Catesby Leigh A Stirring Monument to America’s Warriors Sabin Howard’s A Soldier’s Journey brings a cinematic approach to the Great War—and defies the arrogance of Washington’s cultural elites.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/stirring-monument-to-americas-warriors
Sabin Howard’s engrossing 38-figure, high-relief sculpture—the centerpiece of Washington’s new National World War I Memorial, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of the White House and Treasury Department—takes a cinematic approach to sculptural narrative. It commemorates a civilization-transforming conflict in which 116,516 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded. The several scenes in what Howard calls his “movie in bronze,” portraying a soldier’s departure from home and family for war and its horrors and then his return, unfold from left to right in a work nearly 60 feet wide.
Entitled A Soldier’s Journey, the sculpture is noteworthy for several reasons. Its kinetic design, with changing tempos and moods and a range of character types, seems to resonate with visitors. In remarks at the memorial’s inauguration on September 13, Howard said that his sculpture heralds “an American cultural Renaissance.” There’s also a polemical edge to his public discourse, as when he told the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent podcast interview that the “art world” treats the public the way the government does.
A Soldier’s Journey appears at a time of growing aversion to elite arrogance and incompetence of the kind that foisted on the public Frank Gehry’s bloviated, $150 million Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial (2021), with its rigid, lifeless statuary groups and enormous, unfathomable background tableau of metallic squiggles supposedly resembling the Pointe du Hoc. Back in 2018, Howard and the World War I memorial’s young architect, Joseph Weishaar, confronted such art-world arrogance when their project ran into headwinds at the federal Commission of Fine Arts, one of the guilty parties in the Ike memorial fiasco. The $44 million World War I memorial, mostly paid for with private funds, could wind up fortifying public opposition to boondoggles like Gehry’s, for which the American taxpayer got stuck with the bill.
There is also a technological angle to A Soldier’s Journey: the important role of digital technology in its creation raises serious questions about how sculpture will be made in the age of artificial intelligence and robots. Suffice it to say that Howard’s magnum opus was not cast from 3-D printouts.
At the beginning of A Soldier’s Journey, the kneeling protagonist receives his helmet from his young daughter, then pulls himself away from his wife and sets off for battle with comrades in arms. At the sculpture’s center, he leads a headlong charge into No Man’s Land, arms outspread toward each end of the sculpture, and afterward stands motionless, gasmask hanging from his belt, peering out at us in shock and disbelief at the carnage. Then comes a parade of returning troops under the Stars and Stripes that includes the wounded—and finally he is back home. Standing now and still holding his rifle, he offers his upturned helmet to his daughter, who peers down into it with foreboding, for the years to come will bring more war.
A seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze wall stands behind the figures, which are perched on a ledge of varying depth. The shell-shocked protagonist stands to the fore in the war-churned mire, one of his laced boots extending some three feet from the wall. Aside from a single bayonet, only the flag accompanying the returning troops rises above the wall; it extends a background diagonal from wooden war wreckage in the shape of a distorted cross. The cross appears in low relief on the wall, but no figures do. All 38 are free-standing. (Seven of them, including two battlefield nurses, are female.) Figures closer to the wall diminish in size relative to those in the foreground, as background figures rendered in low relief would in a Renaissance or Baroque work.
Howard’s 25-ton sculpture hardly glorifies war. But as he remarked at the dedication, “There are no victims here—they are all heroes.” That’s one reason A Soldier’s Journey might find a place in the popular imagination akin to Felix de Weldon’s massive Marine Corps Memorial, erected 70 years ago on Arlington Ridge—which, like Arlington National Cemetery, is located across the Potomac but still very much a part of Washington’s monumental core. The Iwo Jima memorial, as it is widely known, is famously based on Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s picture of five Marines and a Navy corpsman planting the flag on Mount Suribachi.
Both monuments testify to realism’s dominance of American monumental sculpture since the Civil War, while reflecting very different formal approaches within that genre. De Weldon’s 100-ton colossus, planted on a pedestal ten feet tall, is our nation’s foremost World War II monument, overshadowing the forlorn World War II Memorial (2004) on the National Mall, with its monotonous multitude of pillars and lack of symbolic focus. But the Iwo Jima Marines, five times life-size, rely on sheer magnitude and dynamic thrust for their effect. They are not well put together. Their arrangement—more compacted than what we see in Rosenthal’s photograph—sends a message, but deducing which hand, arm or leg belongs to which figure requires effort. Helmeted heads don’t fit quite right on the bodies to which they’re attached. Hands are rendered in much more detail than faces, making the figures look still more disjointed. De Weldon’s Marines pack a punch, but they are gigantic composites. Howard’s figures read as distinct wholes.
The century-old Ulysses S. Grant Memorial at the Mall’s east end is the monument that most influenced Howard and the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission, Edwin Fountain, who provided significant feedback as Howard worked out his sculptural narrative. Erected on a marble platform no less than 252 feet wide, the Grant might be taken for a classical monument, what with the lofty pedestal on which the bronze equestrian statue of the Union commander stands, the couchant lions on lower pedestals fore and aft of the statue, and the flanking artillery and cavalry groups, also bronze like the lions. But despite the classical trappings, Grant, his mount, and the artillerymen and cavalrymen are all realist creations. The memorial’s sculptor, Henry Merwin Shrady, focused on the stark contrast between the wholly static equestrian and the kinetic rush of the calvary and horse-drawn artillery groups. Fountain wanted Howard’s sculpture to excite the kind of emotion that the movement of those groups does, so that a public removed by more than a century from the Great War might be inspired to learn more about it.
But if you look at the Grant from across the Capitol Reflecting Pool in front of it, the two action groups are a visual mush. Looking at Howard’s sculpture from the far end of the six-acre World War I memorial site, on the other hand, his figures are very legible, as are accouterments such as the rifles pointing forward at different angles in the protagonist-led charge. The spectacle draws you in, and visitors take their time walking from one end of the sculpture to the other. There are always people looking at A Soldier’s Journey when I visit the memorial. On a gorgeous early-September Sunday afternoon, on the other hand, the vast central plaza of Gehry’s Ike memorial, located across Independence Avenue from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, was as desolate as a de Chirico cityscape.
Joe Weishaar and Howard won the World War I memorial competition in January 2016 with an entry featuring walls in a rectilinear “U”-shaped configuration bearing an abundance of relief sculpture in a park setting. At this point, the Centennial Commission wanted the memorial completed for the centennial of the November 1918 armistice. (The time frame was repeatedly extended.) While the narrative concept for the sculpture emerged at the project’s outset, Howard was accustomed to modeling nude figures from life for single-figure works. To expedite the design of his multifigure relief, he pored over World War I photographs and Old Master paintings for ideas, hired young actors who posed in period attire, and took pictures with his iPhone, shooting photo bursts to find the right action poses. During this phase, Weishaar collaborated in photoshopping Howard’s pictures into tableaus that the sculptor reworked in drawings.
The Commission of Fine Arts, which reviews the design of buildings and memorials in Washington’s monumental core, approved the Weishaar-Howard design concept, including Howard’s drawings of the proposed sculpture, in May 2017. A drawing of the entire sculpture in that set is closely akin to what the visitor sees at the memorial. A reduced-scale model was the next step; for that, Howard had to raise half a million dollars from a foundation (which he declines to identify) because the Centennial Commission could not afford to foot the bill. The sculptor decamped to New Zealand for months of labor at Weta Workshop—famed for producing sets, creatures, and costumes for the film and television industries—on production of a ten-foot-long Soldier’s Journey maquette. More photographs of live models and equipment were taken, while Howard continued to refine his design in numerous drawings. Multiple test prints of digitally modeled figures derived from Howard’s drawings or from photographs were made at the scale of the maquette in order to determine the depth of relief. Howard opted for the free-standing arrangement for the sculpture, which would not be covered by a cornice or other architectural element, so that light could fall behind the figures and enhance their spatial effect.
“The poses are all relational to one another,” Howard says of his design’s development. “By knitting the figures together, you’re setting up hierarchies between and within groups.” Hierarchies are also established, he adds, as “articulation of planes and contrast between light and dark increase from background to foreground.” Walking back and forth along the completed sculpture, you can see that background figures are compressed rather than fully modeled.
With the spatial scheme determined, the digitally modeled figures were printed in China in a hard acrylic material on a high-resolution machine and sent back to New Zealand. The China-printed figures came back in 120 pieces. Molds were taken and filled with clay. Howard then worked over the hardened clay—again in clay—and the pieces were reassembled and mounted in their intended arrangement. After Howard did some final hand-finishing, the mold for the epoxy resin model presented to Fine Arts early in 2018 was taken from this maquette.
Fine Arts was already a problem because of members—led by the commission’s then-vice-chair Elizabeth K. Meyer, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Virginia—who were more interested in preserving the seriously defective park Congress designated as the location of the World War I memorial than the creation of an appropriate monument. Pershing Park (1981) was designed by a modernist landscape architect, M. Paul Friedberg, on the spacious Pennsylvania Avenue site in front of the venerable Willard Hotel. Friedberg’s overly elaborate, multilevel design created a leafy, largely berm-enclosed, problematically introverted precinct focused on a pool eventually left empty. A plaza at the east end still features a rather unimpressive bronze statue of American Expeditionary Forces commander John J. Pershing, along with mahogany-granite wall slabs bearing war maps and narrative text. The high-maintenance park inevitably degenerated into a haven for skateboarders and derelicts.
Meyer’s campaign against the Weishaar–Howard design got traction, however, because the National Park Service had determined in 2016—perfect timing!—that Friedberg’s dysfunctional park was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The Centennial Commission offered to whittle Weishaar’s design down from three connected walls to a single wall bearing Howard’s sculpture to accommodate Meyer and her cohort. In May 2018, Fine Arts nevertheless requested a rethink of the sculpture, suggesting that it might be turned the other way around or moved to a different location in the park, even though it had already approved it in concept and even though Howard had already narrowed the sculpture’s proposed breadth by ten feet and lowered his figures’ height by a foot to not much larger than life-size. But then Fine Arts—chaired by veteran Washington insider Earl A. Powell III, the then-director of the National Gallery of Art—had second thoughts about its outrageous request and backed off.
If Meyer’s campaign had not come to a halt, the Centennial Commission’s fundraising efforts would surely have suffered. And in fact that campaign mainly succeeded. The park is little changed apart from the introduction of the sculpture wall and the rather awkward viewing platform covering much of the area originally taken up by Friedberg’s pool. Its meticulous restoration has been funded by the Park Service as part of the memorial project. A noteworthy problem with Howard’s sculpture wouldn’t have arisen but for Fine Arts: it is horizontally too compact, lacking the breathing spaces between scenes that he intended. In sum, Meyer and company did their damage, and A Soldier’s Journey has likely saved a misbegotten park. So it goes in the Swamp.
With the major review-board concerns allayed, Howard collaborated with the Pangolin Editions foundry in the English town of Stroud on the creation of full-scale, unfinished foam models of the figures in his sculpture. Pangolin, like Weta Workshop, is a high-tech operation. There was a five-day round of photogrammetry in a studio attached to the foundry, with live costumed models posing on a stage, surrounded by 168 cameras arranged in circular tiers. What ensued was the milling of the mannequin-like foam figures, about half of them derived directly from the photogrammetry at Stroud and the other half from the model produced at Weta as well as a smaller one fabricated, with a tighter spatial arrangement and alteration of three figures, at Pangolin.
The foam figures started arriving piecemeal at Howard’s Englewood, N.J., studio in the summer of 2019. He and his principal assistant, Charlie Mostow, spent hundreds of hours working over each figure in clay. The reworking was done, Howard says, from 15 or 20 live models, also costumed, including a number of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The head of the protagonist, who appears five times in the sculpture, was modeled on a Marine’s, while his body was modeled on an Army Ranger’s. The girl at each end was modeled on Howard’s daughter Madeleine.
The last group of figures left Englewood for Stroud for piece-casting in bronze in January of this year. Pangolin co-founder Rungwe Kingdon and Howard settled on a dark patina as appropriate to the sculpture’s theme, though there is a noticeable if limited sheen to the bronze. Soldier’s Journey figures also exhibit toolmarks left by the clay modeling because Howard wanted to leave this evidence of the sculpture’s making as a contemporary accent.
Close up, you are separated from the sculpture, which is raised about three feet above the stone platform you’re standing on, by a narrow channel of water. A cascade pours through a horizontal opening in the granite wall beneath it. The modeling of the figures is not highly detailed; Howard says he left them 65 percent complete to meet his production deadlines. (The rifles born by the sculpture’s warriors, in contrast, appear to be straightforward casts of period weaponry.) A Soldier’s Journey has problems besides the compactness noted above. One thing that caught my eye right off was that the girl peering down into the returning hero’s helmet looks a good deal shorter than the one at the other end, partly because the ground she is standing on is lower. She doesn’t look like the same girl, and her elongated, distinctly unfinished fingers don’t look like they belong on her.
When the sculpture is viewed closer up, the diminution of figures in perspective can seem overdone. This is perhaps most noticeable in the first scene. Here the foregrounded wife who turns to clasp her departing husband’s arm seems unnaturally larger than she is when, just to the left, she stands behind him with her hands resting on his shoulders as he receives his helmet from his daughter. This appears to have resulted from the final round of modeling at the Englewood studio, when Howard scaled up foreground figures while increasing their three-dimensionality in accordance with his hierarchical concept. That concept is manifest, however, in prominent figures that are more structurally articulated, as with a striding nurse supporting a wounded soldier: her long skirt is treated as diaphanous drapery, revealing more of the underlying anatomy than thicker fabric would.
The six charging figures behind the centrally situated protagonist leading them form something of a maelstrom that recalls the Iwo Jima and Grant memorials to a degree. A falling figure embedded among them was perhaps inspired by a trooper in the Grant memorial’s crowded cavalry group plunging headlong after his mount has been shot out from under him. Howard presents the cost of war very clearly further along in the sculpture, and while he was evidently intent on introducing that theme in the charge scene, it would have more sculptural integrity with fewer figures.
But the sculptor handled the lead-ins to both the charge and the homecoming astutely. In the latter case, a helmeted soldier behind and just to the side of the shell-shocked protagonist helps a wounded comrade from the field; then we see the just-mentioned nurse with another wounded soldier, and after that two threesomes in the homecoming parade under the flag, appearing in receding perspective on diagonals running from left to right. The other such threesome—three soldiers locked in arms—includes the protagonist taking leave of his wife.
The pictorial, kinetic realism of Howard’s sculpture jibes with what he regards as modern culture’s most significant medium, film, while reflecting photography’s incalculable impact on our way of seeing the world since its emergence around 1840. That’s one big reason, along with its uplifting thematic content, that it resonates with ordinary people.
Howard credits digital technology with relieving him of the “grunt work” of “blocking out” his figures, emphasizing that without it the Soldier’s Journey project, which wound up costing $12 million, could have taken a decade longer than it did. He says AI could be deployed for such grunt work. “You can choose not to use the new technology but then you risk becoming archaic and irrelevant,” he declared a few years ago. But the other side of the coin is the considerably greater threat—which Howard readily acknowledges—posed by the creative type in a hurry who simply resorts to photogrammetry followed by digital modeling and sculpting. Howard has argued that because a computer can’t echo human modes of perception, and because the “human fingerprint” is indispensable to sculpture, new technologies can only expedite development of “a creative armature.”
Sabin Howard is 61 years young and very ambitious. In an age when artists need to explain themselves, he has the advantage of being an engaging communicator with a devoted publicist, in both print and visual media, in his wife, writer Traci Slatton Howard. He already has plans to employ his Soldier’s Journey methodology for a multifigure monument embodying the theme of American exceptionalism.
It would be located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He’s had his fill of the Swamp.
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