Anthony Caro, leading artist of his generation, died last week leaving the art community to reflect on his astounding contribution to British sculpture in the twentieth century. Both building on and challenging the work of his companion Henry Moore, Caro was pivotal in the development of sculpture in the 1960s and continued to influence the trajectory of sculptural art through the impact of his work
Curatorially, Caro’s work presented new challenges. In his inaugural show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, Caro insisted on placing his structures directly on the floor, opposing the entrenched tradition of plinth-based displays for sculpture. Bringing down the primacy of the plinth is an effort credited to Anthony Caro – one he has been commended for. Yet it was not just the plinth that Caro challenged, as Penelope Curtis recognises in her tribute in The Guardian. When the Royal Academy placed barriers around his most famous piece, Early One Morning (1962), Caro demanded that no such partition should be placed between the spectator and sculpture. As Curtis writes, “He made his argument, almost like a lawyer, and changes were made”. This emphasis on the one-to-one relation between sculpture and audience seems a well-played out discussion in contemporary writing about curation, a method of display seen as commonplace now but at the time this represented a significant curatorial shift in the exhibition of sculpture and the way in which we conceived the reception of artworks by members of the public. Caro’s work was championed by Curtis in her tribute describing his pieces as:
“full of promise and optimism, and perfectly reflect the vibrant balance of the works, which hover or balance in the air, like planes or beams of colour, poised, ready to move on, but holding their balance for as long as you want to enjoy them.”
Perhaps the most public of his works is the Millennium Bridge, described by its designers as a ‘blade of light’, walked over by millions per year the bridge connects the City of London with the Tate Modern and the Southbank. The architecture of the bridge met some controversy when the bridge oscillated slightly (earning its colloquial name ‘The Wobbly Bridge’) due to the volume of pedestrians on it when it first opened. This in fact inspired an artistic response by Bill Fontana in conjunction with the Tate Modern, who in his work “Harmonious Bridge” (2006) collected the high resonance frequencies from the bridge for a sound installation piece, which was played in the Turbine Hall.
At the beginning of his career, Caro worked for Henry Moore and the influence of his mentor’s process can be seen in Caro’s sculptural pieces. Like Moore, Caro began his career with figurative drawing, drawings that were then corrected by Moore as Caro drove him back to London from his studio on the outskirts! Yet it would be a false impression of his artistic direction to see his path as a simple continuation of Henry Moore’s aesthetic – Caro shifted away from this. He represented the core of British avant-garde in the 1960s, bringing formalism to the forefront. Caro took a strong influence from the renowned American art critic Clement Greenburg, who so fervently championed the movement and works of the abstract expressionists in New York including: Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. Caro represented the British reinterpretation of the abstract expressionist manifesto for sculpture and demonstrated this through his clear lines, the balance and harmony of his forms and his signature vibrant colour palette.
As art progressed throughout the 1970s it continually sought to challenge and move away from the formalist ideology promulgated by Caro and the Abstract Expressionists. The swathe of abstract sculpture inspired by Caro was to be contested by the very students that Caro had taught during his time as a tutor at St. Martin’s School of Art. Artists including Barry Flanagan, Richard Long and Gilbert and George reconceived the notion of sculpture as something conceptual and in turn reconceived Caro, a once progressive artist, as a traditionalist – a member of the ‘international art establishment’. Conceptual sculpture of the seventies certainly fought against the formalist aims that Caro sought to promote but Caro continued to produce work throughout his eighties and showed his contemporary pieces and retrospectives internationally, including a major exhibition at the Museo Correr in cooperation with this year’s Venice Biennale.
Anthony Caro will be remembered as a pioneering sculptor of the twentieth century, a strong defender of his formalist aesthetic aims and as the man who moved the sculpture off the plinth. Despite the progression away from his aesthetic sensibilities by post-modern and conceptual artists, his work represents a pivotal moment in Modernism and one that truly shaped the path of British sculpture.
For more information about Anthony Caro, please see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24654484
If you are interested in Modernism then you may be interested in the Art History Summer School running on the 28th July – 1st August