Art, History, and Human Resilience with Sabin Howard

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Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hansen.

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are not with me.

It's one of our Victor Davis Hanson interview shows.

I'm really happy today and honored that we have the figurative artist sculpture Sabine Howard, who has been working on this monumental task of the World War I monument.

And

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And we're back with a Victor Hansen interview of Sabin Howard.

And Sabin, I'd like, before we even start, I'd like people to know what's your background, what are you doing, what is the World War I project?

I am a figurative Renaissance contemporary sculptor.

I began sculpting 42 years ago.

Wow.

I have 80,000 hours of working with life models.

So

incredibly traditional type of art that comes from the lineage of Western civilization.

My heroes are Michelangelo and the Hellenistic period of the Greeks.

And I entered into a competition in 2015.

It was a blind global competition for the National World War I Memorial.

And it was

2016 in January.

I was announced that I was the winner with Joseph Weischar, Architect in Training.

And

I am sculpting, I finished sculpting, actually.

And you're...

Well, we've finished sculpting a

foot-long bronze wall with 38 figures that weighs 25 tons that will be placed in Pershing Park on September 13th of this year.

To give our listeners some idea, is it something comparable to the classical idea of a freeze course like the four i know it's not 450 feet like the parthenon freeze but is it that the idea that it's going to be a relief freeze of kind of a panoramic narrative as i understand it and is that what you're so it's a monumental

task i i

yeah you think of it as a um a bronze film that unfolds as you walk from the left to the right uh the story is of a soldier it's called a soldier's journey.

And it is the hero's journey where a soldier leaves home, enters into battle, is transformed,

shell-shocked, and then returns home to hand his daughter, the next generation, his helmet, which is World War II.

So it really is in the tradition of the Greek narrative freeze course that you see on so many of these Doric and Ionic temples.

I'm just saying that because I'm a classicist, and I was a professor of classics for a long time.

And

it seems so

refreshingly traditional is what I'm trying to say.

But I was going to ask you for the listeners, what is the process involved?

You're working on stone or do you make cast or is it going to be in bronze?

Tell us how you do the actual material work yourself.

I work with live models and I sculpt them in clay.

I use metal tools, the same sort of tools tools that were used 2,000 years ago.

And

from that clay, then a mold is made and sent to a foundry where it is cast using the lost wax process.

And the bronzes are then reassembled.

And then

this

truly is something that has not happened over 200 years,

what we're going to reveal.

It's quite amazing.

When you get the bronze cast

that come back to you, then do you, as the original artist, the person who made the molds, do you have to go back and touch it up?

Or is it pretty much what you expected as it comes back from the foundry?

Well,

it stays at the foundry.

We used a foundry in the UK

in the coswalds, and the sculpture was cut into 600 pieces and then reassembled.

So I needed to have a crew alongside.

They did the brunt work.

I came back in at the end for patina and just touching up of things.

But it's the foundry that did all the finishing,

incredible craftsmanship at this Pangolin Editions Foundry.

It's really something of the past.

Yeah, it is.

And we are playing forward.

How many hours do you think are days, or how do you calibrate the time that you invested in it

for such a detailed work of art?

I would say that

if I,

yeah,

650 hours of sculpting per figure, 38 figures.

Oh, my God.

That's the average.

Some of the figures obviously were more of the more important.

Yeah.

What is the status right now?

When will people be able to see the actual monument unveiled in Washington?

The

bronze sculpture is right now

in a ship, in a container, traveling across the Atlantic back towards the United States.

And we will reassemble the sculpture in the end of July in August.

And on September 13th at 7.19, there will be a candlelit vigil.

That's sunset on September 13th,

which will be open to the public at

Pershing Park, 150 yards from the White House.

That's amazing.

In this genre that you work in, and I know that in the modern world, we often call it figurative art.

And I don't know, it seems to be, as you said, a

direct descendants from Michelangelo, the Italian Renaissance, Praxilates, Phidias, Lucippus, in the classical and the great, you know, the Rhodian sculptors of the Laoquan.

But it's, is it in a renaissance?

Because it seems to me that for so long, representative, represent, representational, I don't know what you want to call it, representative art or image art, or

I don't know what we would call semi-modern, modern art, figurative, but it's not figurative in the classical sense.

And it was,

that skill, that tradition was dying out.

Are you part of a renaissance?

It may see it come back.

Yeah, I feel like I...

Yeah, I'm a dinosaur.

I'm truly one of.

It's very unfortunate, very lonely to be in this position.

I wish that this is part of our culture that would continue.

I'm

very stubborn in my vision of what art can be.

And I honestly think the art world has...

um fallen into an abyss it's a dark abyss that does not speak at all about elevation of consciousness or rising to the occasion as a human race.

And I'm a very strong proponent in the idea that culture and art can lead the real world.

And so my roots are in Italy.

I am half Italian, half American.

I grew up in Italy.

I went back to Rome to study

there for several years.

And

when I began in the 80s to practice this type of art, I had very good teachers that handed down an education to me that is not available in the art schools today because they have been completely decimated by technology and digital

computer

visions of our world.

And I am...

very against that because as a human being, you need to make something that has the human fingerprint and plays forth the idea of what it means to be human.

And you cannot do that if you are using mechanics or technology to make your art because the mechanicals

will overtake the human fingerprint.

And there you go.

You don't have human art anymore.

You have mechanical art now.

And so that is what I did is very radical because it says, no, that's not the way to go.

And we're going to return to humanity.

I think that's really fascinating.

When I was a student at the American School of Classical Studies

for my PhD work, I took a lot of courses on site in classical architecture.

I remember in one of the

there's always scaffolding on the erectium or the populeia or the parthenum.

But in 1972, there was a big scaffold and we were allowed to go up and look at some of the freezes.

And it was just amazing in the sculpture that they've all been removed since because of air pollution.

But

there was the idea that Phidias and others, Paul Cleides, and that school of art,

when we looked at the hair, that you could see the fine strokes of hair and the wrinkle in the ear, and yet they knew that no one 30 feet below would be able to see that detail, and yet it was important for them to have that detail.

It was almost as if there was some type of allegiance to humanity.

And if you don't just make a sculpture,

in the cheapest way or the easiest way, but it was kind of a, you feel that that that school of figurative art has that dedication that goes in a direct descent all the way back to that Greek ideal.

Yeah, it's, I just returned from Italy last week, and I was in Rome and Florence.

And I think one of the things that you're bringing up here is The past for Europe is their history and the history of what we have built and created in our cultures are imperative to play forward because that's what unifies a nation and brings a people together underneath an umbrella that defines who they are.

And so

we have moved into a place where

if you use technology, you lose that heritage of your culture and it becomes an art that is purely generic and does not define the people of the country.

And so this project project and sculpture is

a strong statement to return to an identity.

And that identity for me is an art that is of the Renaissance that speaks about what our country can be.

And so what you're speaking about with all the details on the sculpture is that's a human-made cultural statement with the human fingerprint.

And that has to be maintained for it to have value.

It does seem though that when you talk to people or when you go to Washington and you see some of the figurative art traditions in the National Cathedral or Vietnam,

the three soldiers or even the Korean warline, the public wants what you're doing.

They're not, I think they've sort of tired of representing.

representational art or representative art or whatever or abstract art or abstract sculpture.

They really have a deep desire to see classical beauty and the effort to make people either look as they are or even better than they are.

Don't you feel that the public is sort of on your side in this artistic tradition and this sculptor tradition?

I love that you asked me that question.

I feel that the art that I am making is understandable by all.

And if I were to talk about this on scientific terms, we view the world 80% through our eyes as human beings.

And

it's not called visual art by accident.

It's that because visual is what we are.

And when you look at what happened with World War I, it's ironic that I'm now making a sculpture that goes back and harkens to the age prior to the destruction of the idea of a God-driven universe that's unified.

And you step into, you know, with the decimation of 22 million people, the modern era and nihilism.

Yes.

And the art changes at that moment, it changes and it goes into this modern concept that requires a book to understand the art.

And it began with Marcel Duchamp's The Urinal.

104 years ago

in Paris.

And it's enough is enough.

It's like redundant at this point.

And I'm saying this is the next wave.

And it is a tsunami of beauty that will hit the beach in Washington, D.C.

I'm very proud of this fact.

You should be.

And I'm very proud of it.

It brings people together.

It brings us together under this.

It's so, I think that's a very good point.

I think people sometimes

don't realize that World War I was the first semi-global war and the...

the dead at 22 million had a it just had a nihilistic effect on art and literature and that that was the start in Europe of even you know there was a lot of good things about blank verse but the idea that verse no longer had hexameters or pentameters or rhyme or novels never had protagonists and antagonists they were sort of theater of the observer that whole nihilism saturated European and American culture, both in art and literature, poetry.

And

what you're doing,

I'm not versed well in America

the history of American sculpture, but it seems to me that you're trying to revive a tradition from St.

Gaudin's all the way to Frederick Hart, maybe.

Is that who you see as people that were

your...

Is that the school that you...

Is there an American school that you...

you belong to and you're trying to promote and try to continue and keep alive with names like that in the past?

I think we have two sculptors, French, who did the Lincoln Memorial, and you have Gaudens, who did

quite a few sculptures, one in Boston of the Union Army with the black soldiers.

Those are probably your best two figurative sculptors for the United States of America.

So

if you compare that to European sculptors and Western civilization, we are a little bit poor in the figurative art department.

So not to brag or anything, but but that was the guidelines that I moved from.

This is really interesting.

I was told by the commission that hired me, the Centennial Commission, we would like you to make a sculpture like the one in front of the Capitol, the Grant Memorial, done by the sculptor Schrady.

And I believe that that's probably the best sculpture in the whole United States.

And I played that

sculpture forward because of its visceral nature, its expressive humanism,

It's very pictorial.

It's

full of driving forces with kinetic energy that move.

And here's the thing, motion

in sculpture, in form, motion drives emotion, and that makes it accessible to the general public.

General public has been far too long overlooked in the art world because it's become very snobby and elitist and status-oriented.

So,

I am trying to establish probably almost for the first time in this country the value system of culture.

And it comes from a European descent.

And let's now create something that has value that's actually American.

And this is the next generation of what happened, maybe as far back as the 1800s,

what I've done.

And it speaks about values that are not about money, but about humanity and expression of what human

potentiality is.

I think that's

something that goes along with the politics of this moment,

where people are just sick and tired of

the government and the way people are treated.

And I make the analogy of how the art world treats the general public.

I'm sick and tired of how the art world museums and the academics have held this status quo

for far too long since World War I.

And I am going to break that system and we are going to start from a new place.

That's very exciting.

It reminds me in my field of writing and historical writing that all of the great narrative historians,

Andrew Roberts, who the biographer of Churchill, he's a wonderful writer, Neil Ferguson, my colleague,

they're all not academic writers.

In other words, what you're describing in the art world is also true of nonfiction, that people don't want to have

that postmodernist Foucaultian vocabulary and

these esoteric microscopes.

They want to know what the big things, the material stuff of history is, diplomacy, government.

They're tired of these, not that gender and race and all of these are not important, but this obsession with these binaries of oppressed, oppressor.

They just want to...

they want something human that they connect to.

And I think it's happening across all of these genres.

I was not too long ago in New York and that Gaudin's monument near Central Park of Sherman, I thought was,

it just stuck, struck me as so different than a lot of the modern sculpture.

And the only thing I can relate to you, because I'm not, again, an art historian, but I remember I was in Washington once and

Frederick Hart,

the guy that did some of the things of the National, I heard a lecture by him.

I think he died in the late 90s, but he was, it was kind of eerie listening to you because he was giving a lecture on the same topic that you are and his desire that maybe what he was doing would catch on.

I don't mean catch on, but revive.

There would be a renaissance in America.

And yet, I think he died fairly young.

in his 50s.

But there seems to be a lot of people like you that

not just attempting to bring back figurative and classical sculpture, but feel that this time it's really going to work and that commissions, because I know that you've had a lot of commissions.

Didn't you also sculpt some of the Greek gods themselves?

As I remember reading.

You know, it's.

Yeah, Victor,

I would see the first 35 years of my art career as my training to make this sculpture.

I did a lot of sculpture that is reminiscent of, well, Greek gods, Aphrodite, Mars, Hermes.

These were pieces that were my training.

And

if I look back, I feel that they were too esoteric and didn't connect with the general public.

So the memorial that I did, I changed

my style completely.

I went from a more quiet and aloof figure that is, they were all nudes very anatomical um

very very precise in their structure their body structure but this is not something the general public you would be interested in if you you know you're not going to move anything doing something like that

and so i would i i i was very frustrated that i couldn't like change the art world.

And so I entered into this competition and everybody said, well, you know, this could take years.

And it's like, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

And I was like, No, this is it.

This, I have to get this project.

I have to make a change.

I have to make a difference with my life.

And I committed myself.

I even went, I went all the way to New Zealand to make a model for this piece and was away from my family, which was very hard.

I raised half a million dollars on my own to make that model and bring it back to the Commission of Fine Arts.

I was determined to make something that would give a change to, and you said this yourself.

It's general public.

If general public gets involved and looks at the art, you've made a difference.

You've made a change.

And I'm not stopping here.

I'm going to do another sculpture that is equally as big

and it's something that people can get interested in it again.

But don't you think

it's fallen apart?

Yes, but don't you think that what you did, because I've looked at some of your earlier work

about Greek deities and divinities, don't you think that was absolutely necessary?

Because when I looked at the detail of some of the pictures and photos of your World War I monument,

nobody could do that in their 20s or 30s.

It seems to me that, unknowingly, that all of that earlier work was

a requisite or prerequisite for what you're doing now.

Don't you think you developed the skills?

Because I don't think anybody could do what you're doing now in their 20s.

No, it's 100% correct.

It was my training ground.

And

I had to learn that first.

I had to learn.

Here's the thing.

Not to be didactic, but a figure when it's done well is not an imitation or a copy of nature.

It is a translation where you use principles of architecture.

Actually, the body parts.

are rectilinear solids that are moving in space and they're all tilted and rotated and extended in specific thrusts and action.

It's a force.

The body, even just standing in a reference position, is a force.

The act of standing, you are fighting against gravity and your pelvis is tilted in a specific way and your rib cage is also tilted in accordance to how much your pelvis is tilted.

So if I was, I learned this way of breaking down what I saw.

in a in a live model and it's a deduction.

It's not how do you feel about it.

It's a scientific deduction.

Now, what drives it into the art realm is my heart and the feelings of

what do you want to talk about?

And so then when you add that on to a methodology of abstracting life into art form, you actually have something.

And I, so you're 100% right when you say I had to go through

that rigorous training for 35 years so I could make then the memorial.

When I got to the memorial, there's so much kinetic energy and drive because I changed my way of working.

I wasn't doing a model just posing on the dais.

I was doing

a model that was in movement.

And then I had to freeze that movement and capture it in a sculpture.

So it talks about past, present, and future as you walk by it.

I think it's really...

you've done a great service to the American people because so often we're so trapped in the modern age.

And to the degree that we go back in history and honor the people who helped save America, it stops at World War II.

And we've forgotten, you know, World War I, we didn't even have a word World War I until World War II started.

It was always called the Great War.

And then when World War II started, they said, well, this is even bigger.

So we'll go call that World War I.

But for that generation, it was

the greatest human catastrophe in history.

And yet, there was a lot of nobility in what the Allies did.

And I just say that personally, I grew up on a farm and I still live on one, but I had a Swedish grandfather, Frank Hansen, and he was farming.

He was just minding his own business in 1970, 16, 17.

And then he was drafted and he went all the way over to France.

He fought in

the

Bella Wood campaign.

And then he was gassed.

And he came home and he lost 70% of his lungs.

So when I knew him in the 1960s and 70s, he was disabled, but he broke horses for a living.

And all I would, and I have his helmet from the 91st Division and what's left of his gas mask our family has.

But I'd ask him,

and he had a very sweet, I said, what was it like?

And he said, I'm not going to tell you what it was like.

He was breaking horses.

So he said,

he said, I don't know what was worse.

The horses that were shredded in front of me or the men, it was horrible.

And then my father

flew on a B-29 over Tokyo, 40 missions, and he kept saying to me, and then my son, your father did this, and it's horrible.

And no one has any idea of what it does to a family.

And I'm named after my

member of my family, Victor Hanson, was killed on Okinawa.

So when I hear of what people like you are doing to bring the bring public attention to all these people that we forgot that sacrificed so much for us, It's really, it's really stunning what you're doing.

And I hope people will recognize all of the work you've done.

And I hope that

I think this will be

an extravaganza.

I don't mean that in a cheap way, but I think it will lead to a lot of renaissance, I hope.

And I hope, just to ask, I don't want to pry, but beyond this, what do you envision as the next project?

I

want to do a sculpture about American exceptionalism.

I've called it the Grand Arch Project,

and it will be a sculpture of our history passing through that arch led by Lady Liberty at the front.

And in front of her will be a young girl, which is the next generation.

And it is a way of making something that brings us together under one unified cultural history, Because our country will not succeed if it is fractured anymore.

We must come together and you come together with art.

And I'm looking at Western civilization as my template.

When you look at city-states like in Italy, of Florence, who created pieces under Michelangelo's hand, like the David, that represented their city.

It was a way to unify their people and elevate them, not debase debase them in fear, but to bring them together.

And

then you have greater productivity.

You have greater ability to rise as a country, as the citizens of that country.

And so this is my statement and my way of handling the problems that we have today from a cultural way.

Do you think, and I know this is a very controversial topic, but it's often one that's sometimes lodged against modern art or non-figurative sculpture that

to be

Michelangelo or da Vinci or Rodin or Saint-Gaudon, it requires such skill and hours of training that very few people can do it.

They either do not have the natural talent or they don't have the discipline.

And in that recognition, it allows other people to come in.

and say, you know, put a toilet in or throw feces on a canvas or or abstract.

And yet,

what I feel is that the classical sculptor, like yourself, if you wanted to do that, you could.

But if they wanted to do what you do, they couldn't.

In other words, they lack the basic skill sets or experience or training.

And that in some ways explains the proliferation of non-figurative sculpture because it's a rare, rare, rare talent.

And if we were to honor this tradition and consider this art and the rest may be

cul-de-sacs, then

we would have very few artists.

And that would be, I think, in some ways good because we have so many people who say they're artists, but they don't have the basic skills of drawing and proportion that the true artist does.

Does that sound fair to say that?

Because it seems

the public believes that, I think.

I think what you said is very truthful.

Our schools,

academics, have done a disfavor, a horrible disfavor to the art world.

And what happens is they're hired as teachers.

They're paid, you know, I call it tenure art.

So they can go to school.

They can make that art because they are being paid by their school.

And so a lot of garbage is proliferated and it doesn't have anything to do with the rest of

society.

And I want to make an analogy to the sports world here.

How How many Michael Jordans do we actually have?

Would you go to a sports arena to watch somebody throw basketballs and completely miss the backboard even?

No, you go to see excellence in sports.

Why should the art world be any different than that?

You look for these things that are still maintained.

And I think sports world, you know, you have problems with the, you know, the gender thing, but for the most part, professional sports, you have the best of the best, like the Tour de France, bicyclists.

Those are the best athletes in the world performing for crowds.

Look at how many people go see them.

Look at how many people go stand

at St.

Peter's.

I was there last week.

I waited an hour to get in.

It's the Vatican.

It's like a half a mile long line.

It is a stamp that history proves

these things are valid.

And so we've been fooled.

We've been fooled.

It is.

It's aristotle when he critiqued art said that every human had this an instinctive

instinct desire to be divine or to see

art representing both the real world as it exists as as the eye sees it but even inspirational

that it would be perfect they had that desire and and when you look through classical art whether it's on base painting some of it can be grotesque but it's never it's never abstract it's not modern art that it That genre doesn't occur to them in the ancient world.

They have finally in late Roman sculpture, there's very old people with wrinkles, but

it still conveys a very powerful human emotion of aging.

And I don't think they would recognize as art what we now call art.

And in this context,

do you get invitations to speak or to teach at these major universities and their art department, given what you've done?

I get no invitations

from schools.

I get very little press from mainstream media.

I am followed very

much by the general populace.

And

I have to say, the right, the conservative,

not even conservative right.

It's really people with values are very interested in what I'm doing.

And because I'm saying form, aesthetics, and philosophy are one.

And

there's a reason for this National World War I memorial because I'm doing something that is on sacred ground.

It is about sacred history and sacred human beings that gave and dedicated their lives to something that is horrible.

War is horrible.

I hate war.

I grew up in Vietnam era.

but I have a great love for humanity.

And so the art that I have made is in in recognition of our humanity.

And

I'm fighting against this whole idea that art is entertainment.

It's not.

If you go back to the cave paintings of Lascau, these are paintings that were done in prehistoric times.

I'm sure your audience knows.

Those paintings were done for survival,

so that they would have animals in the hunt.

They're painted on those walls so that when they went to the hunt, hunt, they would actually capture and kill and have enough to eat and see the light of the next day.

And so I'm saying, let's return to that.

We're not in that place today, but we do want to take heed to the fact that we have mortality.

So with the energy that we have been given, use it wisely.

It is a sacred gift.

And that's what my art represents.

We're going to be right back.

We're with Sabine Howard, Howard, the sculptor of the soon-to-be

shown in September 13th in Washington, the World War I Monument.

We'll be right back.

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And we're right back with Sabine Howard.

But don't you think, Sabine, that the fact that your design and your entry was chosen, because there must have been other non-figurative designs that were submitted.

And it seems that, and I can remember, as I emphasized before, Frederick Hart's kind of brief career, but I mean,

he did some things that you're doing.

Don't you think that the fact that you were chosen in this very competitive judgment is a good sign, don't you think?

That people either put pressure on the committee or the committee reflects a sense that the public has got a deep yearning.

I know they do for classical architecture.

They're sick of the Bauhaus square-ness.

And

when they go to Washington, they always go to classical buildings, the Supreme Court building or the Capitol.

And

so I think that things are changing.

Aren't you a little optimistic?

It seems like

you're the one man.

Yeah.

The

Centennial Commission, they're the people that ran the competition.

There was one man there, Mr.

Fountain, and he wanted the Shreddy Memorial done for the World War I Memorial.

That's why I was chosen.

A large part, 80% were digital type projects that were very

abstract and kind of corporate art, where it doesn't offend anybody, where it doesn't say much of anything.

And so I was when I won the project under because Edwin basically selected me, he said, I want you to make something that will make people interested in World War I and show them what World War I looked like.

So I don't want something that's boring and quiet.

I need something that's very activated and

drives that emotion forward to the visitor that comes to see it.

So yes, I am very enthusiastic about it, but I think we do have a serious problem in our schools because the schools are not teaching this type of art.

They're teaching stuff that is more about how they can run their business.

And we have to rebuild from that place because I know there are a lot of kids out there that they love the superheroes.

You know, those movies are just.

over the place.

And there's a reason they're all over the place.

People love heroes.

They love the idea of being elevated, of like, wow,

I have a possibility of of achieving something with my life and so the whole idea the philosophy the aesthetics and the form like i said they're all together it's and it's about not victimization victimization is old it's done it doesn't get you anywhere it's a it's a leveling of the playing field so you you this sculpture every single figure the 38 figures they're all heroic they are all self-responsible and they are all very clearly you know a specific character derivative of a specific model so i use veterans that saw combat i put their faces on that wall it's it's very clear that those are soldiers because it comes from afghanistan and iraq rangers marines uh navy seals that all saw horrible horrible things and and it's same

Same thing from 100 years ago, just it's a different floor.

And so I made a piece not necessarily about, it is about war, but it is about humanity.

And all those figures are intertwined.

They're all relational.

And it's a statement about, you know,

our world and what it can be.

We're not there yet, but it shows where we can go.

Did you pick the title or was that given to you, the weight of sacrifice, or did that influence you?

Is that the formal title

of the project?

Way to sacrifice is what Joe Weischar, the 25-year-old kid who brought me along, he came up with that.

And then I changed it once I had made the story.

I composed it.

I did 25 iterations with Centennial Commission over nine months.

My wife, Tracy Slattin, who's the videographer and doing the documentary on this piece called Heroic, she

told me one day at breakfast, she said, you're doing Joseph Campbell's hero's journey here.

And I was, what is that?

And she educated me on what the hero's journey is.

And so I came up with a soldier's journey, which is the hero's journey, age-old cultural tradition played forward into the contemporary modern era.

Everybody, we're talking to Sabin Howard, and he is the, he's,

just finished the World War I memorial sculpture.

I think it's in Pershing Park, isn't it?

As I remember, it's going to be.

Yeah, it's coming.

It's coming.

And

you also,

besides your work as a sculpture,

is it you and your spouse, Tracy Slattin, wrote a book called The Art of Life?

Yes, she did.

What was that about?

What was that about?

Yeah, well, we wrote a book about the sculpt.

The last sculpture I did before I got into this project,

I had a vision.

I wanted to make art like Michelangelo.

So

the final sculpture that I did was called an Apollo sculpture.

I spent 3,500 hours on a single figure.

And I wanted to make a Renaissance quality art today.

And I finished that piece in 2011.

And it was a buildup to that sculpture and all the pieces that I had done to get there.

And I did this giant unveiling

in Chelsea, New York.

I got my own gallery, ran my own business,

redid all the lighting, and then I did the unveiling and nothing happened.

And I realized this is not going to work.

The book was done with that sculpture to bring us to that place.

But ultimately, that show brought me in front of Frank Geary for the Eisenhower Memorial, which I then connected with.

We didn't meet eye to eye, and I didn't continue with him because he didn't, he fired me basically.

But that put the bug in my ear that you need to make public art.

And so, when the World War I Memorial came about,

I entered it.

And so,

that's the story of that book, how it got me to this project.

I know if people that are listening are going to be very interested in your work, what you're doing.

How would they find out more about you or if they could do the, you know, they could promote you or help you?

Do you have a website or where would they go?

Well, we have Sabin, S-A-B-I-N, SabanHoward.com.

And then you can find me on X, again, Sabin Howard, and on Instagram as well, Sabin Howard Sculpture.

And then we have heroicdocumentary.com, which is the documentary that will be released next spring by Tracy L.

Slattin.

That sounds great.

I've taught for 20 years,

even though I work at Stanford University at the Hoover Institution.

I teach

Western Civ classics, ancient history at Hillsdale College three weeks, four weeks, depending on the course each year in the fall.

And one of the nice things of going to that campus is I always look at the sculpture.

They have Churchill, they have Mark.

It seems that that's a place that really honors figurative art.

And I've noticed they've got some brilliant sculptures there.

I wonder,

I think you're someone that

would be, I hope that they reach out for you because they are big promoters of exactly what you're talking about, the return of classical sculpture in the United States.

I would like that.

I would like to have other people that I could talk about this with.

I think you would be a wonderful if you went out for a week or two artists and residents because the campus has

five or six,

maybe 150% of life size of great figures in Western civilization, Frederick Douglass, etc.

And it's and they really and they have a classical Romanesque cathedral there.

And I hope, I hope, I hope, I know we have a lot of Hillsdale faculty that listen to us, but I think the idea of Sabine Howard visiting Hillsdale and giving a few lectures about figurative art in America would be wonderful.

Do you have a following, Sabine?

Do you have younger people that come and seek you out to learn the craft in America?

Not so much, because it's really the last nine years were dedicated

to this project.

I didn't do anything else.

I took weekends off, but basically worked all the time on it.

The sculptors were

in nine years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the sculptors I had, they couldn't keep up.

I kept one sculptor, Charlie Mostow.

And at the end, it was just basically Charlie and myself sculpting.

It's kind of like a very Herculean task.

Were you ever in doubt that your health or your would hold up, that you could do it?

That seems like a classic, that reminds me of Phidias and the Chris Ephentine statue of Zeus in the Parthenon.

I mean, it took him years to do that.

I'm not...

your average person.

I broke my clavicle bike riding.

I ride bikes every day.

And

I continued working working the next day with a broken clavicle.

So that's pretty much whatever it took.

I had to do it.

I look, Victor, I guess what I'm saying is I saw how important this mission and job was.

And it was almost like a deployment where it doesn't matter what you get hit with, you just have to do it.

There's no excuses.

It was just show up and do it.

And there's no inspiration in being an artist at this level.

You just do what you're supposed to do.

And I'm very, very lucky that I had an education that gave me the structure that would give me the tools, the know-how to problem solve because every day there was something that went wrong.

I can imagine.

I can imagine.

You know, I feel bad because we were originally scheduled for 35 minutes, but this has been so fascinating.

We've kept.

uh sabine howard for almost an hour and now you know how to contact him and uh i know he's going to be very busy in the next year but what he's doing is very important I think all of us, according to our station, should try to promote figurative art and return of classical sculpture, but especially Sabin's work.

And thank you so much for being with us.

And I hope you'll come on again after

the project is finished and we can look back at it after it's maybe next year and we'll see how the public reacts.

But I think we know how they're going to react.

And very much I'd like to do that.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

And this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

And we've been very lucky to be talking for nearly an hour with Sabin Howard.