Sabin Howard’s engrossing 38-figure, high-relief sculpture—the centerpiece of Washington’s new National World War I Memorial, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of the White House and Treasury Department—takes a cinematic approach to sculptural narrative. It commemorates a civilization-transforming conflict in which 116,516 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded. The several scenes in what Howard calls his “movie in bronze,” portraying a soldier’s departure from home and family for war and its horrors and then his return, unfold from left to right in a work nearly 60 feet wide.
