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Change of Style
In 1959 Caro travelled to the States and met the abstract sculptor David
Smith. Smith's influence led Caro to abandon figuration and instead he
started constructing abstract sculptures out of steel, which were welded
together and sometimes painted. He also worked with bronze, silver, lead,
wood, paper and stone. Caro's first important piece of 3-D abstract
art, made in 1961, was Twenty Four Hours (Tate Modern, London).
The same year he created his first polychrome sculpture, Sculpture
Seven. Despite his prolific output up to this point, Caro only came
to public attention in 1963 with his extensive one-man show at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery. Sculptures included in the show were Twenty Four Hours;
Sculpture Seven; Early One Morning (1962); Month of May
(1963) and Pompadour (1963). His works at this time were brightly
painted, standing directly on the ground (without a base), which allowed
the viewer more immediate access. By removing sculpture from its plinth,
Caro was breaking new ground, although David Smith and Brancusi
had also taken steps in the same direction.
Note About Sculpture Appreciation
To learn how to evaluate modernist abstract sculptors like Anthony Caro,
see: How to Appreciate
Modern Sculpture. For earlier works, please see: How
to Appreciate Sculpture.
Fame and Recognition
From the 1960s onwards Caro's reputation was firmly established. Between
1964-5 he had important one-man shows in New York (Andre Emmerich Gallery),
Washington DC (Washington Gallery of Modern Art) and London (Tate). For
the next decade he visited the States several times a year, usually working
for a month at a time. In 1966 he exhibited in the British Pavilion at
the Venice Biennale, with the painters Bernard Cohen, Richard Smith, Harold
Cohen and Robyn Denny. Caro's fame spread and he widened the range of
his work. He began to make small sculptures using handles which came out
over the edge of a table, he called them Table Sculptures. He also
created larger sculptural towers that are part architecture, part sculpture.
In 1969 a retrospective exhibition was held at the Hayward Gallery, London,
consisting of fifty works made between 1954 and 1968.
Sculptural Developments
In the 1970s, Caro starting purchasing large agricultural machinery parts,
including plough parts and propeller blades, and integrated them into
this works: Sun Feast (1969, Private Collection) and Orangerie
(1969, Private Collection). The machinery parts are recognisable items,
which create an illusion of familiarity, yet the abstract form of the
sculpture is purely expressive. He began waxing and varnishing the steel
structures, as in The Bull (1970). Another important work was Tundra
(1975, Tate). He continued to spend periods of times in America, working
at American abstract painter Kenneth Noland's studio in Vermont. In the
last two decades Caro has continued to develop his style. He has experimented
with small 'writing pieces', calligraphic sculptures made from steel often
including other utensils. He has made sculptures with handmade paper,
ceramics and painted acrylic on canvas (at Helen Frankenthaler's studio
in New York). In 1986 Caro created After Olympia (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York), his largest sculpture to date. In 1991 he created
several examples of what he dubbed Sculpitecture (eg. Tower
of Discovery).
Exhibitions
Over the next few decades, Caro expanded what he termed the 'language
of sculpture', as both an artist and an influential teacher at St Martin's
School of Art. He encouraged students to test and push the boundaries
of their work, as he has done in his own. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York held a retrospective exhibition of his works
in 1975, which travelled to the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, the Museum
of Fine Art, Houston and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Caro has also
had major retrospectives at the Trajan Markets, Rome (1992); the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1995); and Tate Britain, London (2005), where
he showed his gigantic sculpture The Last Judgement (1995-9, Collection
Wurth, Kunzelsau). In 2008 he also had his first solo exhibition at the
Hillsboro Fine Art Gallery, Dublin.
Awards and Recognition
Like his British contemporary Henry Moore, Caro has served as a model
of professionalism, through a combination of energetic work and the creation
of a productive relationship with the art world. He has received copious
awards, including the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in Tokyo in 1992
and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Sculpture in 1997. He was awarded
honorary degrees from universities in Europe, the United States and the
UK. He received a Knighthood in 1987 and the Order of Merit in 2000. He
died in October 2013.
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