‘A memorial to humanity’: Washington DC’s monumental first world war sculpture

The creator of a 60ft-long bronze sculpture at the heart of the World War I Memorial in Washington DC is a soldier of peace.

“You will not find anyone else who hates war as much as I do,” says the sculptor Sabin Howard, who unveiled his modern masterpiece earlier this month. “The people that are caught in war are innocent bystanders. They are the ones that lose their homes, their families, their mothers, their children and there’s no like, ‘Oh well, we’ll fix your life.’”

Howard describes his monumental sculpture featuring 38 figures as “a film in bronze”. It completes the World War I Memorial, which opened near the White House in 2021 – more than a century after the last shot was fired. By contrast, Maya Lin’s Vietnam veterans memorial was built just seven years after the end of that conflict.

Seeking to honour the 4.7 million Americans who served in the US armed forces during the first world war, a federal commission organised a design competition that drew entries from 360 teams. Howard, a modern classical sculptor who grew up in New York and Torino, Italy, and has lived in Venezuela, Portugal and Britain, emerged victorious in 2016.

Howard says he wanted to make a contribution to America because of the opportunities it have given him. “I love my country and what’s possible. I started as a 19-year-old at zero: couldn’t draw. I put myself in it and bought a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain the first day and started doing the exercises and 90 days later went back to art school and asked them if I could get in and they said yes.

“It was like an adventure that I began and it gave me a purpose. I am the American dream – the possibility; this could not have happened in Europe. I believe that strongly, especially in Italy. It could only happen here.”

Howard had no intention of glamourising war. Now 61, he belongs to a generation with a very different attitude.

“I grew up going to a lot of Vietnam anti-war marches and I saw the horrors of war did because in the neighbourhood that I grew up in there were a lot of junkies that came back,” he says. “There’s a median in Broadway, Manhattan, that I used to traverse all the time and there were junkies there with needles just lying there. It’s like a nightmare for a little kid to see that and it stayed with me.”

Howard’s $8m, 25-ton sculpture, mounted on pink granite, is called A Soldier’s Journey. It follows an unnamed soldier the day he takes his helmet from his daughter’s hands and goes off to fight. It depicts the horror of war, with soldiers fighting and nurses tending their injuries. One man looms towards the viewer with shell shock. It concludes with a homecoming in which the soldier hands the helmet to his daughter – presaging the second world war.

Howard was conscious that this is public art seeking popular appeal. “How many people go to art museums – what is it, 5, 10%? So you’d better do something that’s exciting. I thought in the beginning, what is the most interesting art form today for general public and it’s films. OK, you’ve got to make a film in bronze so you work from left to right. The scenes unfold for you.

“You’re an active participant and that way you can actually become involved with it in an emotional way, and it develops as catharsis and community. What I learned in the studio, I can pass along to the visitor, and I love that because now I’m in service of that, not just making my art in the studio for myself. It’s not egocentric anymore. It’s in purpose of others.”

A Soldier’s Journey involved an elaborate sculptor’s journey with an important detour to Britain. Over nine months Howard came up with 25 iterations, taking more than 12,000 images of models wearing real uniforms in his south Bronx studio in New York.

He started by using college students and Broadway actors as models but, once he moved into the studio to start sculpting, found they lacked the necessary gravitas so turned to real military veterans – Navy Seals, Marine and army rangers – and hired one to work for him full-time.

“This brought more of a historical reference,” Howard recalls. “I could sculpt from their faces the actual PTSD that they had been through and so the bronze carries that history and beats mortality. That’s a critical aspect here because we did something that’s very human and very emotional.

“Movement is emotion so if you look at the relief it’s a symphony that is quiet then very screaming loud then quiet then moves on again and then goes quiet. All these crescendos and diminuendos are the way the sculpture’s made and it goes back to the whole idea of Renaissance art, which is very unified and cohesive.”

Sculpting in clay, Howard travelled the US looking for a foundry to realise his immense vision but all had systems that were too restrictive. Then, looking at Instagram one night, he came across Indomitable, a monumental bronze of a bear by the British sculptor Nick Bibby. Howard made contact and learned about the Pangolin Foundry in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

“I’m off on a plane to there and as soon as I walked in I knew it was the right place. Aesthetics, craftsmanship, creativity and problem solving and a team of 200 people. That’s what you need on a project this big. All 200 people worked on it.

“The community in the area are very interfacing with that foundry because that’s where you go get a job. That’s a cool thing. You have real people making art. It’s not computer … You can see my fingerprints in the metal. Literal fingerprints are in the metal. That’s how good the casting is.”

The first world war caused twice as many American deaths as Vietnam and fuelled civil rights, women’s suffrage and the rise of the US as a superpower. Yet the centenary of the country’s entry into the war in 1917 came and went almost unnoticed, unlike the fanfare of remembrance in Britain. The second world war looms much larger in the national consciousness.

Howard reflects: “It’s critical that we start to look more at our history and learn more about what we have passed through so we don’t repeat those same mistakes. If you look at world war one and this moment 106 years ago, it’s like we have now opened the box to these never ending wars.

“The war to end all wars has been the war that actually opened the gate. That’s the reason that helmet is facing down in the beginning and at the end it’s open because it’s Pandora’s box that has been unleashed upon us. It’s a crying shame that it’s going in that direction.”

He asks: “Are we sleepwalking into world war three and now we’re unveiling this sculpture? If those soldiers come back, they will recognise themselves in this equally as much as soldiers that fought a hundred years ago. It’s a war memorial but ultimately it’s a memorial to humanity and human beings.”