Finance
How do you capture the tragedy of war? (with Sabin Howard)
Russ Roberts: Okay. What did you submit in the filing, both written and physical? By the way, I told the listeners, we’ll put up some videos where you can see what this looks like. It’s stunning, even on video. I’m sure it’s even more beautiful in person. But in video you get a real sense of how extraordinary both the finished work is, and the process, some videos of which are also available. And we’re going to talk about the process in a moment. But I’m curious what you submitted. Did you submit a miniature of the whole, or of one of the figures, or did you describe it? What is the nature of such a process in an international competition like this?
Sabin Howard: The submission was completely different from the way the project developed. We started with an idea of what we were capable of. And to win the project we had to go to five meetings to present.
And I made drawings of… I worked the same way as before. I work, I have models: everyday, ordinary people with very specific characters. And in the beginning I have rented uniforms that were real. I rented real uniforms, about 105 years old, and I started taking pictures and came up with an idea. I made two drawings. Those drawings took me about, I think, 140 hours each.
And then Joseph – Joe – came up with an idea for the park. The reason we won is twofold. We were given a park that had been built by Friedberg in the 1980s, and it had been a nice place with an ice skating rink right in front of the Willard Hotel. But at the time we started this competition – you have it here, it’s 35 years later – this park had fallen into disrepair. enormous decay. It was full of dilapidations and rubbish. And this is shocking, but maybe it’s not so shocking because this is 500 feet from the White House, so it looks like a garbage dump. So something had to be done.
And Joseph’s piece – Joe Weishar’s piece – in the entry was the closest of all 360 teams to preserving the bones and structure of that city park. And the competition’s cues were very specific. We need to create a memorial that will excite people, And we must maintain that city park. And he maintained the city park for the most of all 360 teams.
And for my part, after we went to two of the meetings, Edwin Fountain, who headed the Centennial Commission, said to me that he really liked the Grant Memorial in front of the Capitol, made by the sculptor Shrady. And I took that to heart; and I went to look at it; and I was very intrigued by it.
And in the end I’m going to say this is the best sculpture this country has has on American soil. It’s from a different generation. It is an artillery wagon pulled through the mud by horses. It’s very kinetic; it’s very emotional. And it’s exciting. It’s an exciting sculpture because as you walk around it this scene unfolds and you are drawn into it. And so you can 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 you work.’ I had been working more from a very elegant, aesthetic, esoteric base that was similar to Greco-Roman sculpture. So my work was very structured, very calm and not so dramatic.
And so I entered the competition with very dramatic drawings. And Joe used a computer to map a wall, for example. And we put some figures on that wall. And they thought it was a great idea, and it was the beginning.
Now I had to take that and completely transform that over the next year. I took 12,000 photos of models and worked again and again. I went back to Washington to meet with the Centennial Commission – all lawyers who had no artistic background, but had an idea of where they wanted to go.
And so it was… this is a difficult, challenging process because you’re working of someone and they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them. We are 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 very often.
And then there’s something that doesn’t happen often: most artists – and I’m not trying to be disparaging here – but because we have to make a living, we go with a client. I didn’t, I led the team. I said, ‘This is how it should be,’ and we had several arguments. And I stuck to the vision I needed to play moving forward.
And the reason I stuck to that vision was because I knew I was doing things correctly, given the number of iterations I did. It wasn’t like I thought, I came up with the first one; I thought, ‘Yes, this is it.’ No. I kept absorbing the criticisms that we would get, that I would do the presentations; and then this panel of lawyers said, “Hey, we don’t like this way this is. We have to change this.’
And I made some changes to the image that I think would have been very challenging for other artists. I went to… I was really pushed to my limits.
And this sculpture then had to go through the Commission of Fine Arts, which is a very, very difficult thing. They held up the Eisenhower Memorial for fifteen years. Granted, it’s a piece of trash. But they held their ground us a year and a half into it, and they know nothing about sculpture. They were all landscape architects.
So the challenge there, and the fact that they sided with preserving the park, was another obstacle for us. And eventually we got through it.
And then, okay, after that it’s like, ‘I have to shape it.’ So this is a huge task. It really is a hero’s journey in itself.
