Anthony Caro (born 1924) is widely regarded as 'Britain's greatest living sculptor' (The Guardian, 2003) and has enjoyed an international reputation since the early 1960s. This publication accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Caro's work at Tate Britain in January 2005. Caro studied at Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools, before working as Henry Moore's assistant between 1951 and 1953. His work changed radically following a visit to America in 1959, when he met the sculptor David Smith, the painter Kenneth Noland and the critic Clement Greenberg. In 1960 he began making purely abstract sculptures constructed and welded in steel, comprising beams, girders and other found elements painted in bright colours. 'I think my big break in 1960 was in challenging the pedestal, killing statuary, bringing sculpture into our lived-in space', Caro wrote. The exhibition of these works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, caused a sensation and heralded a revolution in sculpture. Within a short period, conventional ideas about materials, method, surface, scale, form and space were overturned by his radical reworking of all these elements.
This recognition was paralleled in America. In 1965 Clement Greenberg observed of Caro that he was 'the only new sculptor whose sustained quality can bear comparison with (David) Smith's'. Although best known for his work in steel, Caro has also worked in bronze, wood, lead, ceramics and paper, on both large and intimate scales. Since the 1980s, the range of Caro's work has increased, encompassing 'sculpitecture' (sculpture that the viewer enters and explores internally); large-scale works that allude to the language of classical architecture; and sculptures that respond to earlier works of art by such masters as Rubens, Manet and Matisse. This extensively illustrated book includes an overview of Caro's career by the exhibition curator Paul Moorhouse, as well as critical essays by Micheal Fried and Dave Hickey. In accompanying the major exhibition at Tate Britain in 2005, this will be the most up-to-date survey of Caro's work in print.
