Anthony Caro

Summary of Anthony Caro

Anthony Caro is widely considered the most important British sculptor since Henry Moore, a pioneer who took the older artist's characteristic figurative abstraction one step further, creating wholly abstract works which didn't bear obvious resemblance to any other objects. These works asked fundamental questions about the nature of sculpture as an artform: what it could be made out of; what, if anything, it had to look like; and how it might position itself in relation to the space of the gallery. Many of Caro's works seem to disintegrate and reform in front of the eye as the viewer walks round them, performing subtle commentaries on the boundaries between artistic and non-artistic space; or frame the gaps and surfaces around and in-between the works as of equal importance to the work itself. As a teacher, he influenced a whole generation of younger British sculptors, and though his critical and commercial success led some to view him as an institutional figure - an example to be kicked against - his works continue to excite and provoke by their genuinely radical formal innovations.

Accomplishments

• Caro's work enacts the movement from figurative to non-figurative abstraction which characterizes British sculpture of the 1950s-60s. Influenced primarily by American abstract artists of the same generation, Caro abandoned the anthropomorphic motifs of his early work in favor of dynamic, expressionistic assemblages of steel and other materials. His breakthrough 1963 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition represented a turning point in British sculpture, suggesting the possibilities opened up to sculptural form once its 'representational' function had been entirely eliminated.
• One of Caro's most innovative technical maneuvers was to integrate the spaces and surfaces around the sculpture into the work itself: removing his works from the plinth, he placed them directly on the gallery floor, or, as in the case of his Table Pieces, suspended them from the edges of flat surfaces. This encouraged a more interactive relationship with the work, encouraging viewers to approach them closely and to inspect them from every angle, interacting with them more as environmental features than privileged adornments to the gallery space.
• During the last few decades of his life, Caro began to work on a range of projects which blurred the boundaries between artistic and architectural design: what he called "sculpitecture". These pieces generally suggested - and, in the case of his iconic Millenium Bridge, literally performed - practical functions. This element of Caro's practice led him to collaborate with prestigious architects and engineers such as Norman Foster, and ensured the cultural ubiquity of his work. Any visitor to London who has crossed the Thames from St. Pauls Cathedral to the Tate Modern Gallery, for example, has walked over an Anthony Caro artwork, mostoften without even realizing it.

Important Art by Anthony Caro

Artwork Images

1955

Woman Waking Up

Anthony Caro's early sculptures differ greatly from the abstract works which he began to construct from welded steel from the early 1960s onwards, and for which he would become famous. Having served as Henry Moore's studio-assistant since around 1951, Caro's first pieces suggest the stimulus provided by the older artist's practice, but also Caro's attempt to wrest free from Moore's influence. Woman Waking Up is similar to Moore's work in its abstract anthropomorphic form, but eschews his direct carving technique in favor of the more old-fashioned process of modelling in clay.

Woman Waking Up was made by dropping soft clay from a height, creating an amorphous mass which was then manipulated into a figurative shape (based on the traditional sculptural form of the reclining nude). Utilizing a significant element of chance in the composition process, Caro created a work whose pitted and rough surface contrasted deliberately with the characteristically smooth patina of Moore's works in bronze and stone.

The critic Jorella Andrews argues that this work represents "a quest to try and find new parameters for sculpture, to push it as far as it could go, using relentless experimentation at a material and compositional level. Indeed, in their unformedness, these figurative works have themselves often been described as full of yearning: the body as experienced from the inside, striving to break out of its confines, to find definition and release." However, various aspects of the piece, including the broadly representative form, and the use of a base for the sculpture, indicate the scope of developments still to come in terms of the abstract character of Caro's work.

Bronze - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

1960

Twenty Four Hours

Twenty Four Hours is often described as Caro's first truly abstract sculpture, one which breaks away entirely from the conventions of figurative representation. As a student, and while working for Henry Moore, Caro had produced experimental works which nonetheless remained within the bounds of figurative modelling. But following his trip to the USA in 1959, he completely redefined his practice.

That redefinition is evident partly from Caro's construction process. Rather than modelling or carving, Caro created this work by industrial welding, a technique which would become something of a signature style. He also disposed of the plinth, placing the sculpture directly on the floor, thus situating it emphatically in the 'real world', and in the physical and sensory space of the viewer. Such gestures represent a conspicuous rejection of the inherited conventions of both classical and modern sculpture. The circular form behind the central trapezoid shape, meanwhile, might imply an affinity with the American painter Kenneth Noland, whose work Caro had encountered in the US, and which often features concentric rings. Any element of conscious homage seems unlikely, however, as the piece was created through an instinctive process of experiment and chance-based discovery. Caro latter recalling thinking to himself: "[t]hat sculpture is right, it's the way I want it. I'm into something I don't know about and I'm going to keep going and see where I get to."

Almost all subsequent developments in Caro's practice can be traced back to the formative gesture represented by Twenty Four Hours, and many of the individual figural forms and motifs found in the work would reappear across the remainder of Caro's career. This is also seen as a vital work in the history of British sculpture, defining a post-war aesthetic of pure abstraction of which Caro was the primary exponent.

Painted steel - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

1962

Early One Morning

Early One Morning is seen as one of Caro's boldest and most sophisticated works. Painted in bright red, and constructed from disparate-seeming steel components, it confounds the viewer's expectations in subtle but profound ways. It has something of the haphazard quality of an assemblage, but is granted a sense of homogeneity and harmony by the uniform color.

Early One Morning can be primarily seen as an exploration of spatiality, and as an interrogation of the formal parameters of different artistic media. Caro makes the unprecedented move of arranging his sculptural elements along a horizontal plane: viewed head-on, they thus seem concentrated into an almost pictorial form, with the metal square at the back serving as a canvas (Caro himself noted that "although for this piece, a work by Alexander Calder was my initial suggestion, my source was invariably painting rather than sculpture.") As soon as the viewer begins to walk around the piece, however, that pictorial harmony is exploded, and the work seems to expand in space, with new angles and elements appearing and disappearing at every step. This refusal to privilege a single, 'ideal' viewing perspective represents a radical rejection of sculptural convention, and suggests the inability of artistic form to capture physical reality. A significant and related aspect of the viewing process is the time taken to walk around the piece (it is over 20 feet long) which adds a temporal dimension, and grants the sculpture something of the time-bound quality of music. Indeed, Caro later described Early One Morning as "like a song, moving along in time. In this sculpture the parts are separated, so as to open out and extend the sculpture."

The art historian Rosalind Krauss has argued that "[i]n a picture, every dimension of real space must be collapsed onto a flattened, vertically oriented plane; and in Early One Morning Caro constructs a model of this experience of a world compressed into the uprightness of painting." In another sense, however, this experience of the work as a picture is confounded by its simultaneous presence as a brute physical object. Krauss goes on: "[t]he achievement of Early One Morning is not only that it provides these two possibilities but that it shows them to be mutually incompatible." It is also a piece which stands at the forefront of developments in abstract sculpture globally across the late-20th century, being comparable in both color and compositional material, for example, to many subsequent works by Mark di Suvero.

Painted steel and aluminum - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

1969-70

Table Piece LXXXVIII (The Deluge)

In 1966, Caro began to experiment with a new format for his sculptures: rather than making large-scale works for placement on gallery floors, he began to create smaller, "table sculptures", to sit at the edges of flat surfaces. Although this work might resemble a maquette, then - a scale-model preparatory to a larger, finished work - it is an artwork in its own right; indeed, the 'hanging' format made Caro's established technique of placing his works directly on the ground impossible.

The scale of works such as The Deluge is vital to their appeal, and in defining their relationship with the viewer. Not only does their reduced size stand in striking contrast with the large works, such as Early One Morning, to which Caro's audiences had grown accustomed, but it also confirmed their status as pieces for domestic settings, intended to coexist with the viewer as everyday objects rather than (or as well as) works of art. Caro noted that "my Table Pieces are not models inhabiting a pretence world, but relate to a person like a cup or a jug. Since the edge is basic to the table all the Table Pieces make use of this edge which itself becomes an integral element of the piece." This particular Table Piece also makes a series of allusions to the history of modern painting, as the art historian Ann Hindry notes: "[w]ith his Table Pieces, [Caro] gave himself the means [...] to implement a translation or transfer of the values of pictorial art to sculpture. The Deluge (1969-70) is one of the first pieces to present a three-dimensional interpretation of the arabesques of Matisse."

Responding again to painting rather than sculpture as his primary source of inspiration, with these smaller, more lyrical works Caro took another step in re-defining the formal parameters of sculpture, re-framing its spatial relationship to the viewer through its partial suspension in the air.

Steel - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artwork Images

1967

Prairie

Prairie is one of Caro's masterpieces, and another example of the phase of work represented by Early One Morning. Combining the impressions of haphazard arrangement and conscious design (as partly implied, again, by the homogenous color-gloss), the yellow-ochre bars articulate lines and planes which seem to continue beyond the bounds of the sculpture, creating a sense of openness and expansiveness. The organic color-palette, meanwhile, in combination with the hint provided by the title, suggests an agricultural landscape, complete with plough-lined fields.

Like Early One Morning (1962), Prairie extends outwards rather than upwards, offering a reconceptualization of the space defined by sculptural form. Once again, walking around the piece provides a series of shifting and receding sightlines, generating tension between the impressions of modelled shape and of uncontrollable physical mass. More than in his 1962 work, however, Caro introduces a certain quality of weightlessness into this piece, a paradoxical association for an object made of solid steel: from some angles, the central plane seems to be floating in space, while from others the means of support is obvious. Again, this poses subtle questions about the distinctions between the illusory space of art and the 'real world' of physical matter.

The art critic Michael Fried was deeply struck by Prairie when he first saw it, stating in his commentary on the work that Caro had incorporated the very ground on which the sculpture sat into the form of the work, as "the last, or lowest, of the three levels which, as abstract conception, Prairie comprises." In so doing, Fried argued, Caro had framed a series of conceptual and formal distinctions between the sculpture and the ground beneath, as different arrangements of physical mass: "Prairie defines the ground not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant [...] the result is an extraordinary marriage of illusion and structural obviousness."

Painted steel - Private Collection

Artwork Images

1977

Emma Dipper

In the 1970s, Caro began to experiment with new technical approaches and presentational formats for his work, abandoning the bright colors that had made many of his earlier sculptures so distinctive. In 1977, he was working at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada with the sculptor Douglas Bentham. In this remote location, it was difficult to source the heavy metals he had used in his previous works, so Caro requested some of the light, thin steel tubes used in local agriculture and industry. With these materials he was able to work more spontaneously and instinctively; the resulting sculptures, such as Emma Dipper, seem almost like line drawings composed in the air.

With this work, Caro 'opened up' the space of the sculpture, framing the spaces in-between the structural elements as key compositional features (as previous abstract sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo had also attempted). This was a way of eliminating the impression of monumentality from sculpture; Caro himself stated: "I was interested in the possibility of feeling my way into sculptural space from within, instead of without." As the art historian Ann Hindry describes, works such as Emma Dipper thus introduce a new quality of dynamism into Caro's practice: "[v]oid at their centre, they unfurl in space apparently random lines that are nonetheless held by small orthogonal structures, hollow or solid. The consequent 'stop and go' tension increases the overall dynamic."

Applying this compositional approach over a number of years, Caro created a series of striking and original works, also including Emma Dance (1977), and National Gallery Ledge Piece (1978), which combines that approach with the Table Piece format. If Caro's 1960s sculptures had encouraged the viewer to see sculptural forms emerging and disintegrating as they traversed the work, with this format the physical elements of the sculpture almost becomes a secondary, framing device: a way of presenting the spaces which the structure contained.

Painted steel - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

1989

Elephant Palace

In the 1980s, Caro became interested in combining sculptural tropes with architectural ones, creating what he called "sculpitecture"; Elephant Palace is an important example of such work. Whereas his 1970s practice was characterized by its openness and linearity, his architectural pieces are notably 'closed-off', as the art historian Ian Barker notes: "Elephant Palace marks a real change in his work because it presents a skin. We see the outside only."

This particular work was inspired by Caro's travels: the motif of the elephant's head suggests a memory of his time India, but in a more general sense, it was a visit to Greece which prompted him to consider the relationship between the body - and other organic forms - and the rectilinear spaces of architecture. In Elephant Palace, Caro presents an architectural 'entrance' which also seems like a mouth or ears, and a roof which also seems like the domed skull of a large animal. Connotations of the organic and the inorganic are thus brought together to suggest a tension between natural and man-made worlds.

Caro's 1980s works - also including pieces such as Oracle (1983-85) and Xanadu (1986-88) - are interesting in suggesting that his sense of sculptural space had, in a sense, come full circle. Having exploded the space of the sculpture in the 1960s, and hollowed it out in his 1970s works - so that the physical elements of the work framed the gaps between them - he began once more to confront the viewer with solid, sculptural mass (though still suggesting inner recesses and voids).

Steel - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

2000

Millennium Bridge

During the 1990s, as part of his development of "sculpitecture", Caro looked for opportunities to work with architects and engineers. One of the results was a collaboration with the architect Norman Foster and the engineering team Arpus, on a bridge that would cross the Thames in London, connecting the area in-front of St Paul's Cathedral with the grounds of the Tate Modern Gallery. (Both were due to open in 2000, but due to structural complications, the bridge finally opened in 2002).

The Millennium Bridge combines Caro's interests in architecture, minimal composition, the material qualities of steel, and engineering. The artistic and architectural qualities of the work are deeply complementary, with a complex, shallow suspension system, elided in the simple and elegant overall appearance, allowing panoramic views across the city. Through the design process, however, Caro discovered that an artist's way of thinking was often very different from an architect's. In conversation with Norman Foster, he noted: "[m]y way of working is quite different from yours, as I discovered when we worked together on the Millennium Bridge. Your thinking is from the tiny to the massive, and because you think with sketches, you get grandeur and a sense of overallness. Later you focus on the detail."

As a work designed solely for the public realm and for practical use, Caro followed up on the implications of earlier gestures such as removing the sculptural plinth by producing a work which was wholly incorporated into the everyday space of the city-dweller. The Millennium Bridge was also intended to fulfil a social function, promoting connectedness in the city, and revitalizing areas that were previously under-visited; indeed, it is a work intimately familiar to almost anyone who has visited London, and thus, more than any of Caro's other pieces, confirms his status as one of the most ubiquitous artists of his era.

Steel suspension bridge - City of London

Biography of Anthony Caro

Childhood

Antony Caro was born in New Malden in South-West London, the youngest of three siblings born to Jewish (but not religiously observant) parents Alfred and Mary. He was sent to Charterhouse, a private school in Surrey, where one of his housemasters introduced him to the sculptor Charles Wheeler, a future president of the Royal Academy who would tutor Caro during the school holidays. In 1942, Caro started an engineering degree at Christ's College, Cambridge, but he still felt the pull of Wheeler's influence, and continued to study sculpture with him at Farnham Art School in Surrey during his vacations. After graduating from Cambridge, Caro joined the Royal Navy, serving for two years in the Fleet Air Arm.

Early Training and Work

By 1946, Caro had decided to pursue a career as a sculptor. He became a full-time student at the Regent Street Polytechnic, studying under the artist Geoffrey Deeley. Caro continued his artistic education at the Royal Academy between 1947 and 1953, learning traditional sculptural techniques, and making copies of classical statuary.

While at the Royal Academy, Caro met the painter Sheila Girling, a fellow student. They married in 1949, and had two sons, Timothy and Paul, in 1951 and 1958. The year their eldest son was born, Caro made an unsolicited visit to Henry Moore's studio in Hertfordshire, apparently simply knocking on the artist's door. He was invited in, and six months later was given a part-time job as Moore's assistant; he moved his family to the area shortly afterwards. Of his time working with Moore, Caro stated: "[h]e introduced me to modern art, [...] and to a whole new world of non-academic art that I had not ever come into contact with before." He also noted: "[a]ll students of sculpture are indebted to him, and all at one time or another in their careers are influenced by his work; he provides an alphabet and a discipline within which to start to develop. His success has created a climate for all of us younger sculptors and has given us confidence in ourselves which without his efforts we would not have felt."

Mature Period

In 1953, Caro started teaching part-time at St Martin's School of Art in London, a position he held until 1981. Teaching would become a significant part of his life, and during that period he tutored some of the most significant British sculptors of the later 20th century, including Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, and Gilbert & George.

Caro's first solo show took place in 1956 at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, followed quickly by a solo show at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London. Two years later, one of his sculptures was included in the Venice Biennale of 1958; in 1959, the Tate Gallery purchased one of his works, and he was awarded first prize for sculpture at the Paris Biennale des Jeunes. At this time, Caro was still working in what might be called his early style, drawing on the classical influences which had underpinned his training, but a trip to the United States the same year turned out to be a transformative experience. Funded by the Ford Foundation English Speaking Union, his visit included meetings with the influential art critic Clement Greenberg and the painters Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. Caro also discovered the innovative sculptural constructions of David Smith, whom he would get to know better on a later visit in 1963.

These experiences fundamentally altered Caro's perception of art, and of sculpture in particular. Upon his return to London, he abandoned the figurative approach of his early work, and began purchasing welding equipment and scrap metal. The importance of his first entirely abstract sculptures was recognized quickly by the art-world, and he was offered a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963.

During the mid-1960s, Caro made regular visits to the US, teaching and working at Bennington College in Vermont. He renewed several of his friendships with American artists, including with Kenneth Noland, whose suggestion that he work in series had a powerful effect on Caro. He worked regularly in collaboration with other artists at this time - as he had done, to some extent, throughout his career - and often drew inspiration from the advice of friends. In the late 1960s, for example, the critic Michael Fried prompted him to work on a sequence of small table-top pieces, designed to adhere to the edges of flat surfaces. In 1969, Caro moved his studio to a former piano factory in Camden, London, where he employed the engineer Patrick Cunningham as his studio assistant (a role that Cunnigham would fulfil for the next 35 years).

The same year, Caro began to buy pieces of agricultural machinery, with a view to incorporate them into his sculptures. Two years later, he travelled the world with his family, visiting Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and India, giving lectures at various art schools and universities. In 1976, he was presented with a key to the City of New York, in acknowledgement of his contribution to American culture.

Late Period

During the later decades of his life, Caro began to experiment with a wider range of sculptural materials, including clay, bronze, and handmade paper. In the mid-1980s he made a number of pieces inspired by his travels, including works in bronze based on Indian reliefs, and a series of sculptures influenced by ancient Greek architectural pediments. His interest in architecture also led him, from 1984 onwards, to move into the area of what he called "sculpitecture", a practice which pushed the boundaries between artistic and architectural design. Noting that "[a]rchitects do not get their hands dirty enough", he worked on a range of projects, including a sculpitectural "village" with the architect Frank Gehry, and, in the 1990s, the famous Millennium Bridge linking St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery, with the architect Norman Foster.

In the year 2000, Anthony Caro was awarded the Order of Merit by the UK government, a title restricted to 24 living recipients; he was the first sculptor to receive the award since Henry Moore in 1963. As active as ever, Caro continued to create and exhibit work right up until his death of a heart attack in 2013, at the age of 89.

The Legacy of Anthony Caro

Antony Caro was one of the most influential figures in British sculpture during the second half of the 20th century, and through his work at St Martin's School of Art he helped to shape the careers of many younger artists. In particular, the influential 1965 New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery featured works by a number of sculptors taught by Caro.

While some of his students, such as Phillip King and Richard, followed his lead stylistically, others deliberately rebelled against the hegemony which they saw forming around Caro's popular abstract style. Richard Long incorporated performance and photography into his practice, while Bruce McLean, reacting against what he saw as Caro's academicism, began making sculptures out of rubbish. The artistic duo of Gilbert and George responded to Caro's pared-down aesthetic by creating installation works full of color and irreverence. Nonetheless, such work might not have been created without Caro's practice to respond to: whether as inspiration or foil.

Caro arguably had a more direct stylistic influence on sculptors who didn't study under him, such as the artist Richard Serra, known for his large-scale assemblages of sheet-metal. Of this connection, Caro noted: "Philip Glass, the composer, said to me that Serra was aware of my work [...] but it is not where you get it from but what you do with it." Caro's place in the genealogy of modern art was perhaps already ensured in 1964 by the praise of the canon-making critic Clement Greenberg, who remarked: "[w]ithout maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner, I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to the genuine grand manner - genuine because original and unsynthetic - than any English artist before him." Whether or not his practice stands for the institutionalization of avant-garde aesthetics across the later part of the 20th century, Anthony Caro remains a respected and hugely popular artist today, especially in Britain.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

• Henry Moore
• David Smith
• Pablo Picasso
• Alexander Calder
• Henri Matisse

Friends & Personal Connections

• Helen Frankenthaler
• Kenneth Noland
• Sheila Girling

Movements & Ideas

• Surrealism
• Abstraction

Artists

• Gilbert and George
• Richard Long
• Richard Serra
• Barry Flanagan
• Bruce McLean

Friends & Personal Connections

• Phillip King
• Tim Scott
• Peter Hide
• Richard Deacon

Movements & Ideas

• Abstraction

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Anthony Caro

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