Caro, Sir Anthony

Caro, Sir Anthony (1924– ). British sculptor, one of the most influential figures in postwar British art. He was born in London and studied engineering at Christ's College, Cambridge, 1942–4. After war service in the Fleet Air Arm, he studied sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic, 1946, and the Royal Academy, 1947–52. From 1951 to 1953 he worked as part-time assistant to Henry Moore, who was ‘very generous with his help; when I had no studio he encouraged me in my own time to make my own art in his studio'. Caro's early works were figures modelled in clay, but a radical change of direction came after he visited the USA and met David Smith in 1959. In the following year he began making abstract metal sculpture, using standard industrial parts such as steel plates and lengths of aluminium tubing, as well as pieces of scrap, which he welded and bolted together and then generally painted a single rich colour. The colour helped to unify the various shapes and textures and often set the mood for the piece, as with the bright and optimistic red of Early One Morning (Tate Gallery, London, 1962). This, like many of Caro's sculptures, is large in scale and open and extended in composition; it rests directly on the ground, and Caro has been one of the leading figures in questioning the ‘pedestal’ tradition: ‘I think my big break in 1960 was in challenging the pedestal, killing statuary, bringing sculpture into our own lived-in space. And doing that involved a different kind of looking. These sculptures of mine incorporated space and interval so that you could not grasp them from a single view; you had to walk along to take them in.’ The novelty of his work was quickly realized; his first one-man show after setting off on his new path (at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1963) was greeted by The Times with the headline ‘Out-and-out originality in our contemporary sculpture'.

Caro taught part-time at St Martin's School of Art, 1953–79, and he had a major influence on several of the young sculptors who trained under him, initiating a new school of British abstract sculpture (see NEW GENERATION). In the 1970s his work became much more massive and rougher in texture, sometimes incorporating huge chunks of metal. In the 1980s he returned to more traditional materials and techniques and began making figurative (or semi-abstract) works in bronze, including (in the early 1990s) a series inspired by the Trojan War. His reputation is high in the USA as well as Britain (the American critic Clement Greenberg wrote of him in 1965: ‘He is the only new sculptor whose sustained quality can bear comparison with Smith's … the first sculptor to digest Smith's ideas instead of merely borrowing from them'). Caro has also had his detractors, however, among them Peter Fuller, who described the work with which he became famous as ‘nothing if not of its time: it reflected the superficial, synthetic, urban, commercial American values which dominated the 1960s'.