Sabin Howard and the Return of Modern Classicism

Art can tell a civilization what it believes about itself.

If a culture believes human beings are sacred, purposeful, and capable of rising toward something higher, that belief shows up in its monuments, its buildings, its public spaces, and the way it shapes beauty. If a culture loses that belief, the loss appears there too.

That is the tension at the center of Sabin Howard’s work and his philosophy. As one of the leading practitioners of modern classicism, Howard has spent decades pushing against the currents of a contemporary art world he sees as detached from beauty, transcendence, and the dignity of the human person. His answer has not been to complain from the sidelines. It has been to build.

After creating A Soldier’s Journey, the sculptural centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC, he set his sights on something even larger: a monumental public work in Utah called the Grand Liberty Arch. For Howard, this is not simply another commission. It is a cultural statement about history, faith, freedom, human agency, and the kind of nation America still has the power to become.

Starting from nothing and choosing purpose

Howard’s story does not begin with the polished certainty people often imagine successful artists must have had from childhood. He describes reaching a turning point at nineteen when he realized he was wasting his life and needed direction. That moment became a decision to pursue art seriously, even though he was starting with almost no practical knowledge of how the art world worked.

He has spoken about calling an art school and being told he needed a portfolio, then having to ask what a portfolio even was. That detail matters because it reveals the foundation of everything that followed. His path was not built on early privilege in technique or insider access. It was built on discipline.

He approached art the way an athlete approaches training. He drew every day. He practiced relentlessly. He learned by repetition, by failure, by showing up, and by refusing to quit. Over time, that discipline evolved into something larger than technical skill. It became a way of seeing.

For Howard, artistic education was never just about making objects. It was about learning to perceive reality through a tradition rooted in Western civilization. In that older understanding, art was connected to proportion, truth, metaphysics, beauty, and the spiritual order of the world. It was not merely self-expression. It was a search for alignment between the human soul and the structure of creation.

That way of thinking shaped the artist he became.

Why the old masters still matter

Howard’s early idea of art was shaped by the giants of the Renaissance. Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo represented, for him, what great art was supposed to do. Their work carried skill, yes, but also coherence, moral seriousness, and reverence for the human form.

That reverence is central to modern classicism. In Howard’s hands, classicism is not nostalgia. It is not an attempt to live in the past. It is a conviction that certain discoveries about beauty, anatomy, harmony, and meaning were true then and remain true now.

He sees the human figure as one of the deepest subjects art can explore because the body is not accidental. It reveals order, design, and personhood. A culture that can no longer depict the human figure with dignity, strength, and emotional depth has usually lost confidence in the human being itself.

This is one reason he places such importance on life study. The years he spent drawing and sculpting from live models were not just exercises in accuracy. They were a prolonged encounter with human reality. That matters when you are trying to create monuments that people can feel in their bones, not simply decode with theory.

The collision with modern art

For all his devotion to classical traditions, Howard built his career in an era dominated by modern and postmodern assumptions. Over time he came to feel that he had hit a wall.

His criticism of modern art is not simply that it looks strange or rejects older methods. His objection is deeper. He argues that much of modern art severed itself from the sacred, from beauty as an objective pursuit, and from the idea that art should elevate human consciousness.

In his view, the modernist turn encouraged a culture of irony, fragmentation, and alienation. Instead of helping people experience a sense of belonging in the universe, it often reinforced the feeling that they are isolated, accidental, and spiritually homeless.

He points to a long historical break. In the older Western tradition, art was tied to a larger order. Human beings belonged to a cosmos shaped by divine intelligence. After the catastrophic violence of the twentieth century, especially World War I, that confidence cracked. When millions were killed on an unimaginable scale, many artists and thinkers began to question whether there was any moral or sacred order at all.

From there, Howard sees a chain reaction. Philosophies of loneliness and absurdity gained traction. Art began to mirror cultural disintegration. The authority to define art moved from transcendent standards to human ego and institutional approval. Once that happened, almost anything could be called art if the right gatekeepers said so.

His point is not that all modern art is worthless. It is that a civilization cannot live on negation forever. Art that only deconstructs eventually runs out of life.

Why World War I changed everything

One of the strongest parts of Howard’s worldview is the way he links artistic change to historical trauma.

World War I was, for him, more than a military event. It was a civilizational rupture. The scale of death was so vast that it shattered assumptions inherited from centuries of European culture. Villages, families, cities, and landscapes were devastated. The old confidence in progress and continuity was badly damaged.

That context matters because Howard later won the international competition to create the major sculptural centerpiece for the National World War I Memorial. Out of 360 global teams, his design was chosen. The project demanded not only technical mastery, but moral imagination. He had to create something that could hold grief, sacrifice, heroism, and historical memory in one unified visual statement.

The result was A Soldier’s Journey, a sixty foot long bronze composition with thirty eight figures and a total weight of roughly twenty five tons, installed near the White House. It was the culmination of years of work and one of the most ambitious figurative monuments produced in recent memory.

That project did more than establish Howard’s reputation. It clarified his mission. He did not want to move backward artistically after being stretched to that level. He wanted to continue forward into work that demanded everything he had.

A turning point after A Soldier’s Journey

After finishing the World War I memorial, Howard returned home and asked a simple but profound question: what now?

For someone who had just completed a landmark national project, the obvious path might have been to capitalize on prestige, accept elite commissions, and continue operating within established circles. Howard’s response went in another direction. He began asking about meaning and purpose in explicitly spiritual terms.

He has described this season as one in which he sought clarity from God about his path. Around that time, a conversation led him to take a closer look at Salt Lake City. What happened next felt decisive to him.

He visited Temple Square and immediately sensed something he believed was rare in the United States: sacredness.

That impression was strong enough that he called his wife and told her they needed to move there. Soon afterward, they packed up their home, crossed the country, and relocated to Utah. Howard frames that move not as a calculated career play, but as a calling.

He did not go because someone formally hired him. He went because he believed he had been sent.

What he found in Utah

Howard’s connection to Utah is philosophical as much as geographical. He sees in the state a combination of values that align with the kind of art he wants to make.

He points especially to four things:

• Faith
• Family
• Community
• Patriotism

To him, these are not sentimental slogans. They are living cultural forces that resist fragmentation. In a time when many places seem defined by isolation and social distrust, he found in Utah a stronger sense that people are bound together by shared commitments.

He also emphasizes kindness. That may sound small beside a discussion of civilization and monuments, but he treats it as evidence of a deeper moral reality. A society that still expects people to care for one another has preserved something precious.

Howard contrasts that with experiences from the East Coast, particularly in New York, where he often sensed a harsher social environment. What struck him in Utah was not only the friendliness of individuals, but the presence of a public ethos. He felt he had entered a place where moral and cultural continuity still existed in visible form.

Italy, America, and the shaping of an artistic mind

To understand why Temple Square had such an effect on him, it helps to understand Howard’s own formation.

He was born in New York City, but spent his earliest years in Italy, where his mother was from Turin. He often describes Italy as a place where cities were built with an awareness of human proportion and divine order. In that environment, architecture and public space did not feel arbitrary. They reflected assumptions about harmony, embodiment, and sacred meaning.

He connects that world to the classical inheritance that flowed from Greece to Rome to the Renaissance and beyond. In that tradition, the universe was intelligible. Human beings were made in the image of God. The built environment was meant to correspond, however imperfectly, to that truth.

Then he returned to America during a period of upheaval. The Vietnam era, Watergate, and the larger cultural convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s presented almost the opposite mood: distrust of inherited institutions, radical experimentation, and a willingness to tear down older social structures.

Howard sees both of those inheritances in himself. From Europe came a sense of order, proportion, and civilizational memory. From America came the refusal to accept limits, the drive to create, and the belief that a person can manifest a vision through sheer commitment.

That combination helps explain the force of his work. He is not simply a traditionalist preserving old forms. He is also deeply American in his ambition.

The Renaissance as a moral project

Howard does not talk about the Renaissance as merely an art historical period. He treats it as a model for civilizational renewal.

What he admires is not only the quality of the paintings and sculptures, but the underlying view of human life. In the Renaissance, especially in Florence, thinkers and artists wrestled with what a human being ought to do with the gift of life. The question was personal, moral, and spiritual.

What is your purpose?

Will you rise toward greater consciousness and virtue, or sink into a cruder form of existence?

Will you use freedom responsibly?

Howard believes that message remains timeless. He sees it echoed in the values he associates with Utah, especially agency and self responsibility. In his eyes, a healthy culture calls each person upward. It reminds people that their choices matter and that freedom is not the absence of structure, but the ability to choose the good.

That is why he speaks so often about light. For him, the great classical and Renaissance traditions are oriented toward illumination. Light reveals. Light clarifies. Light draws the human being upward. Art, at its best, should participate in that movement.

The collapse of institutional authority in the art world

Howard argues that the modern art establishment is in decline. He points to galleries, critics, museums, and universities losing their grip on the public imagination. The reason, in his view, is not simply economics or changing tastes. It is relevance.

When institutions stop speaking to what people actually recognize as beautiful, meaningful, and human, their authority weakens. Howard believes ordinary people remain a reliable measure here. They may not speak the language of elite criticism, but they know when they are standing before something that moves them.

He makes the case in plain terms. Put a revered modernist abstraction beside Michelangelo’s David, and most people will immediately identify which one feels like art in the deepest sense. That instinct matters. It suggests that the hunger for beauty and form has not disappeared. It has simply been ignored by institutions that mistook ideology for taste.

Howard reads the present moment as a crossroads. The old modernist framework is losing force, and the opportunity now is to recover a more human, coherent, and ennobling vision.

The Grand Liberty Arch

That larger vision takes physical form in Howard’s proposed Grand Liberty Arch.

He describes it as a monument designed to bring people together and raise consciousness. This is not a static object meant only to be admired from afar. It is meant to be encountered, walked through, and experienced in stages.

The monument is conceived as a four sided structure with relief panels surrounding a central arch. It operates on multiple levels at once. From a distance, it presents a unified image. Up close, it unfolds into a sequence of narratives and philosophical ideas about America.

Howard is careful to say that these panels are not a simple history lesson. They are a philosophy of American history. The point is not to catalog every event. The point is to interpret the nation’s development through recurring themes such as liberty, agency, responsibility, struggle, and vision.

The relief panels

The six relief panels around the monument are intended to trace the unfolding meaning of American freedom.

These scenes include:

• The Revolutionary era and the founding of the nation
• The signing of the Declaration of Independence
• Emancipation and the redefinition of liberty
• The struggle of settlers and Native Americans
• The Civil War and the fight for the flag
• Westward expansion and the movement into the twentieth century

Each panel contributes to the larger thesis of the monument. Freedom in America did not arrive as a finished product. It had to be fought for, defined, corrected, expanded, and carried forward through conflict.

The arch as experience

At the center stands the arch itself, which Howard imagines people physically walking through. That matters because the monument is designed as a passage, not only a display. It invites movement from one understanding to another.

Above the arch stand large scale figures representing principles that govern American life, including liberty and freedom. Howard imagines these elevated figures as partly unattainable, almost like ideals held above us.

By contrast, the figures on the lower reliefs are close enough to touch. This is one of his most compelling ideas. The monument places ideals above, but keeps history at human scale. The great principles may transcend us, but the struggle to live them belongs to flesh and blood people.

He has even described the project as a kind of modern Parthenon, not because it copies ancient architecture, but because it reclaims the role of monumental figurative art in public life.

The front, the sides, and the far side

Howard’s explanation of the monument unfolds almost like a guided walk.

On the front, the theme is inception: the raising of the flag and the founding of the nation. George Washington and the drama of the Revolution anchor this side, along with the act of declaring independence.

The sides transition into the nineteenth century, where American liberty becomes more complicated and more fiercely contested. Howard includes emancipation and the Civil War as pivotal chapters because they forced the country to ask what freedom truly meant and to whom it belonged.

Then, once you move through the arch to the opposite side, the emphasis shifts toward the West and the future. A giant wheel being pulled forward symbolizes motion, expansion, and the national drive toward what comes next.

The message is unmistakable: America is not just a memory. It is a continuing project.

Why figurative monuments still matter

Howard’s defense of public monumentality is inseparable from his defense of the human person. He rejects the idea that human beings are insignificant or disposable. For him, that assumption lies behind much of contemporary ugliness and social despair.

The answer is not flatter sentimentality. It is to make works that embody seriousness about human life.

Figurative monuments do this in a unique way because they return us to the body, to action, to expression, to sacrifice, to courage, to grief, and to aspiration. They remind us that history is lived by persons, not abstractions. They also insist that the human form is worthy of reverent attention.

Howard’s monuments are intended to do something modern institutions often avoid: affirm that human beings are sacred.

That is his phrase and his center of gravity. Everything else follows from it.

Salt Lake City as the right place for a national statement

Howard does not regard Utah as a provincial outpost that happened to welcome him. He sees Salt Lake City as strategically and symbolically important to the future of the country.

He points to its growth, its comparatively young population, and the larger energy of the region. In his mind, this is a rising city in a rising state, one with the demographic and cultural momentum to host a landmark national monument.

That future orientation is important. The Grand Liberty Arch is not meant to be tucked away as a local curiosity. Howard imagines it as a destination monument on the scale of major American symbols.

He invokes names like the Lincoln Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore. His point is not vanity. It is that America periodically creates places that help define who it is. He believes the country is ready for another one.

The scale of commitment

Howard does not speak about this project casually. He frames it as the fruit of more than four decades of labor and tens of thousands of hours studying and sculpting the human form.

That cumulative experience has led him to a conclusion: a monument of this scale and seriousness can change people. It can alter the way they understand themselves, their history, and their obligations.

He is now working through the practical steps that make such a monument possible, especially securing a final site and building support for funding. In his telling, location is the key anchor. Once the site is firmly designated, momentum and investment can follow.

He also intends to produce a large physical model for the nation’s 250th birthday, an eight foot three dimensional version that can be shared more broadly and help people grasp the full vision.

Walking away from other opportunities

One of the clearest signs of Howard’s seriousness is the opportunity he says he declined. He was approached about designing a project connected to the Garden of Heroes in Washington, but chose not to pursue it.

He presented that decision as a statement about the importance of Salt Lake City and the monument he wants to build there. In other words, this is not a side project squeezed in between other prestigious jobs. It is the work he has decided to prioritize.

That choice reveals something essential about Howard’s temperament. He is not merely chasing visibility. He is trying to place his energy where he thinks it can matter most.

Modern classicism as a living movement

The title often attached to Howard is that he is a foremost authority on modern classicism. What makes that phrase useful is not just that he understands classical methods. It is that he treats classicism as alive.

Modern classicism, in his hands, does not reject modern life. It confronts it. It asks whether the modern world can recover form without becoming sterile, transcendence without becoming fake, and beauty without becoming decorative fluff.

Howard believes it can. But only if artists and communities are willing to reject the idea that greatness belongs permanently to the past.

That is part of why his projects are so ambitious. Small gestures would not be enough to challenge the assumptions he is fighting against. If the public square has been surrendered to either blandness or fragmentation, then the answer has to be bold enough to reset expectation.

The deeper question behind all of this

Beneath the debates about modern art, public monuments, and architecture lies a simpler question: What do we think a human life is for?

Howard returns to that again and again.

Purpose matters. Agency matters. Responsibility matters. A nation needs public art that reflects those truths or it gradually forgets them. If monuments no longer call people upward, then the culture starts to drift downward almost by default.

That is why he talks about light and darkness so often. He is not using them as decorative opposites. He is naming two trajectories for a civilization.

One trajectory moves toward despair, fragmentation, irony, and the reduction of the human person.

The other moves toward illumination, meaning, and a renewed confidence that beauty and truth belong together.

Howard believes America is being forced to choose between those paths again. His answer is not a manifesto alone. It is bronze, stone, scale, and form. It is the decision to make something worthy of the country’s highest ideals even while acknowledging its wounds and failures.

Why this vision resonates now

There is a reason Howard’s message lands with force right now. Many people feel surrounded by noise, cynicism, and cultural exhaustion. They are tired of being told that nothing is sacred, nothing is beautiful except by private preference, and nothing binds us together except temporary interest.

Howard offers a direct alternative. He argues that:

• Beauty is not arbitrary.
• History should be remembered with moral seriousness.
• Public art should serve the common good.
• Human beings are not expendable accidents.
• Faith, family, and country still matter.
• Great monuments can orient a culture.

Whether one agrees with every part of his diagnosis, there is no mistaking the coherence of the vision. It is rooted, unapologetic, and constructive.

A final thought on building what lasts

Some artists reflect the age they inherit. Others try to help reshape it. Howard clearly belongs to the second category.

His life and work suggest that civilization is not maintained by critique alone. At some point someone has to carve, build, cast, lift, and assemble. Someone has to give visible form to what a people says it believes.

That is what A Soldier’s Journey accomplished on the National Mall for the memory of sacrifice.

And that is what the Grand Liberty Arch aims to do in Salt Lake City for liberty, nationhood, and the sacred value of the human person.

If Howard is right, then the future of art will not be secured by ever more clever acts of detachment. It will be secured by a return to purpose, mastery, and spiritual seriousness.

Not a return backward.

A return upward.