in the United States could handle the project. He sees this episode as a microcosm of a disturbing trend in American industry.
“We lack the manufacturing quality in our castings because we are not teaching our younger generations a craft aesthetic,” he told the Yankee Institute. “What happened to all the trade schools? We are going under quickly because we can’t build well.”
Nor are American students taught the profound, lasting consequences of the oft-forgotten First World War that Western civilization continues to suffer today – and not necessarily for the better. He hopes the memorial can be a springboard that stimulates studies of that conflict.
“The problem is that World War I changed the world, and that is still evident today,” Howard told the Yankee Institute. “It’s the boundary between man and humanity that begins with the idea that there is no God: How could 22 million people die if there is a divine order? How could that happen? And then you get into the idea of alienation, nihilism and existentialism.”
“That is the prevailing view that persists to this day,” he added. “The concept of community, unity and pride in one’s country was destroyed by an act of war 104 years ago.”
Ultimately, Howard wants to be “in the service of truth,” putting the human and the divine at the forefront of his art while constantly asking himself “how can I play it up.” But this, he believes, starts with protecting the “human fingerprint” in all aspects of life—food, architecture, music, movies, and more. With the advent of artificial intelligence, he posits, eradicating humanity in exchange for financial gain will only lead to division, especially when art and history are inextricably linked.
“The idea that you can replace the human fingerprint and nature with the mechanical or digital fingerprint is a fallacy because when you make things, particularly when you make things by hand, human perception is far more powerful than a mechanical machine making something because our consciousness carries our history within it,” Howard told the Yankee Institute. “History is what connects and unites a group of people and acts as an umbrella for them and even enables them to become more than just a single person. They become a group of people.”
By alluding to artistic styles that were discarded by the modernists, A soldier’s journey is a direct insult to time. It glorifies not war but the endurance of the human spirit. It tells a human story: one that millions of Americans experienced over a century ago. And it reminds viewers that there are “sacred values.” Like the father in the sculpture, our shared history must be passed on, Howard argues, so the country can once again be “one group of people under the flag of the United States, indivisible.”
