Sabin Howard shines a New Light This Memorial Day

As the school year ends and many families plan summer vacations, thousands will head to our nation’s capital.  This year Washington D.C.’s mall boasts a massive new World War I tribute, a fifty-eight-foot bronze relief installed in September 2024:  it is breathtaking.  A Soldier’s Journey is the fruit of eight-plus years of intense artistic labor by American sculptor Sabin Howard and his team in Englewood, New Jersey.  It is our nation’s own Sistine Chapel Ceiling.  And Sabin’s physical sacrifice in sculpting it rivals Michelangelo’s back-breaking work on the scaffold. It took twice as long and left him with an unusually jutting thumb. It left us with a masterpiece.

Thirty-eight figures surge from this narrative sculpture, which – as the title proclaims – follows a soldier’s journey:  he bids farewell to the sanctuary of home, enters the camaraderie of warriors, experiences the horror of battle, the physical toll of war, the sorrowful mercy of healing, and finally returns to the sanctuary of home.  The agony of combat and the pieta-like figures center-right rivet the viewer. A Soldier’s Journey speaks powerfully to the immense tragedy and redemptive skeins of war in our very bloody twentieth century.

Many historians consider World War I the beginning of the contemporary era.  One high school student text begins with the definitive declaration:  “Your world began in August 1914.”  World War I was the decisive break with a Victorian past and the first salvo into what one historian described as "the war of the world." The horrors of World War I repeated themselves on an even more massive scale in World War II.  The nearly eighty years of peace since have been a triumph – and from a historical standpoint, an anomaly.

On this Memorial Day, let us, along with teacher/sculptor Sabin Howard, remember those who sacrificed.  Indeed, the original title for the sculpture was to be “the weight of sacrifice.”   4.7 million Americans served in World War I and 117,000 died. World War II would quadruple both those numbers.

The sculpture, which has been called “a movie in bronze,” presents the twentieth century’s cycle of violence and redemption.  It begins with a soldier kneeling to accept his helmet from his daughter, as he leaves to fight “the war to end all wars.”  One imagines him praying to be worthy of the charge. His wife’s arm initially rests on his shoulder, then unsuccessfully seeks to restrain him as he joins his comrades in parade and battle.  War is not glorified here.  The “doughboys” unite, charge, lunge, and are felled, their expressions anguished and agonized. 

To the center right medics and nurses tend the fallen under a cross-like image in the background. Some are lost, some join the ranks of shell-shocked soldiers, trudging home, their mission finished if not accomplished.  The soldier who once knelt before his daughter seeking worthiness, now stands before her, weapon down, returning his helmet of war.  She peers within, perhaps seeing his enormous sacrifice or perhaps the coming of World War II, the ongoing cycle of war, courage, sacrifice, and peace that has made up our era.

What a gift we have been given.  A Soldier’s Journey is the largest free-standing bronze sculpture in the world, but it is ornate -- intricate even.  Every face, every physical strain, every moment of agony and resolve is captured here.  A gigantic project. The process of making it alone was of Renaissance proportions, and indeed, its sculptor claims Renaissance roots. 

Sabin Howard is the son of an Italian mother and American father, both of whom were university professors.  His youth was spent between Torino, Italy and New York City.  And it was from Italy – the Renaissance greats of Donatello, Michelangelo, and Baroque genius of Bernini -- that he drew his inspiration.  Like his Renaissance predecessors, he believes that art is above all a “call to beauty” and sees the human form as one of the great embodiments of that call. He asks us to return to the “architecture of the body.”

Howard’s fascination with sculpting the human form well and precisely, spurred him to employ the latest digital technology in this otherwise classical work.  The figures (among them Jewish, Asian, and African American soldiers) drew their form from live models in authentic World War I uniforms. He and his team took over 12,000 photographs and employed digital modeling and casting by collaborating with workshops in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.  The initial drawings represented 750 hours of work.  A maquette was 3-D printed, allowing Sabin to refine poses and expressions.  All the figures were then painstakingly hand sculpted in clay. 

Howard himself spent more than 45,000 hours on the physically grueling work, which was then cast in bronze. Only in the United Kingdom could Howard find a foundry capable of casting such a large and complex high relief work. When the twenty-three separate bronze pieces were cast and assembled into a seamless 58-foot relief they were shipped to the United States for final patination beneath the hot DC sun, where Sabin endured more hours of physically grueling labor.

Howard’s goal, of course, was to draw attention not to himself, but to the soldier’s journey, inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell’s description of The Hero’s Journey in his work: departure, immersion (trials, transformations), and return. The soldier is a noble embodiment of sacrifice, loss and courage.  His daughter stares into his helmet at the end and wonders perhaps how long his sacrifice will matter.  When will the next trial occur? In the case of World War I, the answer was: right on its heels.  And the narrative cycle speaks as well to that major conflict.

This Memorial Day we are blessed to still bask in the nearly 80-year international peace that succeeded World War II.  There have been smaller scale wars in this time, and the world is now re-aligning, but on May 26 we do well to recall the heroic sacrifice of those who endured the tragedy and horror of war.  And gave their lives that we might be free. 

And we do well to celebrate the artists who are seeking “a new Renaissance” in art, bringing timeless wisdom to life with the heart-wrenching beauty of their creations.  Sabin Howard believes art is in the service of beauty, and that its goal is to reflect universal human experience and thus bring us together.  The renewal of classical figurative art, he believes is a “call to the eternal” and a way to create community.  Our nation’s latest monument – with its themes of sacrifice, courage, and redemption -- does just that.