How Do You Capture the Tragedy of War? (with Sabin Howard)

Aug 12 2024

A soldier goes off to war. Damaged in combat, he returns home, forever changed. Master sculptor Sabin Howard captures this tragic and powerful journey in bronze, for the new World War I Memorial that will be unveiled in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 2024. Howard talks about his craft with EconTalk's Russ Roberts as they discuss Howard's hatred of war, his love for humanity, and what makes art great.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: July 15, 2024.] Russ Roberts: Today is July 15th, 2024, and my guest is sculptor Sabin Howard. He is the sculptor of the soon-to-be-unveiled World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. on the evening of September the 13th. This is a 58-foot wide, 10-foot high bronze wall with 38 figures. It's an incredible project. We're going to discuss the memorial, and then I hope we get to discuss art more generally. Sabin, welcome to EconTalk. Sabin Howard: Thank you for having me on this morning.
1:09	Russ Roberts: The memorial that you're building, you give it the name: A Soldier's Journey. What's the idea behind it? Sabin Howard: It's a story that would be understandable universally of a father, a dad, and an allegory for the United States. And, it falls under the idea of the hero's journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about. It's, this soldier, this dad leaves home and enters into the Brotherhood of Arms, and from that point enters into the battle. He leads the battle charge. And then, from this horrific experience is shell-shocked, which is the focus of the full 60-foot long frieze. And, at that moment, that is an allegory for the change in our world for how we were seen as humans: how we saw ourselves no longer under operating in a universe driven by a divine God. And, it's the beginning of the modern era. And that is what that figure represents. It's alienation, and he is alone. And then, the last section is the return home. And, he is in the last scene where he hands his daughter--the next generation--his helmet. And, that is: she's looking into the helmet, she's divining the future, which is World War II. And, so, that is the story. Russ Roberts: And, of the 38--is the 38 figures correct? Are there 38 figures? Sabin Howard: Thirty eight figures, yes. Russ Roberts: How many are the soldiers, of those 38, of the one we're following? Sabin Howard: The soldier is in--there are six. In family, in being torn between family and the service to country, leading the charge into battle--that's three. Four, leading his--after the leading, shell-shock, that's four. And, final scene--returning to his home, five. So, five, sorry. Five.
3:18	Russ Roberts: How'd this come about? Now, this is going to be at Pershing Square, which is near the White House. Pershing Square is named for General Pershing, American General, World War I. Who commissioned this? What'd you have to do to enter, and what's it been like since you won? When did that start? How long have you been working on it? Sabin Howard: The process began in 2015. But ultimately, I began working on it in 1982 when I decided to be an artist. So, this is a culmination of, really, a little bit about myself, 35 years of being a classical figurative sculptor. And, that's--I did things traditionally: 80,000 hours of working with life models. So, that was the way that I entered into the project. And that's the reason that I won the project. It was a blind global competition. There were 360 design teams that entered. And that was 2015. 2016, January--I believe it was January 22nd--we were announced the winners, Joseph Weishar, who was an architect-in-training, 25 years old, and myself. And then, that was the beginning of a very epic voyage. That competition was run by Centennial Commission, but that didn't mean that we began the sculpting at that moment. We had to go through a very long bureaucratic process, that ultimately we passed; but I had to pass through the agency Commission of Fine Arts [CFA]. These are seven people that are established by presidents, and you have to go present to them. And so--but before I had that presentation, I had to come up with an iteration. So, the full year of 2016 was used as a lab, let's call it, a lab where I had to create 25 iterations. And, I went from each iteration to the next, till we finally finished by November and came up with A Soldier's Journey. That was also very epic. And then we went to CFA. And then, that lasted from 2017, all the way until 2019 when I began actually sculpting the full-size monument; and that lasted till January of 2024. And, as that was going on, the pieces were being shipped even during COVID, over to a foundry in the United Kingdom. It's probably one of the best foundries in world--Pangolin Editions Foundry in the Cotswolds--and they were casting and assembling as we went. And, this is a very timely interview that you're doing with me because today, the two containers containing the full 60 feet of bronze wall were delivered, and will be picked up by the crane company in Maryland right near Washington, D.C. So, this is very timely today that this is--they have landed on United States soil and are headed for Washington, D.C., where we will install on September 13th at Pershing Square Park at 7:19--which is sunset--with a candlelit vigil. Russ Roberts: So, I didn't mean to give you a short shrift and called it a 58-foot wall--frieze--when it's 60, but-- Sabin Howard: No. No: it is 58. You're correct. It is 58, but 60 because you have the stone on each side, it comes out to slightly larger. It doesn't matter.
7:02	Russ Roberts: Okay. When you submitted, what did you submit, both in writing and physically? I just did say to listeners, by the way: We will put up a number of videos that will let you see what this looks like. It is stunning, even in video. I'm sure it's even more stunning in person. But in video, you get a real idea of how extraordinary both the finished work is, as well as the process, of which there's some videos on that as well. And, we're going to talk about the process in a minute. But I'm curious what you submitted. Did you submit a little miniature of the whole thing, or of one of the figures, or did you describe it? What is the nature of that kind of process in an international competition like this? Sabin Howard: The submission was completely different than the way that the project evolved. We began with an idea of what we were capable of. And just to win the project, we had to go to five meetings to present. And, I did drawings of--I worked in the same way that I was working prior to this. I work--I got models: every-day, ordinary people that have very specific characters. And at the beginning, I rented uniforms that were real. I rented real uniforms, 105 years old or thereabouts, and I began taking pictures and came up with an idea. I did two drawings. Those drawings took me, approximately, I think 140 hours each. And then, Joseph--Joe--did an idea for the park. Now, the reason that we won is twofold. We got a park that was created by Friedberg in the 1980s, and it had been a nice place with a skating rink right in front of the Willard Hotel. But at the moment that we were proceeding into this competition--you're talking here, it's 35 years later--this park had fallen to massive disrepair. It was full of derelicts and garbage. And, this is shocking, but maybe it's not so shocking because this is 150 yards from the White House--so, it looks like a rubbish pile. So, something had to be done. And, Joseph's piece--Joe Weishar's piece--in the submittal, was the closest of all the 360 teams to maintaining the bones and the structure of that city park. And, the directions from the competition were very specific. We need to create a memorial that will excite people, and we need to maintain that urban park. And, his maintained the urban park to the most of all 360 teams. And, on my side, after we had gone to two of the meetings, Edwin Fountain, who ran Centennial Commission, said to me that he really liked the Grant Memorial in front of the Capitol done by the sculptor Shrady. And, I took that to heart; and I went and looked at it; and I was very intrigued by it. Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, Washington, D.C. Panoramic view showing artillery wagon on the right. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain. And I--ultimately, I'm going to say that that's the best sculpture that this country has on U.S. soil. It's of a different generation. It's an artillery wagon being pulled through the mud by horses. It's very kinetic; it's very emotional. And it's exciting. It's exciting sculpture because if you walk around it, it's this scene unfolds and you get pulled into it. And so, you can--you get a chemistry that changes in your body. That's the definition of visceral. And so, I thought: 'Wow, you have to change the way that you're working.' I had worked more from a very elegant, aesthetic, esoteric foundation that looked like Greco-Roman sculpture. So, my work was very structural, very quiet, and not as dramatic. And so, I entered into the competition with very dramatic drawings. And Joe used a computer to map out, like, a wall. And we put some figures up on that wall. And they loved the idea, and it was the beginning. Now, I had to take that and then completely transform that over the next year. I took 12,000 images with models and I worked over and over and over again, going back to Washington to meet with Centennial Commission--all lawyers, who were not artistically based, but had an idea of where they wanted to go. And so, it was--this is, like, a difficult, challenging process, because you're working with somebody and they don't understand you and you don't understand them. We're completely different realms. Artists and lawyers are different parts of the planet. And so, we worked in a partnership, which I don't think happens often. And then, the other thing that does not happen often is: Most artists--and I'm not trying to be disparaging here--but because we need to make a living, we will go along with a client. I did not--I led the team. I said, 'This is how it should be,' and we had several arguments. And, I held onto the vision that I needed to play forward. And, the reason I held onto that vision was because I knew that I was doing things correctly, given how many iterations I was doing. It wasn't that I was like, I came up with the first one; I was like, 'Yeah, this is it.' No. I kept taking in the critiques that we would have, that I would do the presentations; and then this panel of lawyers would say, 'Hey, we don't like the way this is. We need to change this.' And I did some turnarounds on the sculpture that I think would have been very challenging for other artists. I went to--I really got pushed to my creative limits. And, this sculpture then had to pass through the Commission of Fine Arts, which is--this is a very, very difficult thing. They held up the Eisenhower Memorial for 15 years. Granted, it is a piece of garbage. But they held us up for a year and a half, and they don't know anything about sculpture. They were all landscape architects. So, the challenge there, and the fact that they sided with the conservation of the park, was, again, a roadblock for us. And, we eventually got through. And then, okay, then after this, it's like, 'I have to sculpt it.' So, this is, like, Herculean task. It's truly a hero's journey in itself.
14:13	Russ Roberts: Well, I was going to ask you one more preliminary question, and we'll talk about the logistics of the sculpting process. I lived in the DC area for 18 years. And one day, I was on the Mall area, which is quite a large complex of monuments and park and grassland, and it's--grass. And, it's a lovely--it's a very, very, very nice area in Washington DC. And, I don't know how I came upon it, but there's a--it looks like a scene out of the jungle, out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in my memory. I'm sure it's not like that. But, what I stumbled on was a World War I memorial to the dead of Washington, D.C. It's a small, really hidden-away, unmaintained, poorly maintained, and felt overgrown at the time, unmanicured spot. And, there was something incredibly poignant about that: that, in this brutal war that was so horrific, the lives of these people who had been lost there and then commemorated, memorialized in this monument, was so hidden away. And so sad. And, there's no--I know there's a lot of the monuments on the mall I don't like. I don't remember the Eisenhower one, but I don't want to offend anyone. I don't like the World War II Memorial. I think it's awful. Sabin Howard: It's [inaudible 00:15:40] It's horrible. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's horrible. There's many that I don't like. We won't go into them all right now. But there's a few that I do like. My question is: As far as I know, and you know, there's no memorial to World War I on the mall. Sabin Howard: No. Russ Roberts: This is--there is this one I mentioned, which is to the Washington, D.C. dead from World War I. But there's no national monument. In fact, other than--well, period. So, why now? Because the 100th year anniversary, who cares about this? For many people, World War I--I'm with you. It's a transformative moment in human history. It's a tragic moment in human history. But, in America--in many countries, it's still huge. But, in America, not so much. Why now? Why was there a push to build a memorial to World War I? Sabin Howard: That's a great question. Edwin Fountain was involved in a project quite a few years before. He was one of the commissioners at Centennial that liked what I was doing, and suggested the Shrady Memorial--the Grant Memorial. So, he had two grandfathers that fought in World War I. That was first off. He had been involved with Buckles, who was--Frank Buckles was the last standing World War I veteran. Bear in mind, what you said is 100% correct. The United States does not give a damn really about World War I, and here's why. World War I was a punch in the nose for the United States. It's not a small number of people that we lost: 116,004. Four and a half million Americans traveled across the ocean, or were involved. And so, now let's take those numbers and compare them to what happened in Europe. It's not the same. Europeans faced a decimation of 22 million people. And so, this was a complete decimation of villages, families, towns, cities, cultural-- Russ Roberts: Generational. Sabin Howard: Generations. They did not recover. The world has not recovered from this moment, because we change our attitude about who we are as human beings on this planet. We are no longer cohesive, unified, part of a greater whole. The sacred is destroyed, and it is the beginning of a nihilism. And, if you look to France and you look to the philosophers of the era--Albert Camus, Sartre--it is the idea that you are responsible for your life and there is no God. And at your end, you are buried and the earthworms eat you. And, it's kind of a brutal, brutalistic view of who we are as humanity. And so, the United States usurped World War I with World War II. We were way more involved in that. And, there is--something else that we want to talk about here is the Great Depression. The Great Depression happens right after World War I, 1920s, and it's the collapse of our country. And then, we rebuilt from that moment, this basement, bottom historical moment: United States usurps, World War I. Now, I feel that Vietnam Memorial was a historical monument for what happened in Washington. You had the Lincoln Memorial and then you had the Washington Monument in place. But, ultimately the Mall was not a place where you shared your heroes of war and battle with the country. It was sacred ground, but not to the way that it has evolved. We worked backwards. We went backwards. We went from the Vietnam Memorial to the Korean War Memorial, to the World War II Memorial, and then all of a sudden now, we moved to the World War I Memorial. The Eisenhower Memorial was part of that list as well. I did something because of who I am--traditionally, I am not only an American citizen: I am also Italian. I grew up in Italy. So, I have two elements to myself. I grew up with the visual splendor of the Renaissance. When you are inundated with beautiful things and culture of elevation of spirit, with the churches and the sculpture and the piazzas of Italy, it permeates your mind. And, that--and then going back to the United States in the 1960s where I was exposed very deeply to the counter-war movement by my parents, Vietnam, I saw things that you don't--we didn't have cell phones back then. And, I remember one day picking up the newspaper, New York Times, in the hallway. I lived in a big apartment building in the 1960s on the Upper West side. And, I pick up this newspaper--that was my job. Dad would say, 'Go get the newspaper.' So, I open the door, I go get the newspaper. Front page, New York Times--horrible image for a little kid to see--this naked young girl, black and white with other children screaming, coming directly out at you with the clouds of war behind her and soldiers leading up the back of that image. That image was a village that had been napalmed. And, those civilians, sorry, had been affected. Russ Roberts: It's the most iconic image of the war. Sabin Howard: It is the most iconic image of the war. That is indelibly seared upon my mind. I have a deep hatred for war. I have a great love for humanity. So, I was the right person to get this job. Most of the war memorials that are done in Washington, D.C. are garbage. And, here is why: Because they do not show humanity. Our countries are made up by people and human beings. And, that is what our country is about. It is We, the people. It is not about: We, the governments. And, we are at crossroads again today with where the world--not only United States--but the whole world stands. It's like governments versus populace. And, it is a fight between governments, elites, and populace and people. And, I am a sculptor for the people. I made a piece that was about unification. It was not about fracturing our society. I made a piece that came from the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgment. That was the poster that one day hit me and explained to me where I should go in early on in the process, because I was being torn apart by so many voices saying, 'Do this. Put more biplanes in. Put more trench warfare in. Put more machine guns in. We would like cavalry charges, pulling wagons.' And, you enter into a bureaucratic situation with all these commissions, and they're all sculpture experts all overnight, and they're telling you what to do. And, I was completely befuddled. And, I had returned back to my studio. And, one morning, I saw that poster, and it was like clear as day right there in front of me, 'Do what you know.' And, I returned to the concept of the Renaissance where we are all intertwined as one group. That's what that Last Judgment is: We all are going to meet our maker. And, I took that compositional element of advancing and receding figures, and I took that as the structural launching point and catalyst for the 38-figure composition. So, the soldiers that went off to fight--from the United States--that went off to fight across the Atlantic were neither Republicans or Democrats: they were Americans. And so, I handled the sculpture with that very term. These are all of the same country. They are not one thing or another. They are all different. Every single figure on that panel, that relief is a different individual, different psychology. But, they are all cohesively tied together in a unified movement from left to right, from the past to the future. And, that was my response. And, that's why this sculpture will stand as something critical in this moment historically in the United States and also globally.
24:30	Russ Roberts: So, I was going to save this to the end, but let's talk about it now, which is the nature of art--since you've taken us there. For reasons I don't fully understand, I found myself reading the other day a book by Tolstoy called What Is Art? Sabin Howard: Yes. Russ Roberts: And, it's a remarkable book. I want to say one other thing though that you referenced about the damaging aspects of World War I. A book I have referenced recently here on EconTalk, is The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig. And, he has a remarkable set of pages where he talks about the influence of World War I on art. And basically, the nihilism that you're referring to, is part of it. But it's also: the way he describes it--whether he's right or not, doesn't matter; it's just interesting--he basically says, 'People who lived through World War I saw it as an extraordinary betrayal, the deaths of tens of millions of people really for no purpose whatsoever. And, it engendered a remarkable reaction against authority.' And, the truth is, we're still living in that world--that post-World War I world--and it launches, in Zweig's view, some of the incredible creativity and changes in the art world. And, by the art world, I don't just mean paintings and sculpture, but literature, music, and so on. And, in Tolstoy's book, which he wrote in 1897, which is describing a period about 20 years before the end of World War I, is a very similar theme--without World War I, though--which is that modern art has lost its connection to the human soul. And, he has a very narrow definition. It's a condemnation of what we would call modern art. Even though it was 1897, it had already started. And in his view, he has a very narrow definition, which is: Art is an emotional feeling inside the artist captured in the art itself, and then shared then, if the art is successful, by the listener, viewer, reader. So, it's the transformation--it's the communication of the artist's feeling, and that feeling is then experienced by the recipient of the art. And, to me that's very similar to what you're saying, your goal is in this sculpture: to take your view of a bunch of things, not one thing, but of war, of World War I in particular--but it's told[?tolled?] an impact on human beings and allow us as the viewers of that art to feel what you experienced captured in bronze. Is that a fair representation? Sabin Howard: Yeah, very much. Thank you for saying that and bringing up Tolstoy an historical writer that has passed through the ages and his validation. Let's look at: What is validated? What is important? What is seen as culturally a goldmine, a treasure? And, Western civilization holds that torch. And, this project is in direct lineage to a very rich history that is, we can go all the way back. Let's see if you can go back 2,000 years to the Greeks, to Hellenistic art. It is a direct lineage to that. I am not inventing what I did out of whole cloth. I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. To make the sculpture, I looked at historical pieces like [inaudible 00:28:16] Caravaggio--the painter from Rome--Michelangelo, Hellenistic art, Canova--this neoclassical sculptor--Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Poussin--the French sculptor. I did not come to these compositional moments from zero. I looked at things, and then I went and got the models. And then, I posed the models using those historical moments in history as launching points. So, ultimately, I'm already working in the same way. And, here's what differentiates modernism and, let's call it Western civilization and more traditional art. There is a separation of all of us in modernism where there is no cohesive unification. And, if you take the figure and you sculpt or paint the figure as a single figure with no interaction with anything around it, ultimately you are doing an alienated figure--because he's alone. Do we live alone? No, we do not. We live in communities. We are more similar to a pack of dogs, and I'm not making a joke here-- Russ Roberts: No, I know-- Sabin Howard: One dog is injured in a pack. The rest of the dogs will do things to keep that dog healthy and safe and protected, to bring it back to health. What is that--why is that important? Because that is what we need to do as a race, as a human race, instead of subdividing and killing and fracturing each other. It is destructive. It is a very modernistic way of approaching things. If you are in a marriage and you insult your wife, you are shooting yourself in the foot. It is destructive to you. So, I made a sculpture that, like Tolstoy talks about, it's about elevating us under sacred values. Now, I'm not saying to go back and deal with values as they were 500 years ago. We have transformed, as we're at a different time era. That would be archeological. But, I am saying: read your history. It is an umbrella that unifies a race, a country, a world. And, read the history because then you can be educated to recreate, in this very moment, something that is contemporary and understandable. It has to be universal. And, that's the problem with the modernists. They are making things that are not universal; and they have complete disregard for history, because ultimately the way they are proceeding is destructive. They are cutting off themselves from the past, and not educating themselves. And, what I am saying, you need the past to know what is possible, and also so that you do not repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, we are repeating the same mistake right now, this very moment, when you have a bullet to assassinate a Presidential candidate in the United States, or you have at least three global wars going on. What is the difference? It is a complete groundhog day. We're [inaudible 00:31:48] walking into World War III. And it's so obvious. I don't think people want war. Civilians do not want war. Governments are the proponents of war. And then, the propaganda that is used to justify those wars is completely--it's lies. And, I think there's a very interesting moment that we are having here because it's this psych-op--the propaganda that the government uses is internal warfare to control people. And so, a piece of art speaks about the truth. It's about light, it's about rising to the occasion, and it's different than reality--because it's art. And so, I'm saying: let's return to the way art used to be in which--let's take an example, Michelangelo's David. It was the symbol for a city-state Florence. And, city of Florence was fighting Pisa. Pisa was way larger than them. And, they made this sculpture to elevate their citizens and say, 'This sculpture represents you. This is your potential. This is what you can be.' And, that is what I'm doing with this sculpture. I'm making something that shows the potential of the United States, not only, but also of everyone on the globe. So, that's my answer to you.
33:12	Russ Roberts: You've been called the American Michelangelo. I don't know if, I mean--that's a nickname, that's kind of a heavy burden to bear. But, obviously from what you just said, you talked about the influence of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and others. I hope this doesn't insult you, this--in what I've seen of your work and certainly this work, it is not edgy, it is--in the usual sense--the word in the art world: it's not avant-garde. It's very much in a very, very old tradition. And, you are, in that sense, swimming against the tide. The art world, as I understand it, is obsessed with the new, the novel, the avant-garde, the edgy. In fact, the whole job in modern art--the modern artist will often say that their job is to make you uncomfortable. As opposed to, say, elevating you, is the term you used. How does--do you interact with other artists? Are you--do you have a reputation among them that is pleasant or unpleasant to you? What's your--how is your work perceived? Sabin Howard: This is a very interesting thing you're asking me. It's a--modernists stipulate that you need to be edgy? You need to be the first one to ever do something? Guess what? I followed exactly what they told me to do. I followed exactly what the modernists told me to do. I am doing something completely contrarian and radical to what is established right now in the art narrative of 2024. I'm a complete outlier. There's no one else doing exactly what I'm doing. And it's--I'm not being archaeological. And, I would say that what I've done is, in some ways, very edgy because I'm taking a stand against a very corrupt system that is driven by financial gains, and the whole ideology that you buy big pieces of valued art because of their monetary value at Sotheby's, and other companies that will actually inflate and create a false market by doing a very wicked system behind the scenes when something goes to auction. Do you think those numbers are actually not discussed behind closed doors? No. A collector is brought in, and then they're going to bid on that piece. And then, that's creating the value. And then, now all of a sudden, the rest of the series is going to be worth--it's going to be a completely inflated number for a piece of crap. And so, I'm doing something that goes: No, guys, I'm not okay with academia. I'm not okay with the critics. I'm not okay with any of these people that are saying, 'This is the status quo.' Russ Roberts: Yeah. In that sense, you're very much swimming against the tide, and I'm not--I don't think I'm not exaggerating--I'm pretty confident that your memorial will be immortal: that people will be looking at it and being moved by it and ideally uplifted by it and challenged by it for a long time without the edginess of modernity and in its tradition, as you've outlined it.
36:51	Russ Roberts: But, let's talk about the process for a minute, which is not going to be easy because we don't have visuals, and I'm sure you could talk about this for a very, very, very, very, very long time. But, when you see this for the first time--again, even on video--and you see these bronze figures, and you start digging in as I did, and the process of one of those figures becoming--going from a model--and by a model we're talking about not an economics model and not a theoretical conception about a physical human being, like a fashion model but not a fashion model--a model, a human being, dressed in a World War I uniform or the dress that a wife of a World War I soldier would wear, and you somehow turn that figure of that person who you've posed, and you turn that into a piece of bronze that is exquisite. I mean, it's exquisite in every version, by the way. There's clay and there's wax. But, give us some brief flavor of how you go from this person who is impersonating a soldier posed by you--or a woman impersonating a wife posed by you, or the daughter--how do you get to the bronze? Like, how do you do that? Sabin Howard: This is the meat and potatoes of cooking a memorial sculpture. The average hour per figure was 650 hours of looking at a model and creating it. This is also completely different than the way the world is operating right now. It completely fights modernism. I am saying the value of human beings in the creative process is so much greater than you are being told by the art world. So, the regular MO [modus operandi] today is to use technology, which is computers, photography, 3D printing [3-dimensional printing] where you actually set up all these cameras and they go off at the same time and then you have a three-dimensional shape. This is not human: it's technological stuff that leaves a mechanical fingerprint. You need to have a human fingerprint in the creative process because the way that we perceive our reality is human. It's not mechanical. And so, yes, we have five senses, but we have so much more in terms of our consciousness in how our history and all these things that aid in how we perceive reality. You need to be educated first and foremost as a figurative sculptor. And, that's decimated as well because of modernism. It's not taught in the schools anymore. So, the way that I'm working comes from, let's call it old-fashioned; but it's not really old-fashioned, because: Am I old-fashioned as a human being right now? No. I'm still perceiving my reality. I'm still very unique in how I perceive my reality. That perception of your reality is what drives how you look at the model. Because, you don't just copy the model: you are translating. This is a huge thing that has been ignored by the art world. When you translate something, there are specific ways of doing it. They're not all the same. I am giving certain values to the way that I look, and then put it into clay. It's an educational basis built upon the anatomical structure of the body and the architecture of the skeleton, and the tenets of Renaissance art. It's not just: Take that sculpture and copy what's in front of you. No. I look at the model and--I'll give you an example. I look at the model dressed in the costumes, and I want to make those forces on that movement and that gesture and the morphology look like it's dramatic and moving forward. And so from that, then I'm going to diagram on the clay and I'm going to look for the high points of all the forms pushing outwards into space. So, I add the clay so it looks like it's expansive and full. And, that already is a full philosophy of a soul, a human being, because all the forms are convex. They're not sunken in, they're not concave. A machine won't see that stuff. And so, by diagramming, you are already drawing and designing, because when you draw, that's not real. That's just--it's like writing. It's a composing. It's a visual narrative of what you're seeing. So, my education, then, gives me a way to organize all this information coming at me. Anybody can draw. At 19, I couldn't draw at all. I picked up a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I started doing the exercises. And that was my launching point. And then I learned--you know, there's so many levels of knowledge and learning that have been taken out of our art training system. And, this sculpture, to me, is shocking not only to myself when I look at it because I did something, it's from a different age. But, it is this age when you look at it. So your brain goes, 'Cannot compute.' And, that is exactly the same thing that everyone else is saying. It's like, 'I didn't know this could still be done today.' It's very, very modern. Well, this is what I want to say, though--I left the process of how I add the clay to the surface. I didn't smooth it out. Every single little piece of clay that I put on, is my process. And that's not what was done in the Renaissance. You were supposed to hide your process because you were working for the Church, and you were a craftsman. Here, I'm showing my process to the audience, and it's like very alive and invigorating. That's pretty cool. Russ Roberts: Well, it's more than pretty cool. I mean, you got these--so, at this point, you have these--a clay figure. And, I just have to say as a footnote: when my wife and I realized that our daughter liked to draw and was good at it, we decided we should learn how to draw. We had no-- Sabin Howard: Oh, wow. [Inaudible 00:43:29] Russ Roberts: We had had no art education, basically. I'd taken art, but I'd been given bad grades because obviously I was not good at art, so they just gave me a C. And so, I assumed I couldn't draw. And then, I asked a friend who painted for a recommendation. He told me to get Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And, I recommend it to listeners. It changes the way you see the world. It doesn't just--it does teach you how to draw. It's a beautiful book. But it also teaches you to look at the world differently. And, it was a transformative experience for me to do something that I did poorly, but could get better at. And then, in the process of doing so, looked at the world differently. So, I strongly recommend that book. Unless you've got a clay figure.
44:17	Russ Roberts: Is the clay figure the full size of the statue to start with, the figure that's going to be bronzed, or smaller, or? Sabin Howard: Yeah. The clay can't just stand up on its own. So, you need to build an armature; and we built an armature. And, from the armature was this foam thing. The foam was an enlargement from the little model that I had made. I made two models prior to that, transferring the drawing to a model. And then, the model was--I used computers to enlarge it. So, I used it for the grunt work. I didn't use it for the sculpting. So, the core is a foam piece with the clay on the surface, and then you are--I redesigned the whole sculpture, all 38 figures, on the fly at over life-sized scale. They're approximately six-foot-six to seven-foot-two. So, you're adding the clay to the foam. And, I'm cutting and moving limbs. People don't do that because they don't have the confidence that I do. I have very highly developed drawing skills because of--I do have a talent, unfortunately. But, part of it is I practice. My perseverance is, I would say I'm off the mountain. Imagine having to make something like this--a Renaissance-type sculpture--in a modern era. Do you know how stubborn you have to be? Russ Roberts: Yeah. Sabin Howard: It's like you are facing a wall. And, you have to support a family through what you're doing. So, this is bordering on a little-- Russ Roberts: Insane. Sabin Howard: insane. And then, [inaudible 00:45:55] Russ Roberts: It's an obsession. It's a bit of an obsession. Sabin Howard: And, [inaudible 00:45:59] Russ Roberts: Here's my question on--anyway, we should finish our narrative and then we'll come back to my question if I remember. But, you take the clay figure, and then you wrap it in wax? Sabin Howard: Oh no, it has to be cut apart and brought to a foundry. So, we had to cut our figures apart to transport them to a foundry. Because of COVID, normally they will come to your shop and make a mold. What is a mold? A mold is a liquid that you put onto the clay. So, you take this liquid--and it has a catalyst in it; it's a silicon--it goes directly onto the clay, and it makes an imprint of the clay. And--all right, so this is a floppy material. Let's say it's a rubber--it's a rubber, ultimately. Russ Roberts: It's a rubber shell that's been-- Sabin Howard: Yeah, on top the sculpture now. Yeah. And, now this has to be--because it flops, you need to build a hard shell around that to contain it. So now you have these two shells directly built onto the sculpture. You take them off the sculpture, but you have the imprint of the surface. Now with these two shells, you fill them with a slurry of wax. You cover the surface. It's about a quarter of an inch to three-eighths of an inch. No more than that. So, they're hollow. You take the shell off, you now have an exact duplicate of the clay in a different material--wax--hollow. You take that wax sculpture and you attach tubes to it. These tubes will be how the bronze runs into the sculpture. Now you take this whole thing and you put it inside a dipping tank. And, the dipping tank is a slurry--it's called ceramic shell--and it covers the inside and the outside. It goes into all the cracks, and it picks up all the detail. You put it in a burnout kiln now. The wax evaporates, and that's why it's called 'lost wax.' Now you have a void where the wax was in this ceramic shell. It's a mold, and you fill that void by pouring liquid bronze into those tubes that now will cover the whole structure. Then you go to knockout, where you knock off all this ceramic shells--very hard, cement-like--and you have a raw bronze. The foundry that I use, Pangolin, is so good that we got my actual fingerprints. My actual fingerprints--think about that--in the bronze, the sculpture. Russ Roberts: That probably means people can open your iPhone if they're creative. Sabin Howard: Yes, that's right. They will be able to. Yeah. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Sabin Howard: Now we just started. Now, you got to reassemble everything. So, each figure has, maybe, eight pieces. That means that the total sculpture is anywhere to near 6-700 pieces that now have to be reassembled compositionally to match your small model maquette. It's also another place where an anomaly exists in the bronze-casting business that's Pangolin. It's driven by a man who is around my age, a little bit older, but has the same sort of vision. We need to do bronze casting at another level, and use technology in that process. But, ultimately, it comes down to one thing, human beings. Human beings driving the technology. Not technology driving the human beings. I am averse to AI [artificial intelligence]. It's complete nonsense. You can't do what I did using AI because of this: my mind, and how it translates reality and then recreates it in art. Same with the casting business.
49:59	Russ Roberts: The thing that's crazy about this for me as an outsider is art is an extraordinary thing by itself, representing a creative vision from the brain in a medium. And, there are many different mediums. They're all interesting. There's marble, and there's canvas, and there's Legos. But, bronze has got an enormous craftsmanship part to it, way beyond the ability to draw, that must have taken you decades to master. This was not like--you didn't just go and say, 'I've got this clay thing. Can we turn it into bronze?' I mean, you had to--there's a lot of learning, I assume, along the way. Sabin Howard: Oh my God, it's--we did something that is--I'm literally a dinosaur. We are extinct. What I do is extinct. What the foundry did is extinct. They are relying on technology instead of human manpower to do this. And, we're going back to a craftsmanship because Rungwe, who runs the foundry, he's been in it for 40-plus years, exactly like me. And then, now he has second generation coming in. Like, the sons of the workers now work there. It's incredible. So, it's handed down. What I learned was handed down to me back in the 1980s, and then I put it into practice. The act of looking at a model, it's so--you have to troubleshoot all day long. So, you said about the drawing. Okay, I want to put this into context of what sculpture is. Sculpture is drawing on steroids because you have to draw three-dimensionally in the round, and then all those different angles and views have to link up so that your drawing skills are at the utmost level to make a really, really good sculpture, and that--it's just not being taught and people are not practicing it. And then, no one has the skill level because it comes--I have a very European mindset that, in the beginning, I was learning how to do it so I didn't have to be creative. Even though I was being creative, it was like I was following in the footsteps, so I didn't have to elevate my ego. And so, it was like I was learning in a way that I feel a lot of Americans don't have the patience to learn because they're looking at, like, 'Well, what about me? What about my creative self?' So, I was not thinking that. I was, like, 'I want to learn how to do this.' And I took it in the context of: 'I want to be the best violinist, so I need to learn how to play this instrument so that I'm like Paganini on that violin. I will kill everybody else. I am better than everybody else. I will be the equal to the Renaissance and that art.' That was what was in my mind. I couldn't give a damn about what my fellow art student or fellow art peer was doing. It was--the competition is not with my peers:, my competition is with history. And so, it's like that was my--I had to jump that high. And so, that's not an American mentality. Russ Roberts: Well, it a little bit reminds me of Hemingway, who said, 'You have to read other authors, so you have to know who to beat.' He had a very competitive form. I don't think that's exactly what you're saying, but it's definitely in the spirit of it. Sabin Howard: It was more of an embracing of my--I call them my guides. They are my guides. They have guided me through life because I go look at what they have done and I have this kinship and this bonding with someone of 500 years ago, and it's like, 'That is my brother. I am doing what he was doing, now.' And so, it's, like, I feel I'm more of a family. It's not like Hemingway; it's like I'm seeing-- Russ Roberts: Yeah-- Sabin Howard: It's not competition, it's, like, 'You are my masters and I'm following in your footsteps. How can I be of service to you?' And, ultimately, that's the biggest thing I learned from doing this project was, I took away I am in service of something larger than myself. And that is incredibly empowering because it attaches you to the sacred because I believe in something larger than myself and my puny little ego. It's like I'm in service of things that are universal and cohesively holding thought process and culture and Western civilization together. That's very powerful if you're a part of that element.
54:32	Russ Roberts: Yeah. It reminds me of our--Agnes Callard on the program said a long time ago, 'Reading is--if you learn how to read, you learn how to talk to dead people.' But, that's sort of the way I hear what you're saying. You--when you--I've had the privilege of standing in the presence of David in Florence, Michelangelo's David. And for me, it's a religious moment. It's not just a cool thing. It is a very cool thing, but it is small-'r' religious in the sense that, as you said, it connects you to the universal human aspirations to be something grand. To aspire. And, boy, did Michelangelo aspire. Oh my gosh. And, to be able to--you could talk to Michelangelo in a way I can't. So, I'm jealous. But, I was going to say one other thing though about strange skills. So, there's this physical part to sculpting that goes beyond the normal drawing, etc., because you've got to represent in the physical what you've imagined in your mind. But, there's this other weird part of this project that is obvious when you watch the videos that give you some of the background, which is: you are not a lone sculptor with a block of marble and a chisel revealing what's inside. And of course, Michelangelo wasn't either. He had lots of helpers when he painted the Sistine Chapel. And, it's not--but we have a certain romance about the great artist working alone. As part of this project, there's an enormous army of people that you're working with. You have the people who are doing the modeling. You have the people who are doing all the intermediate steps you described to get it ready for the foundry. You have the people at the foundry. You also have the bureaucrats who were saying, 'I don't like the way that looks,' or, 'Why aren't you doing this?' So, there's a management, human HR--Human Resources--managerial aspect to your artistry, that to me--looking as an outsider--must have been remarkably frustrating at times because human beings are flawed. Human beings make mistakes. Human beings have issues. They have needs. And, while you're trying to keep this enormous 10-foot high, 58-foot frieze at the center of your consciousness, you've got a lot of headaches, I assume, from managing that enormous team. So, am I right? Was that an important part of the job, keeping that group in focus-- Sabin Howard: Very. Very. Yeah. Russ Roberts: and on the same page? Sabin Howard: Yes. You're so correct in saying that I went from a mom and pop business to be running an organization. And, it was big boy world. It's like you are--I had to hire sculptors. I fired so many people because I started firing people when I took ownership that I was the leader of this project, and I was given the task of seeing this baby through--of getting, let's say, the ball to the end zone correctly. And, a lot of the sculptors that I brought on did not have the capacity to learn and criticize their own capacity in sculpting. So, they got fired. And I took longer to fire people in the beginning than at the end. At the end, I only had one sculptor, Charlie Mostow. And, the sculpture changes from the beginning to the end. It becomes more raw, more emotional because guess what? I'm the one sculpting, and Charlie has learned how to sculpt in the same process that I did. Then there are the models. I went--in the beginning of the sculpture, I used actors that I'd used to do the drawings and the compositional ideas. Coming out of Brooklyn, my actors are--they're actors. They're actors. I don't need to say any more. They act out a part or a character. They're not the real deal. The end of the sculpture, those figures are veterans. This is very--it transforms the process, because it was a four-year process. Went along with the story. I was like, 'What do I need to do in my head to fix this problem, solve it?' I went and got Navy SEALs [Sea, Air, and Land], Marines, Rangers. I had one Marine who worked with me for two and a half years at the end. And, I asked him--I grilled him all the time. And, he opened up because there was a trusting that I learned about the military and what soldiers go through. And, the more I learned, the more I was fascinated with the idea of how, when they enter into battle, they are this--they are all at each other's backs, protecting each other. And, if one of them goes down, it's way more traumatic than either you or I can realize. And then, that family goes down, and then you have this ripple effect from one death that's, like, it's huge. It's a whole community. It's so many people that are affected by that one death. And, those faces that you see at the end carry the history of those unique individuals that each and every one of them was a combat veteran. And, each and every one of them suffered the traumatic effects physically and psychologically for more, and it's painted on their face. That's a wrong way of saying it because it's not surface. It's inside. It's in their body. It's in their cells. And, their faces morphed because of the combat that they suffered. And then, I use that reference, that human being, that history as a complete reference to make the sculpture. And, it's very real and honest and has tremendous integrity to combat PTSD [Post-traumatic stress disorder]--what we call it today. Not any different than 'shell-shocked' 104 years ago. Same thing. Same thing, different floor. That's the thing. It's a sculpture that is historical because they wear the actual uniforms of the era, but it is universal. And, any veteran who served in Afghanistan or Iraq or comes from the United Kingdom or Italy or France or Germany or Israel, will understand it is the soldier's journey. And, it is a very modern thing because it's never been done before. It's the first time that the soldier's story is done and encapsulated in one sculpture. And, here's proof of how hard I worked. Look at my thumb. See how large it is? It's from all the clay that I put on. Russ Roberts: I was going to say I can imagine, but I can't.
1:01:41	Russ Roberts: I want to close with--I'm going to have trouble putting this into words. I apologize if I ramble a bit. But I want to try to get at something I think you're trying to get at. And it's hard to express it. I was in Prague the last few days, came back last night--never been to Prague. And, when you go to Prague, there's a big Jewish presence historically in Prague. And, most of the Jews who built the Jewish presence in Prague were murdered by the Nazis. About 80,000 Jews were murdered, of the 100-, 120- that were there at the beginning of the war. Some people got away, but most of them didn't. And we've preserved the synagogues. Some of them are still active, but--and some of them are quite beautiful. Some of them were quite simple. They were built 900 years ago. They're still there--800 years ago. It's beautiful. But, they are museums. They're not--although they're used some, many of them are literally museums. They are not in working order. There's no vitality. It's an historical monument. And, as a Jew, that's very sad--because of the murder. Because of what was lost. And there's a certain irony because Prague is the city of Kafka, a Jew, a tormented Jew. And, whatever role Jews played in the life of that city is--again, even though there's still some Jews there and there's still Jewish life--its centrality and the culture of Prague is dead. So, unfortunately you can feel that in a lot of European cities. I felt it in Vienna. But, at the same time, I go to a church. And, you walk into a church--it's, again, it's centuries old. It's a magnificent monument to the Divine. And, we happen to hear music in that church of Bach and Pachelbel and Vivaldi, which of course is music that was mainly inspired by the Divine. And of course, the Christians have mainly left Prague. It's not just the Jews. They didn't get murdered, but the role of Christianity at the heart of Prague is gone. And what's left is a shell--the church, the music played in that church that's centuries old. The shell is the Jewish cemetery in the center of Prague--that's an amazing thing to see. But, it's a cemetery. It's not alive. And, I couldn't help but be struck, especially in that church, where there's quite a bit of statuary--and, I was thinking about you and thinking about this upcoming interview--that much of Western art was literally sacred. You used the word 'sacred.' It was literally sacred. It was an attempt for human beings to capture something much greater than themselves, whether it was the music of Bach or the grandeur of a medieval cathedral, which they were even longer than you did, or even more years to build those monuments. Sabin Howard: 100 years. 100 years, yeah. Russ Roberts: 100 years. And, now we look at them, and we're in awe of them. But, all the life that built that art is drained from it in many ways. And that art--the architecture, the sculpture in those churches--those were done to elevate human beings. Many horrible things happened. Many horrible things happened along the way. Sabin Howard: Thanks-- Russ Roberts: So, it's a complicated picture, and I'm not going to whitewash it. But, something is gone. And, I'm curious how you, with your view of the sacred and your respect for the Renaissance, how you think about that. And, it's not really a well-formed question, but say whatever you like in response. Sabin Howard: My response to that is you are spot on when you say something has been lost. And it is the definition of what we are as humans and the act of being human and living your life for the acknowledgement of the sacred. I see this sculpture as the beginning of a new movement--a new artistic movement. And, I am so encouraged by how many people have said, 'Oh my God, you can still do this today.' So, I am doing a documentary with my wife, Traci Slatton. She has done a documentary because she films every single day. It's called heroicdocumentary.com, is the website. But, this is--why am I bringing this up? Because people, if they can see the inside of my studio, they can see how human it is. And, they're going to be surprised that this is something that it can be translated to other arenas, not just sculpture. There's a movement to bring back the idea of, like, how do you use your hands? How do you become a plumber, an electrician? How do you build a house? All these things--craftsmanship, putting things into the physical realm. We're on the move, and I'm not the only one here on the planet. We are all coming out and talking about human beings versus technology or AI. And, human beings are the ones with the power. We see the world 80% through our eyes. Huge amount of data that goes into our brains, far surpasses a computer. And, in that process of looking at the world, we have something that machines do not have. We have a heart, we have a brain, and we have hands. Machine is completely mechanical and mathematical; data-driven. It's not a conscious human being. It's not a human being with a soul. The respect for humanity is what you just spoke about. There was a respect for human beings and what they were capable of. And, I am saying: I am bringing that back. Now, maybe this is a fool's errand, but I will do that till I die, till I meet my maker, because that is my mission and my dharma in life. And that's my response to you. I'm not the only one who is a proponent of making things by hand for the sacred and being in service of something larger than oneself. So, thank you for your time with this. I really appreciate it. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Sabin Howard. Sabin, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Sabin Howard: Thank you very much.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: July 15, 2024.]

Russ Roberts: Today is July 15th, 2024, and my guest is sculptor Sabin Howard. He is the sculptor of the soon-to-be-unveiled World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. on the evening of September the 13th. This is a 58-foot wide, 10-foot high bronze wall with 38 figures.

It's an incredible project. We're going to discuss the memorial, and then I hope we get to discuss art more generally.

Sabin, welcome to EconTalk.

Sabin Howard: Thank you for having me on this morning.

1:09

Russ Roberts: The memorial that you're building, you give it the name: A Soldier's Journey. What's the idea behind it?

Sabin Howard: It's a story that would be understandable universally of a father, a dad, and an allegory for the United States. And, it falls under the idea of the hero's journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about. It's, this soldier, this dad leaves home and enters into the Brotherhood of Arms, and from that point enters into the battle. He leads the battle charge. And then, from this horrific experience is shell-shocked, which is the focus of the full 60-foot long frieze.

And, at that moment, that is an allegory for the change in our world for how we were seen as humans: how we saw ourselves no longer under operating in a universe driven by a divine God. And, it's the beginning of the modern era. And that is what that figure represents. It's alienation, and he is alone.

And then, the last section is the return home. And, he is in the last scene where he hands his daughter--the next generation--his helmet. And, that is: she's looking into the helmet, she's divining the future, which is World War II. And, so, that is the story.

Russ Roberts: And, of the 38--is the 38 figures correct? Are there 38 figures?

Sabin Howard: Thirty eight figures, yes.

Russ Roberts: How many are the soldiers, of those 38, of the one we're following?

Sabin Howard: The soldier is in--there are six. In family, in being torn between family and the service to country, leading the charge into battle--that's three. Four, leading his--after the leading, shell-shock, that's four. And, final scene--returning to his home, five. So, five, sorry. Five.

3:18

Russ Roberts: How'd this come about? Now, this is going to be at Pershing Square, which is near the White House. Pershing Square is named for General Pershing, American General, World War I. Who commissioned this? What'd you have to do to enter, and what's it been like since you won? When did that start? How long have you been working on it?

Sabin Howard: The process began in 2015. But ultimately, I began working on it in 1982 when I decided to be an artist. So, this is a culmination of, really, a little bit about myself, 35 years of being a classical figurative sculptor. And, that's--I did things traditionally: 80,000 hours of working with life models. So, that was the way that I entered into the project. And that's the reason that I won the project. It was a blind global competition. There were 360 design teams that entered. And that was 2015. 2016, January--I believe it was January 22nd--we were announced the winners, Joseph Weishar, who was an architect-in-training, 25 years old, and myself.

And then, that was the beginning of a very epic voyage. That competition was run by Centennial Commission, but that didn't mean that we began the sculpting at that moment. We had to go through a very long bureaucratic process, that ultimately we passed; but I had to pass through the agency Commission of Fine Arts [CFA]. These are seven people that are established by presidents, and you have to go present to them.

And so--but before I had that presentation, I had to come up with an iteration. So, the full year of 2016 was used as a lab, let's call it, a lab where I had to create 25 iterations. And, I went from each iteration to the next, till we finally finished by November and came up with A Soldier's Journey. That was also very epic.

And then we went to CFA. And then, that lasted from 2017, all the way until 2019 when I began actually sculpting the full-size monument; and that lasted till January of 2024.

And, as that was going on, the pieces were being shipped even during COVID, over to a foundry in the United Kingdom. It's probably one of the best foundries in world--Pangolin Editions Foundry in the Cotswolds--and they were casting and assembling as we went.

And, this is a very timely interview that you're doing with me because today, the two containers containing the full 60 feet of bronze wall were delivered, and will be picked up by the crane company in Maryland right near Washington, D.C. So, this is very timely today that this is--they have landed on United States soil and are headed for Washington, D.C., where we will install on September 13th at Pershing Square Park at 7:19--which is sunset--with a candlelit vigil.

Russ Roberts: So, I didn't mean to give you a short shrift and called it a 58-foot wall--frieze--when it's 60, but--

Sabin Howard: No. No: it is 58. You're correct. It is 58, but 60 because you have the stone on each side, it comes out to slightly larger. It doesn't matter.

7:02

Russ Roberts: Okay. When you submitted, what did you submit, both in writing and physically? I just did say to listeners, by the way: We will put up a number of videos that will let you see what this looks like. It is stunning, even in video. I'm sure it's even more stunning in person. But in video, you get a real idea of how extraordinary both the finished work is, as well as the process, of which there's some videos on that as well. And, we're going to talk about the process in a minute. But I'm curious what you submitted. Did you submit a little miniature of the whole thing, or of one of the figures, or did you describe it? What is the nature of that kind of process in an international competition like this?

Sabin Howard: The submission was completely different than the way that the project evolved. We began with an idea of what we were capable of. And just to win the project, we had to go to five meetings to present.

And, I did drawings of--I worked in the same way that I was working prior to this. I work--I got models: every-day, ordinary people that have very specific characters. And at the beginning, I rented uniforms that were real. I rented real uniforms, 105 years old or thereabouts, and I began taking pictures and came up with an idea. I did two drawings. Those drawings took me, approximately, I think 140 hours each.

And then, Joseph--Joe--did an idea for the park. Now, the reason that we won is twofold. We got a park that was created by Friedberg in the 1980s, and it had been a nice place with a skating rink right in front of the Willard Hotel. But at the moment that we were proceeding into this competition--you're talking here, it's 35 years later--this park had fallen to massive disrepair. It was full of derelicts and garbage. And, this is shocking, but maybe it's not so shocking because this is 150 yards from the White House--so, it looks like a rubbish pile. So, something had to be done.

And, Joseph's piece--Joe Weishar's piece--in the submittal, was the closest of all the 360 teams to maintaining the bones and the structure of that city park. And, the directions from the competition were very specific. We need to create a memorial that will excite people, and we need to maintain that urban park. And, his maintained the urban park to the most of all 360 teams.

And, on my side, after we had gone to two of the meetings, Edwin Fountain, who ran Centennial Commission, said to me that he really liked the Grant Memorial in front of the Capitol done by the sculptor Shrady. And, I took that to heart; and I went and looked at it; and I was very intrigued by it.

*Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, Washington, D.C. Panoramic view showing artillery wagon on the right. Source: Wikimedia. Public domain.*

And I--ultimately, I'm going to say that that's the best sculpture that this country has on U.S. soil. It's of a different generation. It's an artillery wagon being pulled through the mud by horses. It's very kinetic; it's very emotional. And it's exciting. It's exciting sculpture because if you walk around it, it's this scene unfolds and you get pulled into it. And so, you can--you get a chemistry that changes in your body. That's the definition of visceral.

And so, I thought: 'Wow, you have to change the way that you're working.' I had worked more from a very elegant, aesthetic, esoteric foundation that looked like Greco-Roman sculpture. So, my work was very structural, very quiet, and not as dramatic.

And so, I entered into the competition with very dramatic drawings. And Joe used a computer to map out, like, a wall. And we put some figures up on that wall. And they loved the idea, and it was the beginning.

Now, I had to take that and then completely transform that over the next year. I took 12,000 images with models and I worked over and over and over again, going back to Washington to meet with Centennial Commission--all lawyers, who were not artistically based, but had an idea of where they wanted to go.

And so, it was--this is, like, a difficult, challenging process, because you're working with somebody and they don't understand you and you don't understand them. We're completely different realms. Artists and lawyers are different parts of the planet. And so, we worked in a partnership, which I don't think happens often.

And then, the other thing that does not happen often is: Most artists--and I'm not trying to be disparaging here--but because we need to make a living, we will go along with a client. I did not--I led the team. I said, 'This is how it should be,' and we had several arguments. And, I held onto the vision that I needed to play forward.

And, the reason I held onto that vision was because I knew that I was doing things correctly, given how many iterations I was doing. It wasn't that I was like, I came up with the first one; I was like, 'Yeah, this is it.' No. I kept taking in the critiques that we would have, that I would do the presentations; and then this panel of lawyers would say, 'Hey, we don't like the way this is. We need to change this.'

And I did some turnarounds on the sculpture that I think would have been very challenging for other artists. I went to--I really got pushed to my creative limits.

And, this sculpture then had to pass through the Commission of Fine Arts, which is--this is a very, very difficult thing. They held up the Eisenhower Memorial for 15 years. Granted, it is a piece of garbage. But they held us up for a year and a half, and they don't know anything about sculpture. They were all landscape architects.

So, the challenge there, and the fact that they sided with the conservation of the park, was, again, a roadblock for us. And, we eventually got through.

And then, okay, then after this, it's like, 'I have to sculpt it.' So, this is, like, Herculean task. It's truly a hero's journey in itself.

14:13

Russ Roberts: Well, I was going to ask you one more preliminary question, and we'll talk about the logistics of the sculpting process. I lived in the DC area for 18 years. And one day, I was on the Mall area, which is quite a large complex of monuments and park and grassland, and it's--grass. And, it's a lovely--it's a very, very, very nice area in Washington DC. And, I don't know how I came upon it, but there's a--it looks like a scene out of the jungle, out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in my memory. I'm sure it's not like that.

But, what I stumbled on was a World War I memorial to the dead of Washington, D.C. It's a small, really hidden-away, unmaintained, poorly maintained, and felt overgrown at the time, unmanicured spot. And, there was something incredibly poignant about that: that, in this brutal war that was so horrific, the lives of these people who had been lost there and then commemorated, memorialized in this monument, was so hidden away. And so sad.

And, there's no--I know there's a lot of the monuments on the mall I don't like. I don't remember the Eisenhower one, but I don't want to offend anyone. I don't like the World War II Memorial. I think it's awful.

Sabin Howard: It's [inaudible 00:15:40] It's horrible.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's horrible. There's many that I don't like. We won't go into them all right now. But there's a few that I do like.

My question is: As far as I know, and you know, there's no memorial to World War I on the mall.

Sabin Howard: No.

Russ Roberts: This is--there is this one I mentioned, which is to the Washington, D.C. dead from World War I. But there's no national monument. In fact, other than--well, period.

So, why now? Because the 100th year anniversary, who cares about this? For many people, World War I--I'm with you. It's a transformative moment in human history. It's a tragic moment in human history. But, in America--in many countries, it's still huge. But, in America, not so much. Why now? Why was there a push to build a memorial to World War I?

Sabin Howard: That's a great question. Edwin Fountain was involved in a project quite a few years before. He was one of the commissioners at Centennial that liked what I was doing, and suggested the Shrady Memorial--the Grant Memorial. So, he had two grandfathers that fought in World War I.

That was first off. He had been involved with Buckles, who was--Frank Buckles was the last standing World War I veteran.

Bear in mind, what you said is 100% correct. The United States does not give a damn really about World War I, and here's why. World War I was a punch in the nose for the United States. It's not a small number of people that we lost: 116,004. Four and a half million Americans traveled across the ocean, or were involved.

And so, now let's take those numbers and compare them to what happened in Europe. It's not the same. Europeans faced a decimation of 22 million people. And so, this was a complete decimation of villages, families, towns, cities, cultural--

Russ Roberts: Generational.

Sabin Howard: Generations. They did not recover. The world has not recovered from this moment, because we change our attitude about who we are as human beings on this planet. We are no longer cohesive, unified, part of a greater whole. The sacred is destroyed, and it is the beginning of a nihilism. And, if you look to France and you look to the philosophers of the era--Albert Camus, Sartre--it is the idea that you are responsible for your life and there is no God. And at your end, you are buried and the earthworms eat you. And, it's kind of a brutal, brutalistic view of who we are as humanity.

And so, the United States usurped World War I with World War II. We were way more involved in that.

And, there is--something else that we want to talk about here is the Great Depression. The Great Depression happens right after World War I, 1920s, and it's the collapse of our country. And then, we rebuilt from that moment, this basement, bottom historical moment: United States usurps, World War I.

Now, I feel that Vietnam Memorial was a historical monument for what happened in Washington. You had the Lincoln Memorial and then you had the Washington Monument in place. But, ultimately the Mall was not a place where you shared your heroes of war and battle with the country. It was sacred ground, but not to the way that it has evolved. We worked backwards.

We went backwards. We went from the Vietnam Memorial to the Korean War Memorial, to the World War II Memorial, and then all of a sudden now, we moved to the World War I Memorial. The Eisenhower Memorial was part of that list as well.

I did something because of who I am--traditionally, I am not only an American citizen: I am also Italian. I grew up in Italy. So, I have two elements to myself. I grew up with the visual splendor of the Renaissance. When you are inundated with beautiful things and culture of elevation of spirit, with the churches and the sculpture and the piazzas of Italy, it permeates your mind.

And, that--and then going back to the United States in the 1960s where I was exposed very deeply to the counter-war movement by my parents, Vietnam, I saw things that you don't--we didn't have cell phones back then. And, I remember one day picking up the newspaper, New York Times, in the hallway. I lived in a big apartment building in the 1960s on the Upper West side. And, I pick up this newspaper--that was my job. Dad would say, 'Go get the newspaper.' So, I open the door, I go get the newspaper. Front page, New York Times--horrible image for a little kid to see--this naked young girl, black and white with other children screaming, coming directly out at you with the clouds of war behind her and soldiers leading up the back of that image. That image was a village that had been napalmed. And, those civilians, sorry, had been affected.

Russ Roberts: It's the most iconic image of the war.

Sabin Howard: It is the most iconic image of the war. That is indelibly seared upon my mind. I have a deep hatred for war. I have a great love for humanity.

So, I was the right person to get this job. Most of the war memorials that are done in Washington, D.C. are garbage. And, here is why: Because they do not show humanity. Our countries are made up by people and human beings. And, that is what our country is about. It is We, the people. It is not about: We, the governments. And, we are at crossroads again today with where the world--not only United States--but the whole world stands. It's like governments versus populace. And, it is a fight between governments, elites, and populace and people. And, I am a sculptor for the people.

I made a piece that was about unification. It was not about fracturing our society. I made a piece that came from the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgment. That was the poster that one day hit me and explained to me where I should go in early on in the process, because I was being torn apart by so many voices saying, 'Do this. Put more biplanes in. Put more trench warfare in. Put more machine guns in. We would like cavalry charges, pulling wagons.'

And, you enter into a bureaucratic situation with all these commissions, and they're all sculpture experts all overnight, and they're telling you what to do. And, I was completely befuddled. And, I had returned back to my studio. And, one morning, I saw that poster, and it was like clear as day right there in front of me, 'Do what you know.' And, I returned to the concept of the Renaissance where we are all intertwined as one group. That's what that Last Judgment is: We all are going to meet our maker. And, I took that compositional element of advancing and receding figures, and I took that as the structural launching point and catalyst for the 38-figure composition.

So, the soldiers that went off to fight--from the United States--that went off to fight across the Atlantic were neither Republicans or Democrats: they were Americans. And so, I handled the sculpture with that very term. These are all of the same country. They are not one thing or another. They are all different. Every single figure on that panel, that relief is a different individual, different psychology. But, they are all cohesively tied together in a unified movement from left to right, from the past to the future.

And, that was my response. And, that's why this sculpture will stand as something critical in this moment historically in the United States and also globally.

24:30

Russ Roberts: So, I was going to save this to the end, but let's talk about it now, which is the nature of art--since you've taken us there. For reasons I don't fully understand, I found myself reading the other day a book by Tolstoy called What Is Art?

Sabin Howard: Yes.

Russ Roberts: And, it's a remarkable book. I want to say one other thing though that you referenced about the damaging aspects of World War I. A book I have referenced recently here on EconTalk, is The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig. And, he has a remarkable set of pages where he talks about the influence of World War I on art. And basically, the nihilism that you're referring to, is part of it. But it's also: the way he describes it--whether he's right or not, doesn't matter; it's just interesting--he basically says, 'People who lived through World War I saw it as an extraordinary betrayal, the deaths of tens of millions of people really for no purpose whatsoever. And, it engendered a remarkable reaction against authority.'

And, the truth is, we're still living in that world--that post-World War I world--and it launches, in Zweig's view, some of the incredible creativity and changes in the art world. And, by the art world, I don't just mean paintings and sculpture, but literature, music, and so on.

And, in Tolstoy's book, which he wrote in 1897, which is describing a period about 20 years before the end of World War I, is a very similar theme--without World War I, though--which is that modern art has lost its connection to the human soul. And, he has a very narrow definition. It's a condemnation of what we would call modern art. Even though it was 1897, it had already started. And in his view, he has a very narrow definition, which is: Art is an emotional feeling inside the artist captured in the art itself, and then shared then, if the art is successful, by the listener, viewer, reader.

So, it's the transformation--it's the communication of the artist's feeling, and that feeling is then experienced by the recipient of the art.

And, to me that's very similar to what you're saying, your goal is in this sculpture: to take your view of a bunch of things, not one thing, but of war, of World War I in particular--but it's told[?tolled?] an impact on human beings and allow us as the viewers of that art to feel what you experienced captured in bronze. Is that a fair representation?

Sabin Howard: Yeah, very much. Thank you for saying that and bringing up Tolstoy an historical writer that has passed through the ages and his validation.

Let's look at: What is validated? What is important? What is seen as culturally a goldmine, a treasure? And, Western civilization holds that torch. And, this project is in direct lineage to a very rich history that is, we can go all the way back. Let's see if you can go back 2,000 years to the Greeks, to Hellenistic art. It is a direct lineage to that. I am not inventing what I did out of whole cloth. I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. To make the sculpture, I looked at historical pieces like [inaudible 00:28:16] Caravaggio--the painter from Rome--Michelangelo, Hellenistic art, Canova--this neoclassical sculptor--Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Poussin--the French sculptor.

I did not come to these compositional moments from zero. I looked at things, and then I went and got the models. And then, I posed the models using those historical moments in history as launching points. So, ultimately, I'm already working in the same way.

And, here's what differentiates modernism and, let's call it Western civilization and more traditional art. There is a separation of all of us in modernism where there is no cohesive unification. And, if you take the figure and you sculpt or paint the figure as a single figure with no interaction with anything around it, ultimately you are doing an alienated figure--because he's alone. Do we live alone? No, we do not. We live in communities. We are more similar to a pack of dogs, and I'm not making a joke here--

Russ Roberts: No, I know--

Sabin Howard: One dog is injured in a pack. The rest of the dogs will do things to keep that dog healthy and safe and protected, to bring it back to health. What is that--why is that important? Because that is what we need to do as a race, as a human race, instead of subdividing and killing and fracturing each other. It is destructive. It is a very modernistic way of approaching things. If you are in a marriage and you insult your wife, you are shooting yourself in the foot. It is destructive to you.

So, I made a sculpture that, like Tolstoy talks about, it's about elevating us under sacred values.

Now, I'm not saying to go back and deal with values as they were 500 years ago. We have transformed, as we're at a different time era. That would be archeological.

But, I am saying: read your history. It is an umbrella that unifies a race, a country, a world. And, read the history because then you can be educated to recreate, in this very moment, something that is contemporary and understandable. It has to be universal.

And, that's the problem with the modernists. They are making things that are not universal; and they have complete disregard for history, because ultimately the way they are proceeding is destructive. They are cutting off themselves from the past, and not educating themselves. And, what I am saying, you need the past to know what is possible, and also so that you do not repeat the same mistakes. Unfortunately, we are repeating the same mistake right now, this very moment, when you have a bullet to assassinate a Presidential candidate in the United States, or you have at least three global wars going on. What is the difference? It is a complete groundhog day. We're [inaudible 00:31:48] walking into World War III. And it's so obvious.

I don't think people want war. Civilians do not want war. Governments are the proponents of war. And then, the propaganda that is used to justify those wars is completely--it's lies.

And, I think there's a very interesting moment that we are having here because it's this psych-op--the propaganda that the government uses is internal warfare to control people.

And so, a piece of art speaks about the truth. It's about light, it's about rising to the occasion, and it's different than reality--because it's art.

And so, I'm saying: let's return to the way art used to be in which--let's take an example, Michelangelo's David. It was the symbol for a city-state Florence. And, city of Florence was fighting Pisa. Pisa was way larger than them. And, they made this sculpture to elevate their citizens and say, 'This sculpture represents you. This is your potential. This is what you can be.' And, that is what I'm doing with this sculpture. I'm making something that shows the potential of the United States, not only, but also of everyone on the globe. So, that's my answer to you.

33:12

Russ Roberts: You've been called the American Michelangelo. I don't know if, I mean--that's a nickname, that's kind of a heavy burden to bear. But, obviously from what you just said, you talked about the influence of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and others. I hope this doesn't insult you, this--in what I've seen of your work and certainly this work, it is not edgy, it is--in the usual sense--the word in the art world: it's not avant-garde. It's very much in a very, very old tradition.

And, you are, in that sense, swimming against the tide. The art world, as I understand it, is obsessed with the new, the novel, the avant-garde, the edgy. In fact, the whole job in modern art--the modern artist will often say that their job is to make you uncomfortable. As opposed to, say, elevating you, is the term you used. How does--do you interact with other artists? Are you--do you have a reputation among them that is pleasant or unpleasant to you? What's your--how is your work perceived?

Sabin Howard: This is a very interesting thing you're asking me. It's a--modernists stipulate that you need to be edgy? You need to be the first one to ever do something? Guess what? I followed exactly what they told me to do. I followed exactly what the modernists told me to do. I am doing something completely contrarian and radical to what is established right now in the art narrative of 2024. I'm a complete outlier. There's no one else doing exactly what I'm doing.

And it's--I'm not being archaeological. And, I would say that what I've done is, in some ways, very edgy because I'm taking a stand against a very corrupt system that is driven by financial gains, and the whole ideology that you buy big pieces of valued art because of their monetary value at Sotheby's, and other companies that will actually inflate and create a false market by doing a very wicked system behind the scenes when something goes to auction. Do you think those numbers are actually not discussed behind closed doors? No. A collector is brought in, and then they're going to bid on that piece. And then, that's creating the value. And then, now all of a sudden, the rest of the series is going to be worth--it's going to be a completely inflated number for a piece of crap.

And so, I'm doing something that goes: No, guys, I'm not okay with academia. I'm not okay with the critics. I'm not okay with any of these people that are saying, 'This is the status quo.'

Russ Roberts: Yeah. In that sense, you're very much swimming against the tide, and I'm not--I don't think I'm not exaggerating--I'm pretty confident that your memorial will be immortal: that people will be looking at it and being moved by it and ideally uplifted by it and challenged by it for a long time without the edginess of modernity and in its tradition, as you've outlined it.

36:51

Russ Roberts: But, let's talk about the process for a minute, which is not going to be easy because we don't have visuals, and I'm sure you could talk about this for a very, very, very, very, very long time.

But, when you see this for the first time--again, even on video--and you see these bronze figures, and you start digging in as I did, and the process of one of those figures becoming--going from a model--and by a model we're talking about not an economics model and not a theoretical conception about a physical human being, like a fashion model but not a fashion model--a model, a human being, dressed in a World War I uniform or the dress that a wife of a World War I soldier would wear, and you somehow turn that figure of that person who you've posed, and you turn that into a piece of bronze that is exquisite. I mean, it's exquisite in every version, by the way. There's clay and there's wax. But, give us some brief flavor of how you go from this person who is impersonating a soldier posed by you--or a woman impersonating a wife posed by you, or the daughter--how do you get to the bronze? Like, how do you do that?

Sabin Howard: This is the meat and potatoes of cooking a memorial sculpture. The average hour per figure was 650 hours of looking at a model and creating it.

This is also completely different than the way the world is operating right now. It completely fights modernism. I am saying the value of human beings in the creative process is so much greater than you are being told by the art world. So, the regular MO [modus operandi] today is to use technology, which is computers, photography, 3D printing [3-dimensional printing] where you actually set up all these cameras and they go off at the same time and then you have a three-dimensional shape. This is not human: it's technological stuff that leaves a mechanical fingerprint. You need to have a human fingerprint in the creative process because the way that we perceive our reality is human. It's not mechanical.

And so, yes, we have five senses, but we have so much more in terms of our consciousness in how our history and all these things that aid in how we perceive reality. You need to be educated first and foremost as a figurative sculptor. And, that's decimated as well because of modernism. It's not taught in the schools anymore.

So, the way that I'm working comes from, let's call it old-fashioned; but it's not really old-fashioned, because: Am I old-fashioned as a human being right now? No. I'm still perceiving my reality. I'm still very unique in how I perceive my reality. That perception of your reality is what drives how you look at the model. Because, you don't just copy the model: you are translating. This is a huge thing that has been ignored by the art world.

When you translate something, there are specific ways of doing it. They're not all the same. I am giving certain values to the way that I look, and then put it into clay. It's an educational basis built upon the anatomical structure of the body and the architecture of the skeleton, and the tenets of Renaissance art. It's not just: Take that sculpture and copy what's in front of you. No. I look at the model and--I'll give you an example.

I look at the model dressed in the costumes, and I want to make those forces on that movement and that gesture and the morphology look like it's dramatic and moving forward. And so from that, then I'm going to diagram on the clay and I'm going to look for the high points of all the forms pushing outwards into space.

So, I add the clay so it looks like it's expansive and full. And, that already is a full philosophy of a soul, a human being, because all the forms are convex. They're not sunken in, they're not concave.

A machine won't see that stuff. And so, by diagramming, you are already drawing and designing, because when you draw, that's not real. That's just--it's like writing. It's a composing. It's a visual narrative of what you're seeing. So, my education, then, gives me a way to organize all this information coming at me.

Anybody can draw. At 19, I couldn't draw at all. I picked up a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I started doing the exercises. And that was my launching point. And then I learned--you know, there's so many levels of knowledge and learning that have been taken out of our art training system. And, this sculpture, to me, is shocking not only to myself when I look at it because I did something, it's from a different age. But, it is this age when you look at it. So your brain goes, 'Cannot compute.' And, that is exactly the same thing that everyone else is saying. It's like, 'I didn't know this could still be done today.' It's very, very modern.

Well, this is what I want to say, though--I left the process of how I add the clay to the surface. I didn't smooth it out. Every single little piece of clay that I put on, is my process.

And that's not what was done in the Renaissance. You were supposed to hide your process because you were working for the Church, and you were a craftsman. Here, I'm showing my process to the audience, and it's like very alive and invigorating. That's pretty cool.

Russ Roberts: Well, it's more than pretty cool. I mean, you got these--so, at this point, you have these--a clay figure.

And, I just have to say as a footnote: when my wife and I realized that our daughter liked to draw and was good at it, we decided we should learn how to draw. We had no--

Sabin Howard: Oh, wow. [Inaudible 00:43:29]

Russ Roberts: We had had no art education, basically. I'd taken art, but I'd been given bad grades because obviously I was not good at art, so they just gave me a C. And so, I assumed I couldn't draw. And then, I asked a friend who painted for a recommendation. He told me to get Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And, I recommend it to listeners. It changes the way you see the world. It doesn't just--it does teach you how to draw. It's a beautiful book. But it also teaches you to look at the world differently.

And, it was a transformative experience for me to do something that I did poorly, but could get better at. And then, in the process of doing so, looked at the world differently. So, I strongly recommend that book. Unless you've got a clay figure.

44:17

Russ Roberts: Is the clay figure the full size of the statue to start with, the figure that's going to be bronzed, or smaller, or?

Sabin Howard: Yeah. The clay can't just stand up on its own. So, you need to build an armature; and we built an armature. And, from the armature was this foam thing. The foam was an enlargement from the little model that I had made. I made two models prior to that, transferring the drawing to a model.

And then, the model was--I used computers to enlarge it. So, I used it for the grunt work. I didn't use it for the sculpting.

So, the core is a foam piece with the clay on the surface, and then you are--I redesigned the whole sculpture, all 38 figures, on the fly at over life-sized scale. They're approximately six-foot-six to seven-foot-two.

So, you're adding the clay to the foam. And, I'm cutting and moving limbs. People don't do that because they don't have the confidence that I do. I have very highly developed drawing skills because of--I do have a talent, unfortunately. But, part of it is I practice. My perseverance is, I would say I'm off the mountain. Imagine having to make something like this--a Renaissance-type sculpture--in a modern era. Do you know how stubborn you have to be?

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Sabin Howard: It's like you are facing a wall. And, you have to support a family through what you're doing. So, this is bordering on a little--

Russ Roberts: Insane.

Sabin Howard: insane. And then, [inaudible 00:45:55]

Russ Roberts: It's an obsession. It's a bit of an obsession.

Sabin Howard: And, [inaudible 00:45:59]

Russ Roberts: Here's my question on--anyway, we should finish our narrative and then we'll come back to my question if I remember. But, you take the clay figure, and then you wrap it in wax?

Sabin Howard: Oh no, it has to be cut apart and brought to a foundry.

So, we had to cut our figures apart to transport them to a foundry. Because of COVID, normally they will come to your shop and make a mold. What is a mold? A mold is a liquid that you put onto the clay. So, you take this liquid--and it has a catalyst in it; it's a silicon--it goes directly onto the clay, and it makes an imprint of the clay.

And--all right, so this is a floppy material. Let's say it's a rubber--it's a rubber, ultimately.

Russ Roberts: It's a rubber shell that's been--

Sabin Howard: Yeah, on top the sculpture now. Yeah.

And, now this has to be--because it flops, you need to build a hard shell around that to contain it.

So now you have these two shells directly built onto the sculpture. You take them off the sculpture, but you have the imprint of the surface.

Now with these two shells, you fill them with a slurry of wax. You cover the surface. It's about a quarter of an inch to three-eighths of an inch. No more than that. So, they're hollow. You take the shell off, you now have an exact duplicate of the clay in a different material--wax--hollow.

You take that wax sculpture and you attach tubes to it. These tubes will be how the bronze runs into the sculpture. Now you take this whole thing and you put it inside a dipping tank. And, the dipping tank is a slurry--it's called ceramic shell--and it covers the inside and the outside. It goes into all the cracks, and it picks up all the detail.

You put it in a burnout kiln now. The wax evaporates, and that's why it's called 'lost wax.'

Now you have a void where the wax was in this ceramic shell. It's a mold, and you fill that void by pouring liquid bronze into those tubes that now will cover the whole structure.

Then you go to knockout, where you knock off all this ceramic shells--very hard, cement-like--and you have a raw bronze.

The foundry that I use, Pangolin, is so good that we got my actual fingerprints. My actual fingerprints--think about that--in the bronze, the sculpture.

Russ Roberts: That probably means people can open your iPhone if they're creative.

Sabin Howard: Yes, that's right. They will be able to. Yeah.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Sabin Howard: Now we just started. Now, you got to reassemble everything.

So, each figure has, maybe, eight pieces. That means that the total sculpture is anywhere to near 6-700 pieces that now have to be reassembled compositionally to match your small model maquette.

It's also another place where an anomaly exists in the bronze-casting business that's Pangolin. It's driven by a man who is around my age, a little bit older, but has the same sort of vision. We need to do bronze casting at another level, and use technology in that process.

But, ultimately, it comes down to one thing, human beings. Human beings driving the technology. Not technology driving the human beings. I am averse to AI [artificial intelligence]. It's complete nonsense. You can't do what I did using AI because of this: my mind, and how it translates reality and then recreates it in art. Same with the casting business.

49:59

Russ Roberts: The thing that's crazy about this for me as an outsider is art is an extraordinary thing by itself, representing a creative vision from the brain in a medium. And, there are many different mediums. They're all interesting. There's marble, and there's canvas, and there's Legos. But, bronze has got an enormous craftsmanship part to it, way beyond the ability to draw, that must have taken you decades to master. This was not like--you didn't just go and say, 'I've got this clay thing. Can we turn it into bronze?' I mean, you had to--there's a lot of learning, I assume, along the way.

Sabin Howard: Oh my God, it's--we did something that is--I'm literally a dinosaur. We are extinct. What I do is extinct. What the foundry did is extinct. They are relying on technology instead of human manpower to do this. And, we're going back to a craftsmanship because Rungwe, who runs the foundry, he's been in it for 40-plus years, exactly like me. And then, now he has second generation coming in. Like, the sons of the workers now work there. It's incredible. So, it's handed down.

What I learned was handed down to me back in the 1980s, and then I put it into practice. The act of looking at a model, it's so--you have to troubleshoot all day long.

So, you said about the drawing. Okay, I want to put this into context of what sculpture is. Sculpture is drawing on steroids because you have to draw three-dimensionally in the round, and then all those different angles and views have to link up so that your drawing skills are at the utmost level to make a really, really good sculpture, and that--it's just not being taught and people are not practicing it.

And then, no one has the skill level because it comes--I have a very European mindset that, in the beginning, I was learning how to do it so I didn't have to be creative. Even though I was being creative, it was like I was following in the footsteps, so I didn't have to elevate my ego. And so, it was like I was learning in a way that I feel a lot of Americans don't have the patience to learn because they're looking at, like, 'Well, what about me? What about my creative self?' So, I was not thinking that. I was, like, 'I want to learn how to do this.'

And I took it in the context of: 'I want to be the best violinist, so I need to learn how to play this instrument so that I'm like Paganini on that violin. I will kill everybody else. I am better than everybody else. I will be the equal to the Renaissance and that art.' That was what was in my mind. I couldn't give a damn about what my fellow art student or fellow art peer was doing. It was--the competition is not with my peers:, my competition is with history.

And so, it's like that was my--I had to jump that high. And so, that's not an American mentality.

Russ Roberts: Well, it a little bit reminds me of Hemingway, who said, 'You have to read other authors, so you have to know who to beat.' He had a very competitive form. I don't think that's exactly what you're saying, but it's definitely in the spirit of it.

Sabin Howard: It was more of an embracing of my--I call them my guides. They are my guides. They have guided me through life because I go look at what they have done and I have this kinship and this bonding with someone of 500 years ago, and it's like, 'That is my brother. I am doing what he was doing, now.' And so, it's, like, I feel I'm more of a family. It's not like Hemingway; it's like I'm seeing--

Russ Roberts: Yeah--

Sabin Howard: It's not competition, it's, like, 'You are my masters and I'm following in your footsteps. How can I be of service to you?'

And, ultimately, that's the biggest thing I learned from doing this project was, I took away I am in service of something larger than myself. And that is incredibly empowering because it attaches you to the sacred because I believe in something larger than myself and my puny little ego. It's like I'm in service of things that are universal and cohesively holding thought process and culture and Western civilization together. That's very powerful if you're a part of that element.

54:32

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It reminds me of our--Agnes Callard on the program said a long time ago, 'Reading is--if you learn how to read, you learn how to talk to dead people.' But, that's sort of the way I hear what you're saying. You--when you--I've had the privilege of standing in the presence of David in Florence, Michelangelo's David. And for me, it's a religious moment. It's not just a cool thing. It is a very cool thing, but it is small-'r' religious in the sense that, as you said, it connects you to the universal human aspirations to be something grand. To aspire. And, boy, did Michelangelo aspire. Oh my gosh. And, to be able to--you could talk to Michelangelo in a way I can't. So, I'm jealous.

But, I was going to say one other thing though about strange skills. So, there's this physical part to sculpting that goes beyond the normal drawing, etc., because you've got to represent in the physical what you've imagined in your mind.

But, there's this other weird part of this project that is obvious when you watch the videos that give you some of the background, which is: you are not a lone sculptor with a block of marble and a chisel revealing what's inside. And of course, Michelangelo wasn't either. He had lots of helpers when he painted the Sistine Chapel. And, it's not--but we have a certain romance about the great artist working alone. As part of this project, there's an enormous army of people that you're working with. You have the people who are doing the modeling. You have the people who are doing all the intermediate steps you described to get it ready for the foundry. You have the people at the foundry. You also have the bureaucrats who were saying, 'I don't like the way that looks,' or, 'Why aren't you doing this?'

So, there's a management, human HR--Human Resources--managerial aspect to your artistry, that to me--looking as an outsider--must have been remarkably frustrating at times because human beings are flawed. Human beings make mistakes. Human beings have issues. They have needs. And, while you're trying to keep this enormous 10-foot high, 58-foot frieze at the center of your consciousness, you've got a lot of headaches, I assume, from managing that enormous team. So, am I right? Was that an important part of the job, keeping that group in focus--

Sabin Howard: Very. Very. Yeah.

Russ Roberts: and on the same page?

Sabin Howard: Yes. You're so correct in saying that I went from a mom and pop business to be running an organization. And, it was big boy world. It's like you are--I had to hire sculptors. I fired so many people because I started firing people when I took ownership that I was the leader of this project, and I was given the task of seeing this baby through--of getting, let's say, the ball to the end zone correctly. And, a lot of the sculptors that I brought on did not have the capacity to learn and criticize their own capacity in sculpting. So, they got fired. And I took longer to fire people in the beginning than at the end.

At the end, I only had one sculptor, Charlie Mostow. And, the sculpture changes from the beginning to the end. It becomes more raw, more emotional because guess what? I'm the one sculpting, and Charlie has learned how to sculpt in the same process that I did.

Then there are the models. I went--in the beginning of the sculpture, I used actors that I'd used to do the drawings and the compositional ideas. Coming out of Brooklyn, my actors are--they're actors. They're actors. I don't need to say any more. They act out a part or a character. They're not the real deal. The end of the sculpture, those figures are veterans. This is very--it transforms the process, because it was a four-year process. Went along with the story. I was like, 'What do I need to do in my head to fix this problem, solve it?' I went and got Navy SEALs [Sea, Air, and Land], Marines, Rangers. I had one Marine who worked with me for two and a half years at the end. And, I asked him--I grilled him all the time. And, he opened up because there was a trusting that I learned about the military and what soldiers go through.

And, the more I learned, the more I was fascinated with the idea of how, when they enter into battle, they are this--they are all at each other's backs, protecting each other. And, if one of them goes down, it's way more traumatic than either you or I can realize. And then, that family goes down, and then you have this ripple effect from one death that's, like, it's huge. It's a whole community. It's so many people that are affected by that one death. And, those faces that you see at the end carry the history of those unique individuals that each and every one of them was a combat veteran. And, each and every one of them suffered the traumatic effects physically and psychologically for more, and it's painted on their face.

That's a wrong way of saying it because it's not surface. It's inside. It's in their body. It's in their cells. And, their faces morphed because of the combat that they suffered. And then, I use that reference, that human being, that history as a complete reference to make the sculpture.

And, it's very real and honest and has tremendous integrity to combat PTSD [Post-traumatic stress disorder]--what we call it today. Not any different than 'shell-shocked' 104 years ago. Same thing. Same thing, different floor. That's the thing. It's a sculpture that is historical because they wear the actual uniforms of the era, but it is universal. And, any veteran who served in Afghanistan or Iraq or comes from the United Kingdom or Italy or France or Germany or Israel, will understand it is the soldier's journey.

And, it is a very modern thing because it's never been done before. It's the first time that the soldier's story is done and encapsulated in one sculpture.

And, here's proof of how hard I worked. Look at my thumb. See how large it is? It's from all the clay that I put on.

Russ Roberts: I was going to say I can imagine, but I can't.

1:01:41

Russ Roberts: I want to close with--I'm going to have trouble putting this into words. I apologize if I ramble a bit. But I want to try to get at something I think you're trying to get at. And it's hard to express it.

I was in Prague the last few days, came back last night--never been to Prague. And, when you go to Prague, there's a big Jewish presence historically in Prague. And, most of the Jews who built the Jewish presence in Prague were murdered by the Nazis. About 80,000 Jews were murdered, of the 100-, 120- that were there at the beginning of the war. Some people got away, but most of them didn't.

And we've preserved the synagogues. Some of them are still active, but--and some of them are quite beautiful. Some of them were quite simple. They were built 900 years ago. They're still there--800 years ago. It's beautiful.

But, they are museums. They're not--although they're used some, many of them are literally museums. They are not in working order. There's no vitality. It's an historical monument.

And, as a Jew, that's very sad--because of the murder. Because of what was lost. And there's a certain irony because Prague is the city of Kafka, a Jew, a tormented Jew. And, whatever role Jews played in the life of that city is--again, even though there's still some Jews there and there's still Jewish life--its centrality and the culture of Prague is dead. So, unfortunately you can feel that in a lot of European cities. I felt it in Vienna.

But, at the same time, I go to a church. And, you walk into a church--it's, again, it's centuries old. It's a magnificent monument to the Divine. And, we happen to hear music in that church of Bach and Pachelbel and Vivaldi, which of course is music that was mainly inspired by the Divine.

And of course, the Christians have mainly left Prague. It's not just the Jews. They didn't get murdered, but the role of Christianity at the heart of Prague is gone. And what's left is a shell--the church, the music played in that church that's centuries old. The shell is the Jewish cemetery in the center of Prague--that's an amazing thing to see. But, it's a cemetery. It's not alive.

And, I couldn't help but be struck, especially in that church, where there's quite a bit of statuary--and, I was thinking about you and thinking about this upcoming interview--that much of Western art was literally sacred. You used the word 'sacred.' It was literally sacred. It was an attempt for human beings to capture something much greater than themselves, whether it was the music of Bach or the grandeur of a medieval cathedral, which they were even longer than you did, or even more years to build those monuments.

Sabin Howard: 100 years. 100 years, yeah.

Russ Roberts: 100 years. And, now we look at them, and we're in awe of them. But, all the life that built that art is drained from it in many ways. And that art--the architecture, the sculpture in those churches--those were done to elevate human beings. Many horrible things happened. Many horrible things happened along the way.

Sabin Howard: Thanks--

Russ Roberts: So, it's a complicated picture, and I'm not going to whitewash it. But, something is gone. And, I'm curious how you, with your view of the sacred and your respect for the Renaissance, how you think about that. And, it's not really a well-formed question, but say whatever you like in response.

Sabin Howard: My response to that is you are spot on when you say something has been lost. And it is the definition of what we are as humans and the act of being human and living your life for the acknowledgement of the sacred.

I see this sculpture as the beginning of a new movement--a new artistic movement. And, I am so encouraged by how many people have said, 'Oh my God, you can still do this today.' So, I am doing a documentary with my wife, Traci Slatton. She has done a documentary because she films every single day. It's called heroicdocumentary.com, is the website. But, this is--why am I bringing this up? Because people, if they can see the inside of my studio, they can see how human it is. And, they're going to be surprised that this is something that it can be translated to other arenas, not just sculpture.

There's a movement to bring back the idea of, like, how do you use your hands? How do you become a plumber, an electrician? How do you build a house? All these things--craftsmanship, putting things into the physical realm. We're on the move, and I'm not the only one here on the planet. We are all coming out and talking about human beings versus technology or AI. And, human beings are the ones with the power. We see the world 80% through our eyes. Huge amount of data that goes into our brains, far surpasses a computer. And, in that process of looking at the world, we have something that machines do not have. We have a heart, we have a brain, and we have hands.

Machine is completely mechanical and mathematical; data-driven. It's not a conscious human being. It's not a human being with a soul.

The respect for humanity is what you just spoke about. There was a respect for human beings and what they were capable of. And, I am saying: I am bringing that back.

Now, maybe this is a fool's errand, but I will do that till I die, till I meet my maker, because that is my mission and my dharma in life. And that's my response to you. I'm not the only one who is a proponent of making things by hand for the sacred and being in service of something larger than oneself. So, thank you for your time with this. I really appreciate it.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Sabin Howard. Sabin, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Sabin Howard: Thank you very much.

How Do You Capture the Tragedy of War? (with Sabin Howard)

Tiffany Jenkins on Plunder, Museums, and Marbles

Ryan Holiday on Stillness Is the Key

READER COMMENTS

Sluggh McGee

Aug 13 2024 at 9:08am

Tony Martyr

Aug 14 2024 at 9:20pm

Tony Martyr

Aug 14 2024 at 9:19pm

Ron Spinner

Aug 15 2024 at 1:21am

David Youngberg

Aug 18 2024 at 1:09pm

Steve Roedde

Aug 29 2024 at 10:22am

LEAVE A COMMENT

How Do You Capture the Tragedy of War? (with Sabin Howard)

Tiffany Jenkins on Plunder, Museums, and Marbles

Ryan Holiday on Stillness Is the Key

READER COMMENTS

Sluggh McGee

Aug 13 2024 at 9:08am

Tony Martyr

Aug 14 2024 at 9:20pm

Tony Martyr

Aug 14 2024 at 9:19pm

Ron Spinner

Aug 15 2024 at 1:21am

David Youngberg

Aug 18 2024 at 1:09pm

Steve Roedde

Aug 29 2024 at 10:22am

LEAVE A COMMENT

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