Anthony Caro

NEW YORK—British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro stands among the likes of Picasso, Brancusi, Lipchitz, Calder, Henry Moore, and David Smith as one of the most significant contributors to the development of modernist sculpture. In the early 1950s he became an assistant to Moore, “the most forward-looking sculptor” he knew of. In 1959 he met Clement Greenberg in London, and later that year he traveled to the U.S., where he met Smith and fell into the circle of painters associated with Greenberg. Caro’s sculpture was transformed. He abandoned molding in clay and casting in bronze and concentrated instead on welded, bolted—and often painted—steel. When he returned to London a few years later, he had an enormous influence on younger artists: Some, like Phillip King, took a direct lead from his abstraction, while others, like Richard Long and Gilbert & George, were among Caro’s students at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, reacted against its perceived purism.

Caro has been enormously prolific and widely respected over the years. He was knighted in 1987 and received the Order of Merit in 2000. In 2005 (a year late!) the Tate Gallery organized a major retrospective show to celebrate his 80th birthday. His most recent show of galvanized steel sculptures opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash last week; he spoke to ARTINFO just before the opening reception.

Tony, you’re often described as having “opened up” sculpture. Do you think you deserve credit for that?  

I think that what opened up the possibilities was Cubism, which was 50 years before I came along. Cubism is always treated as a painting subject, whereas I think of it as a sculptural subject. It gave us the possibility of breaking open the monolith and doing all sorts of things that we hadn’t thought of.

When you started out, even Henry Moore’s sculptures were still solid lumps of material. But you approached sculpture in a different way.

I was getting fed up with making these false human beings, these human beings made of clay. I wanted to make something that was just a sculpture. It seemed to me that as you got away from the figure you could start treating the ground as more important. You could start treating the table as more important, the wall as more important, and your own size, and your own reach. The figure wasn’t out there, it was here [gesturing to his own body], and it was there in the sculpture that you made too.

Which made a sculpture something that you could have a relationship with.

I wanted to make it as intimate as talking to another person, which is why I took sculpture off the base in the first place.

So that it was just like any other thing in the world?

Up to a point. I still think there is probably some transparent barrier between sculpture and us. A lot of people are trying to make sculpture just a part of life, but I think it’s special, just that bit special. I don’t think it’s as much part of everyday life as a telephone or these chairs we’re sitting on.

What becomes important is how the viewer sees it. Does he stick it on a plinth where it’s well away from human life and look up to it, or does he look down on it, or does he corkscrew around it? All of this is essential to the relationship.

How do you think your work would have developed if you’d never come to the U.S.?

This country opened up a lot for me. A lot. I was invited to Bennington College in 1963–65 with Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Paul Feeley. Great things were happening there in painting, and I was able to do a different thing in sculpture.

Every time I come to America it opens possibilities. It’s a bigger scale, and it’s different from London. I lived in New York for two or three years, and I had a place upstate for 10 years in the ’80s. I like getting the buzz of the city, seeing people’s studios, seeing the new art here, seeing people responding to the scale of Manhattan, its skyscrapers and all that stuff. Then you go home, to privacy, to quiet, and you can mull it over, and even when you don’t even think about it, it’s all inside you somewhere. But I would find it very hard to make sculpture in this city. Very hard.