Reviving the art of Renaissance sculpture: the work of Sabin Howard

Associated media

The Art of Life

By Sabin Howard and Traci L. Slatton

This book is novelist Traci L. Slatton’s eulogy to the work of her figurative sculptor husband Sabin Howard. Slatton tells the story of Howard’s journey from his first breath-drawn encounter in the 1960s with Michelangelo’s Day, Night, Dusk and Dawn in the Medici chapels in Florence, Italy, at the age of 14. Inspired by what he saw, Howard’s intention was to recreate this Greco-Roman tradition of beauty through figurative art in his own vision.

In the art world at that time, however, realism and the human body was considered to be a lesser form of art than abstract expressionism. Undaunted, Howard studied at art school with teachers Walter and Martha Erlebacher and learnt the system they had ‘reinvented’ from Renaissance models: proportion, structure and translation of the movement of the human body. He followed this with a two-year apprenticeship with Roman sculptor Paolo Carosone, four years developing his drawing skills at his studio in New York, and finally a refresher course in the structure of the figure at the New York Academy of Art.

Howard consolidated what he had learned by teaching at the New School, and at this time made the transition from drawing to sculpting. When eventually he began his own monumental sculptures, if a mould failed to fill properly, Howard discovered a new type of form, that of the fragmented statue that encapsulated the essence of the work.

Slatton has termed Howard’s figurative sculpture united with beauty ‘Unitive realism’, defining it as ‘the avant-garde of the next movement of art’, one which connects a past tradition with the present/future, the viewer with something greater than their individuality, namely ‘the realm of aesthetics, truth, and spirit’, and the artist’s human vision with the concrete object of perception. This is a broad-based definition, which one could argue, belongs to all artists. If Slatton is claiming a new genre of work for Howard’s sculpture, she may need a more specific manifesto.

Slatton also states that good sculpture requires active observation, walking around the three-dimensional figure and sensing the sculptor’s energy. Accordingly it would have been helpful to have been given fuller captions for the images, telling us where they are currently held so that the reader could see them in situ for themselves, should they so desire.

In order to place her husband’s work in context, Slatton has selected a series of sculptures across time, including Balikligöl Man, roughly 13,500 years old, discovered in Urfa, Turkey in 1993, the figure of Egyptian King Menkaure and his wife, dated at 2540 BCE, the group of Greek sculptors contemporary with or soon after the time of Socrates, including Kritios, Polykleitos, Lysippos and Praxiteles, through to, amongst others, Donatello, Michelangelo and Rodin.

Slatton continually emphasizes the importance, even necessity, of knowing the tradition of sculpture that emanated from the Renaissance. She offers insights into the sculptor’s process: ‘sculpture is all about light; about the play of light and shadow…. [and] as the viewer walks around [a] piece… each of the eight principal views has to be compelling, or the sculpture fails’. Her writing is also either effusive: ‘[Bernini] sculpted flesh so that you want to grab it and squeeze it and feel the juice run out over your fingers’, or scornful: ‘[Michelangelo’s David] ushered in what art historians call the High Renaissance or, when they’re being really pretentious, the Cinquecento’.

Whilst one appreciates the passion Slatton shows for sculpture and understands her personal bias towards her husband’s work (she states that his Apollo is ‘the finest standing male nude since Michelangelo’s David’), the book is mired by such emotional writing, which makes it read like an early draft. Her personal views on sculpture and her polemics against the ‘vacuous haut monde’ have not served the book’s intended outcome of elucidating the fine and distinctive work of her husband.

It is only in the latter part of the book, where Slatton simply outlines Howard’s process, rather than placing her ideas onto the works, that she allows Howard’s work to speak for itself. The photographs detailing the process of creating a bronze are informative of the meticulous, slow and painstakingly laborious work of creating a figurative sculpture. Like all artists’ sketchbooks, which are invaluable for what they tell us of their processes and their thinking, the 28 pages of Howard’s original conceptual drawings make absorbing and instructive reading. So that the images won’t degrade and discolour over time, the book has been printed on sensuous white archival quality paper, acid- and lignin-free.

There is much that is valuable in this book concerning Sabin Howard’s journey towards becoming a figurative sculptor and the process he has come to use in the last 29 years. Unfortunately the vision that Howard holds and creates is not matched by the writing in the first half of the book.

The Art of Life   by Sabin Howard and Traci L. Slatton is published by Parvati Press, New York City, 2011. 248 pp. 190 col photographs, 29 mono  illus. ISBN  978-0-9846726-0-8