Anthony Caro British, b. 1924

Sir Anthony Caro (1924–2013) played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century sculpture. 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. In addition to steel, he also produced works in bronze, lead, silver, stoneware, and wood, as well as on paper. Caro’s constant reinvention of the language of abstract sculpture, as well as his influential teaching at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, distinguished him as the successor to artists such as Henry Moore and David Smith, and as an innovative artist in his own right. 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.”

Born in New Malden, England, 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 modeled 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 present no fixed or singular focus of attention. He departed further from sculptural convention by painting these works in bold, flat colors.

Caro’s breakthrough exhibition of sculptures at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1963 garnered considerable critical attention. In the mid-1960s, he initiated a series of smaller sculptures called Table Pieces, which extend over the edges of the tables on which they are displayed. In 1969, he established his studio in a former piano factory and began making large-scale unpainted works in rolled steel.

His monumental After Olympia (1986–87) offers a sculptural response to the multifigure pediment of the ancient Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece, while the series The Trojan War (1993–94); engages with figurative and narrative sculptural traditions. The Last Judgement (1995–99), a twenty-five-part sculptural installation in terra-cotta, wood, and steel, was exhibited at the 48th Biennale di Venezia in 1999. Caro’s interest in architecture culminated in London’s Millennium Bridge (2000), which he designed in collaboration with Foster + Partners. In 2008, his work was exhibited at three museums in Pas-de-Calais, France, to accompany the opening of his Chapel of Light installation at Église Saint Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg.

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 antique 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 Iris and B. Gerald Cantor 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. 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 honored since Henry Moore in 1963.