Jeremy Black joins me to discuss “The Scream of Steam,” his feature for the January 2025 issue of The New Criterion.
THE NEW CRITERION, February 2025
Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South Bronx and found him surrounded by a pantheon in plaster and bronze (see “Gallery chronicle,” May 2007). At the time, Howard was completing a statue of Apollo. As with all of his work, this multiyear labor, built up through tens of thousands of hand-applied dots of plasteline, was destined to be cast in an alloy, one might say, of his own autobiography. Howard sculpts in epic and myth, including his war against our cultural status quo. He has long approached the plastic arts as if he were a Prometheus, a fallen god out to redeliver that creative fire from Mount Olympus.
I doubt I was the only observer who felt a mixture of elation and apprehension when, in 2016, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission selected Howard out of some 350 submissions to design the centerpiece for its new war memorial on the Washington Mall. Here was a creative battle to end all art wars. I feared one unelected agency after another would wear down this aesthetic belligerent to a stalemate, if not gassing him into unconditional surrender.
It did not help matters that the designated site of Pershing Park, just around the corner from the White House, already contained a design from 1981 that had been the result of an earlier competition involving no less than Robert Venturi, Richard Serra, and M. Paul Friedberg—establishment grandees all. True, their site had been in decline for decades. First it was shoehorned into a sunken ice rink, then a swamp designed by the firm of Oehme, van Sweden, and finally a brownfield site of broken water features, abandoned postmodern pavilions, and a derelict garage for the Zamboni. Despite the sorry state, preservationists were quick to panic in this needle park as they dug up Kodachromes from opening day, 1981. Any commission would need to accommodate Pershing Park’s bones—including its existing monumental plaza dedicated to General John J. Pershing, which had been designed by Wallace K. Harrison with a statue by Robert White from 1983—even as it looked to create something revivified and new.
The location of the memorial site was just one of Howard’s many troubles. Our nation’s art-and-architecture insiders were sure to see the selection of Howard and his competition partner, Joseph Weishaar—a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Arkansas, an architect who did not yet have his license at the time of the announcement—as interlopers in what was supposed to be an exclusive lawn party for pedigreed insiders. After all, the last starchitect to dip his beak in the National Mall was none other than Frank Gehry. In 2020, he left it with an anti-monument made of chicken wire, purportedly dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Of course, the war over the National Mall goes back much further. In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, submitted when she was an undergraduate at Yale (whew!), was a minimalist broadside against the capital’s classical aspirations. The assault was only somewhat countered two years later by the addition to the site of Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculpture of multiracial brothers-in-arms.
Sure enough, as I tuned in to view the endless agency meetings in the years following the commission announcement, it seemed as though Howard and Weishaar’s concept, called “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would be bled through a thousand bureaucrats. What initially called for three walls of engravings, all designed to surround a freestanding battle sculpture and an elevated lawn, was eventually reduced through eighteen different iterations to a single wall of sculptural relief less than sixty feet in length. Weishaar’s elevated lawn, meanwhile, returned back to Friedberg’s sunken plaza, now merely modified and tidied up, with Howard’s sculptural frieze essentially replacing the old Zamboni dock. (gwwo Architects, meanwhile, stepped in as managing architects, with David Rubin Land Collective serving as the landscape designer.)
The pressures might have been enough to shell-shock any creative soul. For Howard, it appears to have fired up some essential distillation, encouraged by his commissioners, including Edwin Fountain, as well as by Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society. Relief sculpture going back to antiquity has a special ability to convey the cycles of war. Unlike freestanding statuary, its program can be episodic. Rather than a single moment, relief can contain many moments across a single frame progressing from left to right, as for example up the spiral of Trajan’s Column in Rome.
Howard appears to have drawn from numerous sources as he recast his sculpture into what he titled A Soldier’s Journey—a long frame of a single figure in multiple scenes as he turns from his daughter and wife, marches off to war, faces the ferocity and terrors of the trenches, and returns home to his family. Howard’s wife, the novelist Traci L. Slatton, as project manager recorded the evolution online in preparation for a documentary about the commission called Heroic, to be released this summer. She also served as a model for a nurse in the composition; their teenage daughter provided the model for the girl at the start and end of the frieze.
For inspiration Howard looked to Ghiberti’s baptistry doors in Florence and John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, that epic processional painting of blinded soldiers from 1919 based on Sargent’s own frontline observations, now in London’s Imperial War Museum. The minimalism of Lin and the realism of Hart both seemed to become reflected in the synthesis of the evolving relief. So too the turmoil of Henry Merwin Shrady’s sculptural battle groups for his tripartite Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, which leads up to the United States Capitol from the west. That work took Shrady twenty years to complete and accelerated his untimely death in 1922 at just age fifty, a fact that did not bode well for Howard. The Grant Memorial was only completed by Shrady’s studio assistants Edmond Amateis and Sherry Fry. (Shrady’s pendant equestrian statue in Charlottesville of Robert E. Lee, completed by Leo Lentelli in 1924 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, was removed and melted down in 2023 as a consequence of the moral panics of 2017. This is just one of the many recent crimes against our sculptural patrimony that has yet to be redressed.)
Howard’s most significant invention in A Soldier’s Journey was surely mothered by the necessities of his impending deadline and what he could fully do with the sculptural space that remained for him. For an artist who could spend years building up a single statue, a multipart relief of more than three dozen figures, all over life size, could quickly add up to a terminal Shrady sum. A manual artist, Howard turned to digital solutions. At first he took some twelve thousand pictures of his models, posed in authentic period uniforms, with his cell phone. The many models—a mix of actors and military veterans along with his family members—recited period poetry during the long posing sessions. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, proved to be particularly relevant to the emerging sculptural story:
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
To advance his production schedule further, Howard relocated for nine months to New Zealand, where he worked with Wētā Workshop, the concept-design company behind the Lord of the Rings franchise. Through Wētā’s digital modeling software, he developed and tweaked his sculptural maquettes to secure commission approval. With his models and their wardrobes in tow, Howard then traveled to the Cotswolds in England to work with Steve Russell Studios and the Pangolin Editions foundry. Here he positioned his models one by one in a 360-degree photogrammetry rig—a cage of 156 inward facing cameras feeding three-dimensional scanners—for a final round of imaging. After digital editing, Pangolin milled foam mannequins of these figural forms, which were left coated with a thin layer of clay.
Beyond merely accelerating his development time, this digital process significantly altered Howard’s final results. His use of digital modeling not only helped him to arrange his figures but also allowed him to build his relief more fully in the round, with increasingly true-to-life complexity. With the foam figures back in his studio, now a garage in Englewood, New Jersey, he sliced and diced slivers off of them while slapping on additional layers of plasteline. The action added an expressionistic finish and an urgent manual dash to the underlying digital printouts. The entire assembly was then cast by Pangolin in large bronze sections. In a final step, Howard patinated his bronze in dark gray with a brush and blowtorch.
Technological advancements have always upended creative practice in both destructive and generative ways that can be long debated. A century ago, the sculptor Paul Manship lamented the imposition of the Janvier Reducing Machine even as the mechanical lathe allowed sculptors to rescale their reliefs as never before (see my “Tokens of culture” in The New Criterion of December 2024).
A Soldier’s Journey, by Sabin Howard, The National WWI Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photo: James Panero
For an artist long dedicated to the importance of manual craft, Howard’s digital intervention has created a hybrid sculpture. A Soldier’s Journey is not classical in its own right. It is rather a modern work that speaks to the classical tradition, quite literally, through a contemporary lens. Viewing the completed assembly soon after its unveiling last September—most revealingly in the stark spotlights that illuminate the monumental site at night and shimmer in its reflecting pools—I sensed I was experiencing not traditional sculpture at all but rather actors frozen on a stage. The uncanny-valley hyperrealism of Howard’s digital scans has left us with a cinematic diorama caked in plasteline mud. In memorializing a war that defied all convention and accelerated our modern era, this end result may ultimately be more successful than any purely classical relief. Staring at his figures, which seem to stare right back as they march and spin and cry through the muck, I regarded the work as an unalloyed triumph.
It should come as little surprise that movie-making, an art form coming into its own at the time of the First World War, should have proven so successful at depicting the flashing terrors of that modern slaughter—and in turn influencing more traditional creative forms. King Vidor’s 1925 film The Big Parade remains one of the finest reflections of that conflict and deeply informed the cinematic painting style of Andrew Wyeth. The films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and, more recently, 1917 (2019) have all arguably done more to keep World War I in the popular consciousness than any other form of art.
Howard has taken up this cinematic idiom to give us a sculptural statement on the First World War that manages to make its century-old realities newly real. At the same time, his composition speaks to the history of relief in bold new ways. I was particularly struck by his use of traditional relief framing at the start of the composition that then appears to crumble away in the mire of battle. Further along, an American flag rises above the relief’s upper frame to signal the new standard on the horizon and the turning point in the war. Throughout the deep relief, the helmets and weapons and gas masks that are scattered about appear as though they could almost be kicked off the stone plinth and into the cascading fountain and reflecting pool beneath them.
At the unveiling ceremony, Howard aptly reflected on the message of his figures and what he hoped to achieve with a monument that gives new life to an old conflict:
There are no victims here. They are all heroes. They are all moving forward, calling upon their better selves, and giving unstintingly to their country, to protect what we so often take for granted, our freedom to choose what we will do with the gift of life.
THE NEW CRITERION, January 2025
On “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” at the Neue Galerie, New York.
For an artist now best known for his desiccated portraits, “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes,” on view at New York’s Neue Galerie through mid-January, adds some necessary water to the flower pot.1 With their exposed, contorted flesh, Schiele’s figures even today appear shriveled and deathlike—and unnecessarily brutalized. Those uncompromising bodies seemed to come out of nowhere when Schiele first conjured them up like an act of necromancy in 1910—a mad, mannered departure from whatever figuration had preceded them, even for the artist himself. Writing in 1912, the art critic Adalbert F. Seligmann took note of Schiele’s
gruesome-fantastical caricatures . . . ghostly lemurs with bloody spider fingers, mutilated, half-decomposed corpses, as if caught in a distorting mirror . . . . [T]he painting seems to have been taken from thousand-year-old graves.
Depending on how you take your art, such an assessment could be considered damning or the highest praise.
That same year, far from helping the case, Schiele was arrested for the kidnapping and defilement of an underage girl. The Neue show glosses over this incident, as those interested in this artist’s reputation have long swept questions of Schiele’s character under the Secessionist rug. Although he was acquitted of these particular charges, Schiele was found guilty of public immorality for displaying his nude figures in his studio with minors present and sentenced to twenty-four days in jail. Such early indictments against Schiele might still find a sympathetic jury today—and did, in fact, in 2018. The hundredth anniversary of his death at age twenty-eight came just in time for #MeToo and saw the artist’s posthumous appraisal unfairly brought before the court of social-media opinion.
Egon Schiele, Krumau Townscape, 1912, Oil on panel, Private Collection.
The Neue Galerie’s current exhibition—curated by Christian Bauer, the founding director of the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems—introduces some exculpatory evidence to the shock and awe of Schiele’s stark figures while also revealing the “life” and “landscape” that in fact occupied a majority of his output. Compared to the one-hundred-thirty-odd nudes and portraits he created in his lifetime, Schiele composed nearly one hundred seventy landscapes, townscapes, and natural scenes during his intense but brief period of creative work.
Rather than the prurient cosmopolitan that his ill-formed nudes might suggest, at least according to this exhibition and its rather impenetrable catalogue of essays in translation, Schiele was a spiritually driven provincial who sought the divine in nature. Born in the hinterlands outside Vienna in a stationmaster’s apartment on the line to the imperial city, Schiele as a boy filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the local countryside. One of his early interests was the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. His first exhibition took place at the Augustinian monastery in Klosterneuburg, where for a time he studied and lived. In 1906, at the age of sixteen, he arrived at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as its youngest student, where he burned to reveal a pastoral religiosity through his work.
This is not all to suggest that Schiele was a prime candidate to join his local Rotary Club. In his 1979 book Symbolism, Robert Goldwater identified the late nineteenth-century fervor to “make emotion meaningful, by connecting it with humanity at large and by seeing nature as its reflection.” For Vincent van Gogh, for example, that meant making “each object such a microcosm of an animized universe vibrating with his own feelings, that it is, in this new sense, a symbol—of himself and of a pantheistic spirit.” For Schiele (who was most likely exposed to Van Gogh through exhibitions in Vienna in 1906 and 1909), a Romantic sense of place combined with an ardent Symbolist faith in the power of depicting the cycles of life and death—which in turn flowed through the godlike self-conception of this headstrong, wunderkind artist. “A divine human being always leads the crowd!” Schiele proclaimed. “So let it be said: that the artist is the only one who is the ruler, the dominator, of 100, 1,000, and 10,000, that he creates only for himself, because it is the same as breathing.” Never one for understatement, he continued, “An artist above all is the one of great spiritual gifts.”
Egon Schiele, Town Among the Greenery (The Old City III), 1917, Oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York.
Schiele’s gift, at least as he understood it, was for revealing the spirits of life and making them manifest in oil. “I can speak with all living creatures, even with plants and stones; speak, speak directly into their face, into their essence,” he said.
Every tree has its face; I recognize its kind of eyes, its kind of arms, its components, its organism. I want to be addressed by everything!—My act is the answer.
For Schiele, God “breathes much more clearly in a field.” As the Viennese art collector Rudolf Leopold said of Schiele, he approached “landscape envisioned as a cathedral.”
In his interests in animism and pantheism, Schiele found ready affinity with the lingering pre-Christian sentiments that took quick root in Austria through such social scientists as Erwin Hanslik, a now largely forgotten figure who was the founder of the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute of Cultural Research) in Vienna, one who gathered the artistic elite around his belief in a Weltkulturgesellschaft (world-cultural society). Working directly with Schiele on the supposed connections between landscape and skull shape, Hanslik saw in Austria, in particular, a “humanity as it truly is, as an earth person, as a powerful, earth-bound spiritual being.”
When not dabbling in phrenology (Schiele even provided the phenotypic head illustrations for Hanslik’s book Wesen der Menschheit—“the essence of humanity”—which is now about as démodé as it gets), the artist worked through several fine but indistinct watercolors and gouaches in Klosterneuburg. Silhouette of Klosterneuburg (ca. 1906, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten) and The Blacksmith’s Courtyard in Klosterneuburg (1906, Stiftsmuseum, Kosterneururg) speak to Schiele’s interest in local topographies but give little hint of the compositional innovations he developed over the next few years.
Egon Schiele, City on the Blue River I (Dead City I), 1910, Gouache with glue & black crayon on paper, Private Collection.
In 1907, as a student in Vienna, Schiele met Gustav Klimt, his elder by nearly thirty years, who became a mentor and influence—and who happened to be the subject of a revelatory landscape show at the Neue Galerie less than a year ago (see “Summer lights” in The New Criterion of June 2024). For the next few years, Schiele worked though Klimt-like modes of composition that interwove figure and ground into a dappled whole. Summer Night (1907, private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York) and Drying Laundry (1908, Kallir Family Foundation) are two of these small highlights of oil on cardboard—or rather “lowlights,” as their indistinct forms and fading illumination convey a haunting presence. Current of Youth (Danaë) (1909, the Lewis Collection), an astonishing concatenation of figure and ground in which a nude melts into the sinuous vines of a dark stream, reveals Schiele’s full debt to Klimt and announced the young artist’s arrival when shown in his first group exhibition in Vienna that year. (If only this nuanced work had been hung lower down at the Neue and not in the glare of gallery lights above a mantelpiece.)
Schiele’s true compositional breakthrough occurred the following year, when he stripped away this integration of figure and ground and placed his subjects—animal, vegetable, and mineral—in free-floating white relief. Sunflower I (1908, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), of falling petals and wilted leaves, set off by a scumbled white ground, hints at how this process began in his natural still lifes before influencing the progression of his portraiture.
A central gallery in this exhibition is titled “My Transformations” (with Schiele, it’s always me, me, me). Here we are presented with a suite of gnarled figures alongside his depictions of peasant jugs and chestnut trees. A gouache and pencil on paper titled Wilted Sunflower from 1912 (private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute) speaks most directly to the portraits here assembled in both composition and tonality. In Schiele’s monistic imagination, figures such as those in his Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910, private collection) and Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovšek) (1910, private collection) are merely the dry leaves and branches of plants in another form. By floating them in fields of dingy white, Schiele further conveys the provisional sketchiness of life—man as little more than stick figure, here revealed by a numinous artist–god as depicted in Self-Portrait in Peacock Waistcoat, Standing (1911, Ernst Ploil, Vienna).
Through such mortifications of the flesh, Schiele connected his art with the melancholy light of a particular central-European sensibility. “My essence—my putrescence,” is how this artist once summed things up. In his stick-bug portraits, squashed as though stepped on by society’s shoe, Schiele presents a vision of human metamorphosis that is Kafkaesque—or perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that Franz Kafka was Schielesque. For the painter, the Fall of Man and the season of fall came together in an imagination that fixated on the cycles of decay and rebirth in the Crucifixion. In his native Austria, Schiele saw his own Calvary Hill (with the tortured artist, of course, on that cross).
Egon Schiele, Sunflower I, 1908, Oil on cardboard, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten.
Rather than some Futurism, Schiele most strongly identified with the Gothic. In his punk appearance, he was himself the original goth. In the Neue’s largest gallery, titled “My Places,” we can see how his treatment of geometric forms and mottled color, set off by thick black lines, calls to mind nothing less than ecclesiastical stained glass. Houses by the River II (The Old City II) (1914, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) is a tour de force of translucent rectangles. Several of the works here are little more than sketches, a continuation of the artist’s interest in the local typologies of house, river, and street—Group of Houses on a Mountain (1912, Albertina, Vienna), Old Houses in Krumau (1914, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), and Supply Depot, Trento Branch: Exterior View with Notice Board (1917, private collection). The highlight in the mix is the Neue Galerie’s own Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1917). Here the triangular rooflines of a gemütlich village, surrounded by greenery, grow up through Schiele’s picture plane like the bark of an ancient tree.
It was Schiele’s fate never to take such root himself but rather to wither on the vine of youth. Itinerant as a boy even before his father’s attempted suicide and death, which sent him into the guardianship of his Bohemian uncle, Schiele was further uprooted by the First World War. In 1918, just days after his wife Edith Harms, six months pregnant, died of influenza, Schiele himself succumbed to the ravages of the Spanish Flu. A final, funereal gallery titled “My Self-Portraits” ends with the plaster Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918), a gift to the Neue Galerie from the scholar Alessandra Comini, who curated the museum’s blockbuster exhibition of Schiele portraits in 2014. Obsessed with depicting the cycle of life, Schiele was far from wrong in his early premonitions of death.
“Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 13, 2025. ↩