MAN OF STEEL

At once maker of icons and iconoclast, Anthony Caro is Britain’s greatest living sculptor. Tim Marlow explains why Forget Fantasy Football. On a recent flight from Edinburgh, the art critic David Sylvester and I devised a game called Fantasy Art. It needs fine tuning, but like its footballing and cricketing antecedents the fun lies in selecting mythical teams of great practitioners. British art has a strong squad at present and the international consensus is that it’s getting stronger. Yet only two British artists consistently made it into our various All Star post-war selections: Francis Bacon and Anthony Caro.

Caro is that rarest of artistic breeds, the successful artist and teacher, the player-coach if you like. Throughout the sixties and seventies he taught at St Martin’s School of Art and the list of his students reads like a sculptural pantheon, from Phillip King and William Tucker to Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Richard Deacon and more. Some followed Caro’s example and methods; others reacted strongly, challenging the ideas of the master head-on. But that appealed to Caro who has always been as much an iconoclast as a producer of steel icons.

‘It’s no good teaching what you know’, he told me recently. ‘You have to teach and encourage your students to do what you don’t know or feel comfortable with’. And he leads by example. His declared aim to ‘expand the language of sculpture’ has always involved ‘pushing at the boundaries to see where it gives’, and that remains his continuing strength: the constant self-challenging, the re-invention of his working methods at a time when most self-respecting artists are taking it easy or consolidating their past achievements. Even at 72, Caro remains the sculptural force and yardstick in Britain and beyond. ‘He sets a standard for us’, said one young American sculptor, ‘He’s the one we all have to beat’.

Caro’s greatest achievement and the one that ensures his historical reputation was the invention and development of a new kind of sculpturally expressive object at the beginning of the sixties. Composed from steel parts, welded and then painted bright colours, Caro produced totally abstract sculptures which had their origins in the cubist collages of Picasso. In effect they were fully three-dimensional collages, assembled from disparate parts but with no allusion to anything but themselves.

‘I didn’t want them to be anything, to have the graspability of a figure or a statue. They had to be something that you really took time to understand visually and emotionally’. Rather as one experiences music? ‘Yes, the analogy between music and abstraction in art is a good one. But I’d still rather people experienced them in their own terms, as physical sculpture.’

Caro now works in a vast studio the size of a small factory in Camden and has a handful of assistants together with his right-hand man and studio director, Pat Cunningham, who has worked with him since 1969. He also has a large workspace in upstate New York. Yet his earliest, trademark, abstract pieces were made in the more intimate surroundings of his garage in Hampstead. ‘I remember finishing Early One Morning [an early masterpiece from 1962, subsequently acquired by the Tate Gallery] which had become so long I’d ended up with the garage doors permanently open. I’d painted it green and we’d put it out on the lawn to get a better look. I woke up next morning and opened the curtains and there it was. But the colour was wrong. Sheila [his wife, painter Sheila Girling] said “that’s definitely a red sculpture”. She was spot on and that’s what it became’.

Colour helped amplify a mood in his work and suggested a lightness not easily achieved with industrial steel. It was also a way of breaking free from Caro’s artistic father figure Henry Moore, whom he’d worked with as an assistant in the early fifties and for whom the idea of ‘truth to materials’ was still powerful.

As a schoolboy at Charterhouse, Caro had shown artistic inclinations and worked in the studio of the sculptor Charles Wheeler in the holidays; but although he now thinks deep down he ‘probably wanted to be an artist’ while still at school, it took ‘a long time before I became conscious that that’s what I really wanted to do’. His stockbroker father was quicker on the uptake, warning his son ‘not to become a dilettante’ and suggesting that he ‘try something like architecture or engineering’. This is just what he did, arriving at Christ’s in 1942 to read Mechanical Sciencees.

Did engineering influence or assist his later sculpture? ‘Well I suppose they stand up,’ he replies with a customary twinkle in his eye, ‘so I guess I learnt something. But really I was a lousy engineer. I’d begun to make heads in clay while at Cambridge and once I’d done National Service I went to art school as quickly as possible’.

The Royal Academy Schools were where Caro ‘really started to think sculpturally’ but copying from casts and aspiring to a classical naturalism felt restrictive to the young sculptor, rather like ‘putting on somebody else’s clothes’. Enlightenment came from ‘the most important sculptor in Britain’ – Henry Moore – who filled in the gaps in Caro’s education. ‘I had no knowledge of Surrealism, no knowledge of Cubism; I hadn’t even seen any Negro art. And when I went to Much Hadham, to Henry’s place, I not only worked on his pieces, which I admired and experienced at first hand; I also had access to his library and went around the galleries in London with him. I really started to expand my knowledge and vocabulary of art’.

The first sculptures which drew public attention to Caro’s talent and for which he started to win awards were made from 1955, after he’d finished his stint with Moore. These clay figures, distorted and expressively gestural, which Caro explained as ‘trying to describe what it’s like to be inside a human body’ both paid homage to Moore and signalled his desire to break away. The real rupture, however, came four years later when Caro won a travel grant to the United States. ‘I didn’t know exactly what was happening in America but I knew it was urgent and exciting, and more to do with me than what was happening in Europe at the time. And when I got there it felt like they were forging a new art’.

Visiting museums and studios across the country and meeting artists of his own age who were making bold and energetic work fuelled Caro’s desire to change. He was particularly drawn to young painters like Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler because ‘they seemed so ambitious and made everything possible’. But it was the influential critic Clement Greenberg who struck the most succinct chord, Caro recalls: ‘If you want to change your art’, Clem told me, ‘change your methods’. I knew abstraction was the way to go. In fact I’d been trying to make abstract sculptures in clay but got completely bogged down. So I decided to stop using clay and plaster and find a new material. I went down to the docks and found some steel.’ The rest, as they say, is art history.

Thirty-five years later and Caro is unassailably the most important sculptor in Britain and, according to a good number of critics, the most widely respected on the planet. He’s produced over 2,500 works, examples of which are in every major collection of contemporary art in the world. He has refused to join the Royal Academy – ‘too complacent, not enough good art’ – but accepted a knighthood in 1987 ‘so that Sheila could deservedly be called a Lady’. He’s relaxed and confident and an eloquent if self-effacing speaker. But he admits to getting anxious if he’s away from the studio for too long: ‘There’s so much left to do and the studio is the only place I can do it’.

Steel remains his favourite material – ‘it enables me to do things that no other material allows’ and it is still ‘the easiest and most pleasurable stuff with which to work’ – but in the last two decades he’s experimented with wood, paper, lead, silver, clay and bronze. Equally varied, and eyebrow-raising to those critics who thought they had Caro categorised as an abstract man of heavy metal, are the sources for some of his more recent works.

Painting has frequently been a springboard for his sculpture, particularly Matisse’s great canvas The Moroccans, which has inspired at least three Caro pieces over the years. At the end of the eighties, however, the relationship became more explicit in work which Caro made directly from studying paintings by Monet, Manet, Rubens and Rembrandt. ‘Source sculptures’ thus transfer two-dimensional figure compositions into steel equivalents in three dimensions.

Likewise, after a trip to the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Caro was moved to make one of his largest and most dramatic works – a twenty-metre long epic called After Olympia – in tribute to the frieze sculptures that originally adorned the temple pediments. Works like these broke all the Modernist rules about the self-contained work of art and some critics felt Caro had betrayed his early achievements. ‘Rules exist to be broken, particularly artistic ones’, he says in reply. ‘At the beginning of the sixties we were trying to find ways to make art with clarity and economy, to establish our grammar. Now we can write fuller sentences’.

Two years ago the fuller sentences became fully-fledged stories as Caro reproduced characters from the Iliad in a sculptural re-enactment of the Trojan War in steel and clay. He showed them at Kenwood House and then up at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. By the time they were exhibited in Japan, photographic backdrops of archaeological sites had been added. The theatrical staging was complete.

‘It’s not really as challenging to work with imagery as it is with the abstract. Abstract sculpture remains my main thing, but I’ve had a hell of a good time making the Trojan War series and I’ve learnt a lot. Discovery is what making art is about and that’s where most of the fun lies’.

The most ambitious area of his output is only just coming to fruition, an area he calls ‘sculpitecture’. There have long been elements of buildings in his work but it was after a summer workshop in America in 1987 with architect Frank Gehry that the idea of exploring the relationship between architecture and sculpture took off. Freed from the constraints of functionalism bar the need to make their structures stand up, Caro and Gehry knocked up over a period of two days a sprawling, quirky and extraordinary hybrid construction in wood that combined ramps, steps, towers and other architectural elements, all used creatively and intuitively as sculptural elements.

Four years later the desire to push the idea of architecture still further bore fruit when Caro decided to build a thirteen metre tower – The Tower of Discovery – for an exhibition at the Tate. Reaching parts of the gallery that other sculptors had never touched, he created a steel warren into which the public flocked in droves.

Challenging the idea that sculpture is merely a a decorative appendage to the ‘mother of the arts’, Caro has continued to develop a working relationship with architecture and in so doing, has begun to produce a more engaging form of public art. A commission straight after the Tate show led to Sea Music, a large, elegantly linear sculpture incorporating a look-out platform, on the quayside of Poole Harbour. Soon after he was invited to a work for the opening of a new museum in Grenoble which he designed to ‘sit across the old city wall, creating a kind of canopy that encourages people to get involved’.

Most recently, it was announced that the competition to design the first bridge across the Thames for over a century had been won by a team comprising architect Norman Foster, engineer Chris Wise and Caro. Linking St Paul’s with the Tate’s new Bankside gallery, thedesign is a blade-like, minimalist intervention over the river with a circular ziggurat at one end and a cascade of ramps and steps at the other. ‘The design is an extension of sculpture’, Caro explains, ‘and it’s starting to feel as if the dialogue between architecture and sculpture can really lead somewhere’.

So he still remains optimistic about the future? ‘Of course. All the artists I believe in are some sort of optimist. Optimism of this sort, like serenity, is hard won. Art is a religious activity – it’s about living. Decay and dying are something else. I can’t allow myself self-pity or a morbid attitude. There’s too much left to do in the studio. That’s the source as well as the place for my optimism’.

Tim Marlow is an editor, writer and broadcaster.

This article first appeared in Cambridge Alumni Magazine, Lent Term 1997 and is reprinted with the kind permission of the author.