"Style has just nothing to do with art—it’s the intent that counts."
–Anthony Caro, Interview with Phyllis Tuchman, Artforum (Summer 1972)
Anthony Caro in his studio c. 1975.
Photo John Goldblatt, courtesy of the Anthony Caro Estate.
Anthony Caro played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century sculpture. Born in New Malden, England in 1924, Caro studied engineering at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before training as a sculptor at the Royal Academy Schools, London. From 1951 to 1953, he worked as an assistant to Henry Moore. His early works, which explored the expressive possibilities of modernist figuration, were modelled in clay and cast in bronze. His first solo exhibition was held at Milan’s Galleria del Naviglio in 1956, followed the next year by an exhibition at Gimpel Fils, his first in London.
In 1959, a grant from the Ford Foundation enabled Caro to visit the United States. There, he met vanguard American artists including painters Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland, and sculptor David Smith, whose works in welded steel offered Caro a new understanding of sculptural possibilities. Upon returning to London, Caro made a decisive shift in his practice as he began to weld and bolt together steel beams, plates, rods, and tubes into compositions that presented no fixed or singular focus of attention. He departed further from sculptural convention by painting these works in bold, flat colours. In the early 1960s, he began making brightly painted, abstract steel structures that he positioned directly on the floor, the omission of a pedestal marking a radical shift in the dynamic between work and viewer. Using prefabricated steel elements salvaged from scrapyards, Caro developed new ways of making sculpture which would be more immediately expressive.
Silver Piece 23
1984-1985
Silver
5.5 x 9.5 x 14.5 inches
13.5 x 24 x 37 cm
Resolutely nonfigurative, his sculptures nevertheless operate as analogues for human experience. As art historian Rosalind Krauss has observed, “Caro rendered the human form not as it looked from the outside, but how it felt from the inside, with its relationships subjectively conditioned.” Caro worked extensively in steel but also in a diverse range of other materials including bronze, silver, lead, clay, stoneware, wood, paper and perspex. Following his 1987 architectural collaboration with Frank Gehry, Caro completed a succession of large-scale projects on an architectural scale. Caro’s interest in architecture culminated in London’s Millennium Bridge (2000), which he designed in collaboration with Foster + Partners.
Mid-career retrospectives of Caro’s work were held at the Hayward Gallery, London (1969), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975). In 1992, the British Council organized an exhibition of his sculpture in the ancient setting of Trajan’s Market in Rome, followed by a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, in 1995. In celebration of Caro’s eightieth birthday, Tate Britain, London, staged a retrospective in 2005. In 2011, a selection of works dating from 1960 through 2010 were exhibited in the Roof Garden of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Caro’s 2013 retrospective at Museo Correr, Venice, coincided with the 55th Biennale di Venezia and was on view at the time of the artist’s death. In 2015 The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park held a joint retrospective to celebrate and commemorate Caro’s life and work. Knighted in 1987, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association in 1992, and was inducted into the Order of Merit in 2000—the first sculptor to be so honoured since Henry Moore in 1963.
