Sabin Howard is a renaissance man.
As an artist, his sculptural work evokes the classics like Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini, the influences — or “guides,” as he describes — of his ethic. His showroom in Kent, Conn., features numerous pieces examining and celebrating the dignity of the human being, seeking to reflect the transcendentals, those being the true, the good and the beautiful.
While he is a student of tradition, Howard’s art is not an aesthetic imitation. Nor is he merely reflective. He is forward-thinking, aiming to elevate and preserve “sacred values” for future generations, which he argues were lost in the modern art trends of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“The sense of community has been destroyed and the sense of being part of something larger than yourself,” Howard told Yankee Institute. “My definition of the sacred is you believe in something that is bigger than yourself. That is sacred.”
Nowhere is Howard’s philosophy and mission more evident than in his latest project A Soldier’s Journey — a nearly 60-foot long, 38-figure massive bronze sculpture depicting an American soldier’s call to duty, from home to the Western Front, during the First World War. The sculpture will become the centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial in Pershing Square Park, Washington, D.C., when it is unveiled Sept. 13.
The sculpture is already being hailed as a “masterpiece.” Yet, in a time of political polarization and rampant concerns about artificial intelligence in art, Howard aspires for the monument to be an edifying and unifying reminder of Americans’ sacrifices in WWI for visitors to the national memorial.
“The most important purpose [of the sculpture] is to present our country unified because the soldiers, nurses and children that are on that wall all entered into that war, neither Democrat nor Republican, but as Americans,” Howard said. “Our identity is unified and cohesive under that flag in the sculpture.”
An Artist’s Journey
In truth, Howard never intended to be an artist at a young age. Born in the 1960s, he grew up in two worlds, New York City and Torino, Italy, the son of two PhDs, who reveled in the life of the mind. While overseas, he admired Torino’s classical artwork — but he recalls his grandfather’s war stories that struck him on a “very personal level.”
“My grandfather — who was Italian — was a POW in Libya, Africa after a giant battle with the Brits,” Howard told Yankee Institute. “And then he escaped, traveled across the Sahara, across the ocean, back to the straits of Messina and then walked, hitchhiked all the way back to northern Italy.”
Stateside, the Vietnam War also left a deep imprint on him as a child after seeing the harrowing news coverage, particularly of napalmed villages. War marked him; but studying WWI, much like art, would come later in life since his high school history courses primarily focused on the Great Depression and World War II.
“We don’t have the same depth of engagement [with World War I],” Howard told Yankee Institute. “I think in America, if you ask any millennial on the street ‘When was World War I fought?’ they will go, ‘What is World War I?’ They don’t even know what it is.”
Howard discovered his appreciation and talent for the arts after dropping out of college. After building a portfolio of drawings, he was accepted into the Philadelphia College of Art, and then earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the New York Academy of Art. Since then, he has taught at graduate and undergraduate levels; been elected to the board of the National Sculpture Society; received numerous commissions and showed his work at more than 50 solo and group shows; and written The Art of Life with his wife, Traci Slatton. Some of his most notable works are heroic scale depictions of Hermes, Aphrodite and Apollo. In total, he has worked nearly 80,000 hours with life models in his studio.
His years of work prepared him for the competition to obtain the World War I Memorial commission in 2015. At the time, the World War I Centennial Commission judged more than 360 designs for Pershing Square Park, named in honor of Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Despite the odds, Howard instinctively knew he would be selected because members of the commission “liked the sculpture in front the U.S. Capitol” of Ulysses S. Grant by Henry Shrady.
“I did drawings with multi-figure compositions that were completely different,” he told Yankee Institute. “They were about the brotherhood of arms and the inter-relatedness of human beings.”
Howard’s design won the competition. The work would then consume nearly ten years of his life.
In Service of Truth
There were 25 design iterations before Howard settled on what would become A Soldier’s Journey. Rather than basing the piece on one specific American soldier’s story, the Connecticut sculptor decided to turn the artwork into an allegory, encapsulating the shared experiences of the more than 4 million men who were mobilized by the war’s end, Nov. 11, 1918. (Of those, 67,000 hailed from Connecticut.)
For inspiration, Howard studied the classics, Baroque Italian artists and even the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. In one example, the shell-shocked figure in the composition was directly influenced by statues from ancient Greece, as well as St. John the Baptist by Auguste Rodin. As for the story, Howard pulled from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, which the sculptor emphasizes is the “only story we actually have.” The sculpture has three distinct scenes: a father leaving home for the war; fighting in the Western Front; and then returning home.
But the story’s core is a father-daughter relationship.
“My protagonist is the father, a soldier and an allegory for the United States,” the artist explained to Yankee Institute. “He leaves home, his family and the Victorian era and enters into a tug of war between home, family and service to country.” The conflict is “the very center of the whole man,” while the aftermath shows the “cost of war where he is transformed after the battle.”
“It is a transformation of a man, soldier and a country as we move from divine order to chaos and modernism,” he added. “In the final scene, he hands his daughter the helmet. She is the next generation. She is World War II. She defines the future as she stares 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 photographs for poses and even flew to New Zealand, collaborating with members of Weta Workshop, the visual effects company associated with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. To have the work effectively cast in bronze, Howard had to enlist the prowess of a British foundry, Pangolin Editions, since none in the United States could handle the project. He views this episode as a microcosm of a troubling trend in American industries.
“We are lacking in fabrication in our casting because we are not training craft aesthetics to our younger generations,” he told Yankee Institute. “What happened to all the trade schools? We are going down fast because we cannot build well.”
Likewise, American students are not taught the deep, lasting ramifications of the oft forgotten First World War, from which Western Civilization is still reeling today — and not necessarily for the better. He hopes the memorial can be a springboard, igniting studies into the conflict.
“The problem is that World War I changed the way the world is, and it’s still apparent today,” Howard told Yankee Institute. “It’s the line in the sand where modern man begins with the idea of there is no God: how could 22 million people die if there is a divine order, how could this have happened and then move into the idea of alienation, nihilism and existentialism.”
“That is the pervasive view that has continued to this moment,” he added. “The concept of community, unity and pride for one’s country has been destroyed by an act of war that happened 104 years ago.”
In the end, Howard longs to be “in service of truth,” bringing humanity and the divine to the forefront of his art, while constantly asking himself how “can I play [sic] it forward?” But this begins, he believes, with protecting the “human fingerprint” in all aspects of life — food, architecture, music, movies and more. With the rise of artificial intelligence, he posits, the extinction of humanity in exchange for monetary gain will only lead to disunification, 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 fallacious thinking because when you make things, especially if you make things by hand, the human perception far outweighs and is way more powerful than a mechanical machine making something because our consciousness carries our history with it” Howard told Yankee Institute. “History is what binds and unifies and acts as an umbrella for a group of people, and even empowers them to become more than just a single person. They become a group of people.”
Through evoking artistic styles jettisoned by modernists, A Soldier’s Journey is a direct affront to the times. It glorifies, not war, but the endurance of the human spirit. It tells a human story: one that millions of Americans faced more than a century ago. And it reminds onlookers that there are “sacred values.” Like the father in the sculpture, our shared history must be passed on, Howard argues, so that the country can once again be “One group of people under the flag of the United States, indivisible.”
