Out in the Midday Sun: Sir Anthony Caro on the Roof at the Met
Anthony Caro on the Roof at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

Originally posted at artcritical June 4, 2011

April 26 to October 30, 2011
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

This year’s summer exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 8,000 square-foot roof garden features five works by Sir Anthony Caro, the most influential British sculptor of his generation. Gently suspended above the verdant carpet of Central Park, and embraced by the New York skyline, the roof garden is not just a pleasant context for viewing art in general but, as it turns out, is uniquely suited to experiencing Caro’s art in particular as it prepares the viewer for the radical shift in perspective that his sculpture provides.

Still prolific at 87, Caro, , who lives in London, is best known for his innovations in modernist sculpture. He began to make abstract sculptures welded together from scrap metal in the early 1960s. He brought an investigation of pure form, line, and material to sculpture at the same time that his contemporaries Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella were accomplishing this in painting. The current show offers a representative sampling of Caro’s iconic, large-scale steel compositions from the past 50 years, beginning with Midday (1960), commonly regarded as his first masterpiece, and extending through the decades to a new work named, appropriately enough, End Up (2010).  With the exception of Odalisque (1984), which is in the Metropolitan’s collection, the works are on loan.

The Met’s roof garden provides a transformed view of one’s everyday surroundings:  rather than being immersed in the lush greenery of Central Park, one is suddenly able to look down on it and across it, from above.  The buildings that normally tower overhead, almost invisible from the street, now meet our level gaze.  This perspectival shift is exactly what Caro accomplished with his ground breaking welded steel sculptures of the 1960s:  they sat down and along the ground, beneath and before viewers, rather than above them.  By removing the pedestal and offering boldly physical, abstract forms that confront us in our own space, at our own scale, Caro inverts the traditional relationship of the beholder and object.  Rather than gazing up at a sculpture on a raised base or platform, we apprehend the works by looking down on them from above (as with After Summer and End Up) or confronting them at eye level (Midday, Odalisque, Blazon).  Our rooftop position—suspended above yet within the city—prepares us for a similar position vis-à-vis Caro’s remarkable forms.

The two strongest pieces in the show, After Summer and Midday, are also the pieces that most strongly embody this transformation in perspective.  After Summer (1968) consists of a pair of long parallel beams set on edge along the ground, with a series of curved pieces of steel made from quartered tank ends affixed to the beams like sails.  The symmetrical layering of the curved, pointed shapes, along with the creamy light-grey color, makes the work formally rigorous yet soft.  (Ken Johnson disapprovingly calls the piece “militaristic” in his recent New York Times review of the show, a description that caused me to wonder whether we had in fact seen the same work).  Because the piece is twenty-four feet long but only five feet tall, the sculpture sits just below eye level.  It unfurls slightly beneath and away from us along the ground as if we were gazing out at sea upon undulating waves.

Midday, on the other hand, is slightly taller and longer than we are.  It confronts us with a bold physicality—aided by the fresh intensity of its yellow color—that we relate to as if it were a living body, despite its consisting of I-beams, panels, and bolts.  Clement Greenberg, who was a close friend and supporter of Caro, wrote that in his sculptures we find “an emphasis on abstractness, on radical unlikeness to nature.” It is true that the tilted series of I-beams and welded steel panels that make up Midday do not immediately suggest organic forms.  Nevertheless, its mysterious power derives in part from the fact that its proportions and angles suggest a reclining figure.  (Let us not forget that Caro began his career as Henry Moore’s assistant.) On the other hand, the play of angular shapes that dance along its surface is complemented beautifully by the ribbon of New York City skyline just beyond it, reminding us of the everyday use for those steel beams and bolts.

Another sculpture whose visual impact is enhanced by its current setting is the bold red Blazon (1987-90).  Like two other sculptures in the exhibition, Odalisque and End Up, Blazon is much more dense and compressed as a form than After Summer and Midday.  Rather than looking through the work, we must look at, into, and around its complex layering of shapes.  The sculpture’s monumental height and weight are offset by the open railing set into one side, suggesting a balcony from which a viewer might gaze out (or be gazed at).  This touch of human scale brings balance to its imposing mass, which is further offset by the buildings in the background that echo its verticality.

Michael Fried has often praised Caro’s sculptures for their self-contained, fully present quality.  For Fried, Caro’s art is a strong counterpoint to what he famously decries, in his essay, “Art and Objecthood,” as the essentially theatrical aspect of Minimal art, which relies on both its viewer and surroundings to complete the work.  The fact that these five Caro sculptures happen to work so beautifully in their current, temporary location on the roof of the Metropolitan does not disprove Fried’s observation regarding their formal self-sufficiency.  Nevertheless, it shows the power that the right setting can have in releasing the full impact of these sculptures, and helps us to experience just what a master of perspective Caro can be.

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David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

The post “A Bright Globe of Everything”: Extracts from “Becoming A Londoner” appeared first on artcritical.

The history of publishers Lund Humphries is intimately bound up with that of British sculpture.  Originally based in the Yorkshire town of Bradford, this printing press was at the forefront of avant garde typography and color processes by the 1940s when, under the editorship of Herbert Read, it produced what would become the first in an ongoing series of catalogues raisonée of Henry Moore, a sumptuous production that defied wartime austerities.  Subsequently the firm, now part of Ashgate publishing, formed a significant relationship with the Henry Moore Foundation, which is a foremost sponsor of scholarship and publishing in British sculpture.  Jonathan Blackwood’s monograph on John Skeaping is part of a research series that includes titles on William Tucker, Reg Butler and F.E.McWilliam.  Skeaping was a pioneer of direct carving in Britain, and first husband of Barbara Hepworth—whose subsequent husband, Ben Nicholson, was an early subject of a Lund Humphries title.  A consummate animalier, Skeaping’s career as a figure carver followed a trajectory of classicism into primitivism into organic abstraction familiar to students of Hepworth and Moore.

Moore is the meridian line of British scupture: There is an AM and a PM, the latter characterized by long anxiety-inducing shadows.  The midnight hour to avoid, however, is exact contemporaneity, as the illustrious yet in some ways wallflower career of Hepworth exemplifies.   Without it ever quite being possible to say who came first, her successes and developments were in uncomfortable near-kilter with the fellow Yorkshireman she once dated in Leeds, whether in the form of publications, representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale, moves into and out of abstraction, official honors and so on.  The major new museum opened in her name in her hometown of Wakefield this year has been accompanied by a volume edited by her granddaughter Sophie Bowness that documents the gift from her estate of the plaster originals from which her late bronzes were cast: once again, a recall to Moore, whose gift of plasters formed the bedrock of the wing devoted to his work at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario.  The volume includes an essays on Hepworth’s process by Bowness, on her relationship to Wakefield by Gordon Watson, and on the museum building by its architect David Chipperfield, whose streamlined purist aesthetic seems an offshoot of the same cultivar as Hepworth’s.

The protean nature of Sir Anthony Caro is attested to in the modernist sculptor’s bibliography: Dieter Blume’s catalogue raisonné, for instance, runs to 14 volumes, while Lund Humphries have brought out a set of five uniformly designed and presented books offering interpretations of his career with different thematic approaches—more phenomenological that chronological in their range.  The series is understatedly edited by one of its authors, Karen Wilkin, whose same preface runs in each volume in much the way Read’s did in the Moore catalogue, although only implicitly does this text acknowledge her leadership role.  Her own volume echoes the thematic approach of her 1991 Prestel monograph by examining Caro’s inside-outside sculptural preoccupation.  Paul Moorhouse, in “Presence,” explores the denial and recurrence of figuration in the more monolithic of his larger sculptures.  Moorhouse, who is now a curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, was curator of a significant overview of Caro’s work at the old Tate Gallery in Millbank, and draws closely on the sculptor’s own words.  Other volumes in the series explore the recurrence of figuration and narrative in his later works, his Smith/Picasso-like drawing in space, and his small, table-top sculptures.  If there is one theme strikingly overlooked I would nominate Caro’s extensive reworkings in sculpture of old and modern master paintings and his allusions to sculpture history.

Phaidon’s weighty monograph on Anish Kapoor is a doorstopper at over 500 pages worthy of the Bombay-born, London-based sculptor’s global popularity and almost corporate success.   David Anfam, who is a long serving commissioning editor at Phaidon and one of the leading authorities on Abstract Expressionism, charts the sculptors evolution from an arte povera aesthetic (scattered piles of pigment on the gallery floor) to spectacular, breathtakingly monumental sculptures and installations that dominate city skylines.  Kapoor’s ongoing obsession with the void unites efforts in divergent materials and scales.  The volume also includes essays by Johanna Burton and fellow “new generation” British sculptor Richard Deacon.

The handsome volume on Thomas Houseago – oddly tall in a way that befits his lanky sculptures – keeps alive the Lund Humphries tradition of charting the efforts of acclaimed Yorkshiremen.  Born in Leeds in 1972, Houseago makes loud, boisterously clumsy tragic-comic figurative sculptures that directly reference modern exemplars like Brancusi, Jacob Epstein, Germaine Richier, Rodin, Giacometti, and de Kooning in a mix of critique and adulation.  Lisa Le Feuvre contributes the main essay while Rudi Fuchs offers an appreciation that draws on his aquaintance with Houseago as a student in Amsterdam.

BOOKS CONSIDERED IN THIS REVIEW

Jonathan Blackwood, The Sculpture of John Skeaping (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9780853319313. 152 pages, 12 color and 210 b&w illustrations. $90.00.

Sophie Bowness, Barbara Hepworth: The Plasters (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781848220669. 200 pages, 85 color and 115 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

Paul Moorhouse, Anthony Caro: Presence (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010).  ISBN: 9781848220539. 152 pages, 73 color and 9 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Julius Bryant, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220324. 128 pages, 55 color and 23 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Karen Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220317. 152 pages, 80 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

Mary Reid, Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009). ISBN: 9781848220300. 152 pages, 66 color and 20 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

H.F. Westley Smith, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2010). ISBN: 9781848220515. 152 pages, 82 color and 14 b&w illustrations. $60.00.

David Anfam, Anish Kapoor (London: Phaidon Press, 2009). ISBN: 9780714843698. 304 pages. £59.95.

Thomas Houseago, What Went Down (Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2011). ISBN: 9781901352504. 240 pages, 211 color and 7 b&w illustrations. $70.00.

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Karen Wilkin, the independent curator and critic and foremost expert on the work of Sir Anthony Caro, will give a lecture tonight on his work titled “Anthony Caro and the Onward of Art”.  Her talk complements an exhibition of Caro’s work on the Met’s roof which has run through the summer and closes October 30.

Wilkin is the author of several monographs and museum catalogues devoted to Caro, along with countless publications on Caro’s American peers, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and his critical champion Clement Greenberg.  Recently she edited a series of five monographs published by Lund Humphries offering different thematic takes on Caro’s work, her own volume, titled “Interior and Exterior,” tackling issues of space and scale that are promised as the focus of tonight’s talk.

The lecture is at 6pm at the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Uris Center for Education, and is free with admission to the museum.

Other  lectures of note upcoming in the next week around New York include Gabriel Orozco who is talking at Hunter College next Tuesday, October 18, and painter Judith Linhares, the same night at the New York Studio School.

See artcritical’s  listings of lectures, panels and events for further details.

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Sir Anthony Caro’s central place in this history of modern sculpture is assured.  With David Smith, he initiated a revolution in abstract constructed sculpture in the 1960s: He was the most singularly influential sculptor of that decade, both as a formal innovator to emulate and as staunch upholder of modernist values to rebel against.

So you might think it is time for the 83-year-old Englishman to take it easy, to rest on his laurels a bit. Not so on the evidence of his latest show, of a half dozen monumental sculptures in galvanized steel, divided between the Madison Avenue and Chelsea galleries of Mitchell-Innes & Nash. These hefty yet open-form, emphatic yet enigmatic assemblages of prefabricated, found, and adapted components show a youthful, spry, curiosity-filled artist at the top of his game.

The irony with Caro is that while his achievements and convictions have been the focus of dogmatic, almost cultish following among formalist critics and practitioners, he himself has so often been the one to break his own rules. It is not that he is an iconoclast as much as he is a protean maker. He is highly prolific, but seems throughout his career to have been more interested in generating sculptural phenomena than objects per se.

Not that his objects are ever lacking in weight.  His earliest work, made while an assistant of Henry Moore and in thrall of a prevailing existentialist-influenced expressionism, were hefty, gravity-oppressed reclining female figures in bronze.  His breakthrough, after a visit to America in 1959 when he met Smith and the color field abstract painters, was to work in welded steel. Since then, welded metal became his preferred mode.

He became famous in the 1960s for assemblages of industrial components, brightly colored so as to abstract the visual experience from the heavy stuff from which it was made. He dispensed with the pedestal so as to do away with stuffy ideas about statuary, and to enforce a sense of immediacy in the work. Sprawling sculptures would fill a whole room each.

But when he wanted to work on a smaller scale, he needed to find a way to pull the object closer to the eye. The solution, he found in his “table sculptures,” was to bring back the pedestal.

The man who brought bright, synthetic color to his sculpture was seized by rawness and rust. The artist of weightless, floating, purely optical forms was seduced by the effects of sheer mass and weight. The formalist for whom sculpture aspired to the condition of painting, as a pure entity disengaged from its surroundings, became fascinated with architecture, and wanted sculpture you had to walk or climb through to get the full experience, coining the term “sculpitecture” for the results.

The latest group is almost a recap of various poles of possibility within Caro’s oeuvre. They have an architectural feel, but you are not allowed to walk into them. Parts of them are painted in saturated color — red, blue, purple — while other parts are burnished stell. They are incredibly heavy (several tons each) but they generally eschew mass in favor of volume as open lattice structures or found parts that one knows to contain inner chambers.

There are examples from his recent series of “passages.” These give an initial impression of being parts of a ship or engineering works wrested free of their context. (Caro had been an engineering student at Cambridge before turning to sculpture.) They are generally long and thin, like walkways or gangplanks.  “Lock Passage” (2007) is almost literally like the plank leading up to a ship.  “South Passage” (2005), which is 7 ½-feet-high and over 11-feet-long, has two frames parallel to one another made of I-beams filled with interrupted grids of piping; the verticals are in the same steel as the frames, the horizontals are painted bright red, and suggestive of rails. And then there are various flat steel squares: one is attached to a grid, another links the two frames at right angles to them, a third does so at a diagonal, and the last is free-floating.

This arrangement of flat elements within a scaffold-like grid, generating at once planar and volumetric effects, suggests that Caro is aware of one of his own younger followers, the American Willard Boepple, who had a series of open cube structures in the 1990s that followed on from Mr. Caro’s sculpitecture. But it equally relates to some of Caro’s own, early sculptures, such as the flat cube supported by a criss-cross of mesh in “Red Splash” (1966).

“Magnolia Passage” (2005–6) is more a room than a walkway, although it should be stressed that, in a way that is typical of Caro, it would never be literally mistaken for an inhabitable or useable space. It can only be sculpture, even though its initial impact is of something very present, and real. It has a floor — elevated a few inches on props, with trap door openings in places — at around 100 square feet, supporting a steel frame structure at around seven feet high. A bed or table structure at one end is placed at a diagonal, and has a purple slatted top. That color is used, also, for a curved element framing one corner of the room, and for a found, antiquated machine part, a vice of some sort, attached to the other end. Some elements are also painted gray, in slight contrast to the galvanized steel.

Most of the elements in a Caro piece are found or bought, rather than created from scratch, but there is often a tension between parts that are components anyway — tubing, mesh, I-beams — and things that have had a former life, so to speak — like that machine part in “Magnolia Passage.” In “Chalk Line” (2006), a starring role is given to an old horse trough, a gloriously weathered stone object with two basins for oats and a central oval for water. This is trisected by square sheets of steel that in turn support a thick pipe running the length of sculpture.  The new steel abutting old stone unexpectedly put this viewer in mind of Damien Hirst’s animals neatly chopped up by sheets of glass — and these are two artists who are hardly natural for formal comparison. The trough rests on a burgundy painted beam. “Chalk Line” is richly enigmatic in the way it collides past and present, utility and aesthetics, factuality and incongruity.

Like the Queen of Hearts, Caro is all for rules, but understands their purpose is to enable one to win. In each body of work, the present included, the rules of engagement seem paramount and compelling. You might have to pinch yourself to remember that a while ago the same artist was working, with equal totally of conviction, by a diametrically opposite set of expectations. The significant thing, however, is that according to anyone’s rules, Sir Anthony’s new show is a winner.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 25, 2007 under the heading “New Spring in a Master’s Steel Step”

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You could call Sir Anthony Caro the Madonna of sculpture. However irreverent to recall the Pop diva in relation to so high-minded a modernist as Mr. Caro, the sculptor shares with the entertainer a protean capacity for personal reinvention while never leaving the viewer in any doubt that a piece is his.

Mr. Caro has been celebrating his 80th year with a slew of exhibitions and publications that mark his stature as one of the giants of sculpture of the last 100 years, which will culminate, later this month, with London’s Tate Modern’s much anticipated retrospective. With Mr. Caro’s radical shifts in gear it will be fascinating to experience how the career adds up, to see what kind of whole emerges from such disperate parts. The last forty five years have witnessed expressive modeled figuration, hard-edged, garishly colored steel assemblages, intimate, enigmatic handsized works, almostly brutally abstract statements that insist of their pure opticality, architectural entities you can climb or walk through, mythological series. Will the galleries resonate order or competition with the contrasts of color and rust, engineered shapes and accidental ones, found and manipulated forms, pure formalism and complex narrative?

There is also a major new monograph just out that charts the sculptor’s evolution in painstaking detail. Its author, Ian Barker, who worked with Mr. Caro for forty years as an exhibition organizer and dealer, has drawn extensively on personal correspondence and the critical record.

There have been various New York gallery shows over the year, exploring different aspects of his oeuvre. The show that opens today at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, for instance, offers a spritely selection of canonical painted sculpture of the 1960s together with examples of his latest work in galvanized steel. These still have the power to startle, despite all that has happened in sculpture in the last half-century to radically overturn any confusion of the medium with classical statuary.

In theory, vintage Caros ought to take their place politely in the history of art. They may have been radical in their time, but so much has happened since, you could argue. His American contemporaries, the minimalists, took reduction of means and inflation of scale to a much greater degree, and since then sculpture has moved into ever more zany, more wacky territory. And yet, it is the very fact that these insist on working as sculpture that makes them radical and timeless.

Take “Aroma,” (1966) in polished and lacquered steel, for instance. It looks to be made from standard building components left close to their intended form: a beam and three pipes at once prop up and interrupt the central, dominating element, a sheet of mesh. For all that this is a supremely elegant arrangement of subtle lines in a rich color, the elements somehow preserve their brazen insolence as forms out of place. The mesh was the kind that, in the construction process, would have been buried in concrete, so it becomes symbolic of its alienation that it should be so exposed in art. It is also a rigidly flat grid that ironically becomes the central motif of a sculptural form that eludes any attempt at a full-frontal view.

Mr. Caro’s first reinvention took place after a trip to America in 1959. After studying engineering at Cambridge, his early artistic training had been conservative, under the Royal Academician Charles Wheeler. As he later recounted, “”I had gone into sculpture thinking I would be one of the chaps who does statues of Montgomery.” He was saved from this fate by Henry Moore, who he visited unannounced one day and by whom he was later taken on as an assistant. His first successes had come with a series of expressionist figures redolent of the existentialism of the 1950s, but exposure to the constructed sculpture of David Smith, and to the circle of artists gathered around the critic Clement Greenberg, opened him up to a whole new set of possibilities. When he returned to London and began welding together found metal scrap it looked like he was more influenced by his engineering studies than by Wheeler or Moore.

Moore was more than a stepping stone towards a cooler, sharper modernism: In fact, Mr. Caro’s whole career can actually be viewed through the lense of his at times oedipal relations to this sculptural giant. Shortly after his seminal exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, which launched his spare, colorful pedestal-free welded constructions to the pubic, Mr. Caro published a stinging review of his mentor. “My generation abhors the idea of a father figure, and his work is bitterly attacked by artists and critics under forty when it fails to measure up to the outsize scale it has been given.” A couple of decades later, Mr. Caro himself would be making gargantuan, heroic, almost romantic works, installed in such settings at the Trajan Markets in Rome, that directly recalled the bombast of Moore’s similar treatment twenty years earlier in Florence. And as an influential teacher at St Martin’s School in London, Mr. Caro’s formalism would be shrugged off by artists like Richard Long and Gilbert and George who took the medium to conceptual and performance ends that Mr. Caro rejects.

In international perception, then, Mr. Caro is very much the successor of Moore. For his 1970s extension to the National Gallery of Art, for instance, I.M.Pei had a Moore commissioned for the exterior, and a Caro “Ledge Piece” for the building’s atrium. Putting the Caro inside is almost symbolic of his difference from the landscape vision of Moore. As Mr. Caro’s great critical champion Michael Fried once put it, his art is concerned with “internal and exhaustive relations.” The 1960s works, with their raw, exposed syntax, were clearly in tune with that decade’s obsession with semiotics, with laying bare the interstices of language and social structures. Mr. Caro, however, later described his subsequent return to more psychologically complex, expressive, even figurative sculpture in terms that don’t seem too caught up with critical theory. In 1980 he wrote: “Twenty years ago we were trying to find ways to make art with clarity and economy, to establish our grammar. Now we can write fuller sentences. We can allow for more weight and pressure without throwing overboard the gains that were won then.”

One of his most audacious and significant moves in the early 1960s was to do away with the pedestal—and more than that, to make sculpture that doesn’t grow from a single root but has multiple points of contact with the ground. A whole generation of sculptors were influenced by this move, and followed suit. But Caro himself went on to re-introduce the pedestal as a vital, rather than passive component, with works intended to emphasize their hand-held, intimate scale. “Table Piece XXVIII,” (1967) at Mitchell-Innes & Nash joins a tilting cone to a double-bent pipe that pivots on the side edge of the supporting pedestal. Crucially, and typically, the table pieces drop below the table line in a way that plays with space: they are at once floating and grounded.

The same is true in trumps with the major piece that dominates this show, “Cadence,” (1968-72), a sprawling arrangement of sheets and pipes painted in a gorgeously saturating mustardy yellow. The color and form are similar to one of his classic pieces which will be seen at the Tate, “Prairie, (1967), and was in fact made on request as a redux of that piece for the color field painter Kenneth Noland, who has loaned the work. A couple of years earlier, incidentally, Mr. Noland had passed onto Mr. Caro the stock of metal parts he had acquired from the family of David Smith, who was killed in a car crash in 1965. “Prairie” was the tradename for the color used, making it a richly ambiguous title. On the one hand, there is the material, industrial sensibility of naming for a color brand, but at the same time the name evokes a pastoral sense of farm machinery and bucolic color.

“Cadence” is a defining early Caro: it demands to be seen from every angle, is a radically open form, yet far from inviting the viewer in it frustrates sculptural empathy. In a way you have to stand well back from it and have it float within the cube of the gallery, to work on your retina in a purely optical fashion. The pre-formed metal components are emphatic, giving weight and measure to the piece, but the color etherealizes the form. Color doesn’t just give sumptuous lightness to the piece: it democratizes the components, forcing attention to the relations of parts to whole.

In a way, early Caros have weathered so well precisely because their author moved on. They look fresh and authentic because they haven’t been compromised by rehashes and endless variations (at least not by Mr. Caro himself.) Despite their clipped and measured tone, these colored constructive sculptures are imbued with a restless energy that would later take contrastive turns towards beat-up, rusty, expressive form, or whimsical, baroque, playful arrangements—and both directions, in their way, are anticipated. Even though his rules changed—an insistence that sculpture was “eyes only” in one decade gave way to to explorations of sculpture that merged with architecture, which he called “sculpitecture,” in the next—what didn’t change was the sense of needing rules, and needing to break them.

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“Michael Steiner: Sculpture” at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries through January 3 (20 East 79 Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212 879 6606)

“Morris Louis” at Paul Kasmin Gallery, through December 31 (293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street, 212 563 4474)

Sir Anthony Caro is the most prolific and influential British sculptor since Henry Moore. To mark his eightieth birthday, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren has laid on a handsome show, which closes this weekend, of a dozen smaller pieces mostly from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. These include examples of two of his extended series, the often highly engaging “table pieces” and “writing pieces”.

Mr. Caro has devoted a career to breaking rules: first the received ones that greeted his arrival on the scene in the late 1950s, and subsequently the ones he invented himself, often to be followed dogmatically by acolytes. He insisted, for instance, on distancing sculpture from conventional statuary by placing it directly on the ground, without a pedestal of any kind. But then he re-embraced the plinth with aplomb, making the support vital and integral to the sculptural experience.

In the monumental sculptures for which he is best known, Mr. Caro reveals his twin allegiances to the soft modernism of Moore and the hard modernism of David Smith. His language oscillates disarmingly between the brutal and the whimsical, regardless of scale. In these smaller works, however, there is an uncharacteristic degree of expressivity and involvedness. We see him looking over the shoulders of his “two fathers”, as he has identified his mentors, to the common sculptural grandfather: Picasso.

The appropriately calligraphic “writing pieces”, in particular, recall Picasso’s early forays into direct welding, with Julio Gonzalez as his guide. “Writing Piece ‘This’,” (1979) employs as its found elements a rusty saw and some kind of handle or crank. There is barely any sense of “appropriation” in the Pop or surreal sense, but that doesn’t necessarily make Mr. Caro the pure formalist he has been cracked up to be: There are complex language games at play, as components both shed and regain their powers of signification.

These enigmatic pieces can evoke another kind of writing, which also militates against formalism: a sense of narrative. This is not to suggest that specific stories are being told-he is resolutely abstract; rather, the structure and complexity of the pieces denies the viewer the satisfaction of the single take, forcing an extended, almost sequential reading of the different events going on within. “Table Bronze ‘Chemical Box’, (1987) for instance, is an animated grid in the tradition of early Smith, the pictograms of Torres-Garcia, or even the Surrealist phase of Giacometti.

The variety of materials, including not just different metals but, cohabiting in single pieces, the welding and casting processes, all suggest restless inquiry. And yet despite his protean creativity there is a strange aloofness of touch, a lack of overt sensuality. Perhaps this is because so much of the grunt work is done by assistants. But somehow the restraint seems more intentional, an insistence that the true content is the relationship of parts, not the fashioning or finding of the parts themselves. This suggests that with all his dancing around and breaking of rules, Mr. Caro is, at heart, a formalist after all.

***

To the circle around Clement Greenberg, the New York critic who was so instrumental in promoting Mr. Caro at the outset of his career, Michael Steiner was the “white hope” for an American link in the constructivist chain. At the tender age of 18, Mr. Steiner staged his first solo exhibition in New York in 1966, just around the time when Mr. Caro’s ascension was being assured. Of the two, Mr. Steiner now seems more faithful to the idiom of open-form construction.

His current show at Salander’s-lie Mr. Caro’s at Artemis-reveals an uncharacteristic intimacy, in terms both of size and touch. Hardly intimate in mood, however, these grids have the unavoidable connotation of cages. The mottled surfaces, though literally sensitive to touch (they are cast from wax and patinated to look as if they were painted in dollops of tar) are alienating in their sheer oddity.

In a formal sense these works achieve their density through a fugal relationship of one grid misregistering with another (one grid will be on the diagonal to another on the vertical/horizontal, for instance). Large luminous gouaches play on a similar motif.

Other pieces court utility: they evoke machines or boats, with slats, pistons, and portholes, without reading literally as functional objects per se. In their ponderous way, these pieces hint at whimsy, but they are in a minority in this show. The lasting impression made by the bronze jails, with their grim surfaces and austere structures, is of tragic grandeur.

***

With these two Greenberg protégés under your belt, you will want to visit one of the critic’s favorite painters, Morris Louis. Paul Kasmin has a varied selection of large canvases from 1958-60, the years when, quite late in his truncated career, Louis hit his stride.

The artist was a prodigious editor of his own work, often taking his destructive cue from a shake of Greenberg’s head. While this show includes top notch examples of familiar Louis motifs within his stain painting idiom, including “Bronze”, a “veil” from 1958, and “Delta Upsilon,” and “Theta Gamma,” two “stripes” from 1960, the show includes works in which there are dense and, by Louis’s standards, almost brushy expanses of flat color. “Addition VI,” (1959) closely recalls Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountain and Sea,” (1952), whose seminal influence on Louis is well documented.

The chance to see works in the estate of the artist that the artist himself might never have exhibited is raising eyebrows among the Greenbergian “faithful” (I visited the show with a stalwart) but actually it can only do Louis good. The best case scenario is posthumous reinvention. The second best is confirmation that he had good taste as an editor and knew the worth of his more canonical inventions, despite the relative obscurity in which he worked, painting in a suburban dining room in Washington DC.: “Theta Gamma”, for instance, which really belongs in a museum (although American museums have plenty of Louis’s languishing in their vaults).

His genius was to discover forms distinct enough to avoid geometric reduction yet impersonal enough to convey color as an end in itself.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 26, 2003

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