Anthony Caro Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Anthony Caro (1924, 2013) was born in New Malden, Surrey, England, and became one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century. He was educated at Charterhouse and went on to study at Christ's College, Cambridge. After university he turned decisively toward sculpture, training at the Royal Academy Schools in London. In the early 1950s he worked as an assistant to Henry Moore, an experience that grounded him in modeling and bronze casting and exposed him to the discipline of a sculptor's studio at the highest level. Those formative years gave him a command of craft but also a clear sense of what he wanted to change.

Breakthrough and American Encounters
Caro's early work followed a figurative, modeled tradition, but a late-1950s visit to the United States transformed his outlook. There he met the critic Clement Greenberg, who became a forceful advocate of his art, and through Greenberg he encountered the painter Kenneth Noland and the sculptor David Smith. Smith's welded steel and Noland's commitment to color convinced Caro that sculpture could dispense with weighty figurative references and still be vivid, serious, and contemporary. Returning to London, he began welding open, abstract constructions from industrial steel and painting them in strong colors, often with advice from the painter Sheila Girling, his wife and closest collaborator.

New Sculpture for a New Era
In 1963 a landmark exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, fostered by director Bryan Robertson, presented Caro's large, bright, floor-bound sculptures without pedestals. Works like Early One Morning (1962) announced a radical alternative to monumentality: steel plates, beams, and arcs arranged in space as if drawing had leapt into three dimensions. The pieces sat directly on the ground, claiming the viewer's space instead of occupying a plinth. This redefinition of how sculpture could be encountered, open, abstract, frontal and lateral at once, quickly made Caro a central figure in postwar art. His London dealer Leslie Waddington and the New York gallerist Andre Emmerich helped him build a wide international audience.

Teaching and the New Generation
Alongside his studio practice Caro taught for many years at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, where he nurtured an ethos of experiment and argument. Around him gathered a remarkable cohort, Phillip King, William Tucker, Tim Scott, Isaac Witkin, Michael Bolus, and David Annesley among others, who pushed welded and fabricated sculpture in divergent directions but carried forward the premise that sculpture could be abstract, constructed, and vividly present. Critics such as Michael Fried wrote persuasively about the new work, reinforcing the intellectual framework in which Caro's sculpture was understood.

Methods, Series, and Collaborations
Caro worked with industrial stock, plate, tube, I-beam, and found steel elements, cutting, welding, and sometimes bolting sections to orchestrate balance, rhythm, and implied movement. He embraced color not as surface decoration but as a structural decision, with Sheila Girling often contributing a painter's eye to chromatic choices. In the mid-1960s he developed the "table pieces", intimate works scaled to rest on tables, where small shifts of angle and volume create dramatic spatial events. Over subsequent decades he explored unpainted steel, combinations of steel with wood, and sequences that responded to architecture and to the classical tradition. He remained in conversation with architects, Norman Foster among them, about the kinship between structure and space, even as he kept his focus firmly on sculptural problems.

Later Work and Public Presence
Caro's later decades were marked by sustained invention. He produced large outdoor works that engaged plazas and landscapes, and bodies of work that answered to historical art, including series that reflected on Renaissance and medieval sources. Installations of multiple sculptures invited viewers to experience variation as a kind of music in space. Museums in Britain, Europe, and North America devoted major exhibitions to his art; institutions such as Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York became important sites for understanding his development. While his materials stayed largely industrial, the mood of the work ranged from exuberant to grave, a range that kept surprising audiences who thought they knew what "a Caro" would be.

Recognition and Influence
Caro's impact was recognized with numerous honors, including a knighthood and membership in the Order of Merit. More consequential than accolades, however, was the way his example reoriented sculpture after mid-century: he demonstrated that sculpture could be built rather than carved or modeled, that color could be integral to structure, and that the pedestal was not a requirement but a convention to be questioned. Through teaching and through friendships with artists in Britain and the United States, David Smith, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Helen Frankenthaler among them, he helped bridge sculptural and painterly debates across the Atlantic.

Personal Life and Legacy
Caro's marriage to Sheila Girling was central to his life and work; their studio conversations about color, composition, and risk were part of his daily practice. Colleagues and former students attest to his generosity in the studio and his insistence on rigorous looking. He continued making sculpture into his late eighties and died in London in 2013. Survived by Sheila Girling, he left an oeuvre that reshaped the language of modern sculpture and a lineage of artists who learned from his willingness to rethink fundamentals. The floor-bound abstraction he pioneered remains a touchstone for sculptors exploring how material, color, and space can cohere into an object that is both distinctly made and intensely alive to the viewer's movement.

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