.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The painted steel sculptures that Anthony Caro made between 1960 and 1967 rank among the most important sculptures of the twentieth century. Moving beyond the totemic open-form masterpieces of his friend, rival and mentor David Smith, these unique groundbreaking works radically transformed and extended the whole tradition of constructed metal sculpture first started by Picasso and Gonzalez in 1930 and opened up the whole medium of sculpture to a wealth of new possibilities.
Executed in 1966 Strand belongs to one of Caro's most important series of sculptures from this vital period. Together with such works as Frognal, Titan, Shaftsbury, Bennington, London, and Hommage to David Smith, Strand belongs to a series of ground-based horizontal strip sculptures that articulate a completely new sculptural language by extending along the ground -without recourse to a base or pedestal - to explore and interact with the real three-dimensional space of the viewer.
Strand was executed at a crucial time for Caro. Following the rapid development of his sculpture since the dramatic shift from his work under Henry Moore to the constructing of open-form work with metal in 1960, Caro's work had surpassed all rivals. Indeed in 1963 Clement Greenberg championed Caro as the foremost sculptor of the age writing of him that "He is the only new sculptor whose sustained quality can bear comparison with Smith's. With him it has become possible at long last to talk of a generation in sculpture that really comes after Smith's." Working in both London and the United States, in a barn prepared for him by Smith at Bennington College, Caro's work had begun to absorb and develop the logic of Smith's work on its own terms. As Caro has often pointed out, although he met Smith briefly in 1959 he "emained largely unaware of his art until much later. "The influence of Smith did not really hit me until '63 or '65" he recalle", "when I went to Bolton Landing and saw perhaps 80 of his s"ulptures "n his field and made many visits to his studio. When I turned to making abstract welded steel sculptures it is true that I used many of the same materials as Smith but I was not so much influenced by him in the early 1960s as trying to do something very different from him." (Caro in discussion with Peter Fuller, cited in D. Blume, Anthony Caro Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Cologne, 1980 p. 37).
It was only after Smith's death in May 1965, that Caro consciously allowed his work to approach Smith's. A friend and rival of the elder man, Caro had been given several small pieces of metal by Smith during his stay with the artist at Bolton Landing, but Caro did not use them. Indeed, while Smith was alive Caro had deliberately avoided using certain forms because he felt that they belonged too much to the American artist's work. After Smith's death however, Caro bought the large stock of metal that Smith had collected for his is own use and stored at Bolton Landing and had the thirty-seven tons of tank ends, angles, channels, stainless steel, rods, plate, etc. shipped to his own London studio in Hampstead.
The 1966 sculpture Hommage to David Smith deliberately appends an H-beam - an element strikingly redolent of Smith's sculpture - onto a ground-based horizontal progression similar to the series of strip sculptures to which Strand belongs. Much has been made of Caro's horizontality in comparison with the vertical totemic tradition perpetuated by Smith, but the essential difference - which Caro's ground-based sculptures clearly show - is that the horizontality of Caro's work enables and promotes a free-form association of real objects in the real space of the viewer. And it is this that enables a new language of form to be articulated and which in Caro's hands is often expressed with a surprisingly deft elegance - given the raw, heavy nature of his material. The proportioning of Caro's forms, the space he creates between them and the innate sense of rhythm he establishes within his work have often prompted critics to remark on the relationship between his work and the gestures or forms of the human body or to say things like "you could dance a Caro sculpture". The fact that, in his 1960s work Caro, painted the steel of his sculptures and ground down his welds so that they didn't intrude reflected the primary influence on his work of abstract painting - in particular the work of Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. It also adds to this pervasive sense of gesture and reinforces a sense of formal elegance which, when combined with the work's free-form style, generates an overall sense of lightness and of Caro's remarkable ability to almost gesturally articulate space.
Strand belongs to a line of enquiry in Caro's work that began with the sculptures, Titan and Bennington in 1964 and which ultimately culminated in the artist's first table sculptures in the late 1960s. Developing themes first articulated in the sculptures Shaftsbury and MoMA's Frognal, in Strand Caro incorporates a vertical arc that eloquently combines a sense of verticality with the predominant horizontal axis of these works and introduces an interesting juxtaposition of scale. The introduction of this arc reflects Caro's increasing confidence and the developing ease with which the sculptor was able to articulate space and give expression to form. Working largely by intuition adding one form to another Caro had managed in works like Strand to develop a way of working that for the first time allowed sculpture to be created almost spontaneously without a preparatory basis in drawing and indeed which cannot be expressed in two dimensions. It is sculpture which refers only to sculpture. "Sculpture was bogged down by its adherence to the monumental and the monolith, by its own self-importance. To release sculpture from the totem, to try to cut away some of its rhetoric and bring it into a more direct relation to the spectator has helped free it a bit." Caro later explained. "Its physicality is less underlined than it used to be. All that is what I would like to think I have been a part of." (Anthony Caro cited in ibid p. 38)
Executed in 1966 Strand belongs to one of Caro's most important series of sculptures from this vital period. Together with such works as Frognal, Titan, Shaftsbury, Bennington, London, and Hommage to David Smith, Strand belongs to a series of ground-based horizontal strip sculptures that articulate a completely new sculptural language by extending along the ground -without recourse to a base or pedestal - to explore and interact with the real three-dimensional space of the viewer.
Strand was executed at a crucial time for Caro. Following the rapid development of his sculpture since the dramatic shift from his work under Henry Moore to the constructing of open-form work with metal in 1960, Caro's work had surpassed all rivals. Indeed in 1963 Clement Greenberg championed Caro as the foremost sculptor of the age writing of him that "He is the only new sculptor whose sustained quality can bear comparison with Smith's. With him it has become possible at long last to talk of a generation in sculpture that really comes after Smith's." Working in both London and the United States, in a barn prepared for him by Smith at Bennington College, Caro's work had begun to absorb and develop the logic of Smith's work on its own terms. As Caro has often pointed out, although he met Smith briefly in 1959 he "emained largely unaware of his art until much later. "The influence of Smith did not really hit me until '63 or '65" he recalle", "when I went to Bolton Landing and saw perhaps 80 of his s"ulptures "n his field and made many visits to his studio. When I turned to making abstract welded steel sculptures it is true that I used many of the same materials as Smith but I was not so much influenced by him in the early 1960s as trying to do something very different from him." (Caro in discussion with Peter Fuller, cited in D. Blume, Anthony Caro Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Cologne, 1980 p. 37).
It was only after Smith's death in May 1965, that Caro consciously allowed his work to approach Smith's. A friend and rival of the elder man, Caro had been given several small pieces of metal by Smith during his stay with the artist at Bolton Landing, but Caro did not use them. Indeed, while Smith was alive Caro had deliberately avoided using certain forms because he felt that they belonged too much to the American artist's work. After Smith's death however, Caro bought the large stock of metal that Smith had collected for his is own use and stored at Bolton Landing and had the thirty-seven tons of tank ends, angles, channels, stainless steel, rods, plate, etc. shipped to his own London studio in Hampstead.
The 1966 sculpture Hommage to David Smith deliberately appends an H-beam - an element strikingly redolent of Smith's sculpture - onto a ground-based horizontal progression similar to the series of strip sculptures to which Strand belongs. Much has been made of Caro's horizontality in comparison with the vertical totemic tradition perpetuated by Smith, but the essential difference - which Caro's ground-based sculptures clearly show - is that the horizontality of Caro's work enables and promotes a free-form association of real objects in the real space of the viewer. And it is this that enables a new language of form to be articulated and which in Caro's hands is often expressed with a surprisingly deft elegance - given the raw, heavy nature of his material. The proportioning of Caro's forms, the space he creates between them and the innate sense of rhythm he establishes within his work have often prompted critics to remark on the relationship between his work and the gestures or forms of the human body or to say things like "you could dance a Caro sculpture". The fact that, in his 1960s work Caro, painted the steel of his sculptures and ground down his welds so that they didn't intrude reflected the primary influence on his work of abstract painting - in particular the work of Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. It also adds to this pervasive sense of gesture and reinforces a sense of formal elegance which, when combined with the work's free-form style, generates an overall sense of lightness and of Caro's remarkable ability to almost gesturally articulate space.
Strand belongs to a line of enquiry in Caro's work that began with the sculptures, Titan and Bennington in 1964 and which ultimately culminated in the artist's first table sculptures in the late 1960s. Developing themes first articulated in the sculptures Shaftsbury and MoMA's Frognal, in Strand Caro incorporates a vertical arc that eloquently combines a sense of verticality with the predominant horizontal axis of these works and introduces an interesting juxtaposition of scale. The introduction of this arc reflects Caro's increasing confidence and the developing ease with which the sculptor was able to articulate space and give expression to form. Working largely by intuition adding one form to another Caro had managed in works like Strand to develop a way of working that for the first time allowed sculpture to be created almost spontaneously without a preparatory basis in drawing and indeed which cannot be expressed in two dimensions. It is sculpture which refers only to sculpture. "Sculpture was bogged down by its adherence to the monumental and the monolith, by its own self-importance. To release sculpture from the totem, to try to cut away some of its rhetoric and bring it into a more direct relation to the spectator has helped free it a bit." Caro later explained. "Its physicality is less underlined than it used to be. All that is what I would like to think I have been a part of." (Anthony Caro cited in ibid p. 38)