Page 54 - Studio International - September 1967

Caro is also the first sculptor to digest Smith's
Anthony Caro ideas instead of merely borrow from them. Pre- eye takes at first for mere agglomerations. Seldom
is there an enclosing silhouette or internal pattern
cisely by deriving from Smith he has been the with readily apparent axes and centres of interest;
better able to establish his own individuality. Un- these, when they emerge, do so tangentially and
questionably, he was led to the use of ready-made ex-centrically. That the ground plan will at times
materials by Smith's example, which may also echo as well as interlock with the superstructure or
The Rijksmuseum
have shown him how it was possible to achieve elevation (as in the superb Sculpture Two of 1962)
Kröller-Müller, Holland, only renders the unity of a piece that much harder
recently exhibited work by `free' effects with geometrical elements. But Caro's to grasp at first. Yet just those factors that make
Anthony Caro jointly with sculptures invade space in a quite different way—a
way that is as different almost from Smith's as it for confusion at first make most for unity in the
sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi
is from Gonzalez'—and they are more integrally end.
abstract. Caro is far less interested in contours or Despite all that it owes to pictorial art, and
profiles than in vectors, lines of force and direction. despite its radical rejection of monolithic structure,
Rarely does a single shape in Caro's sculpture give Caro's work is less pictorial than Smith's. His
Clement Greenberg satisfaction in itself; the weight of his art lies pre- pieces ask to be looked at from many different, and
ponderantly in what Michael Fried calls its dramatically different, points of view; and in some
`syntax', that is, in the relations of its discrete parts. cases the spectator has to look down as well as
In his catalogue text for the first show of Caro's straight ahead. Caro's 'roundness' is the more
`Breakthrough' is a much-abused word in contem- post-1959 work at the WHITECHAPEL GALLERY in paradoxical because there is so little in his vocabu-
porary art writing, but I don't hesitate to apply it London in September and October of 1963, Mr lary of forms that leads the eye into depth. Almost
to the sculpture in steel that Anthony Caro has Fried writes: 'Everything in Caro's art that is all surfaces and edges are rectilinear, and almost
been doing since 1960. During the fifties abstract worth looking at—except the colour—is in its all their changes of direction are strictly rectangu-
sculpture seemed to go pretty much where David syntax.' This emphasis on syntax is also an lar. Far from being anything like calligraphic,
Smith took it. None of the promises made by other emphasis on abstractness, on radical unlikeness to Caro's drawing is not even cursive (it shies away
sculptors during that time was really fulfilled; nature. from curved forms the way British engineering
some of them produced good things, but the good No other sculptor has gone as far from the design tends to, or used to tend to). But the
things remained isolated, did not add up. Caro is structural logic of ordinary ponderable things. relationships of the rectangular details in Caro's
the only sculptor who has definitely emerged from Certainly not Calder, whose mobiles so obviously sculpture, while necessarily angular, are them-
this situation and, in emerging from it, begun to evoke plant forms with their spinal and nodal selves only sparingly rectangular: it is as if the
change it. He is the only new sculptor whose symmetries. Symmetry enters Caro's art too, but rectangular were set up in one aspect only to be the
sustained quality can bear comparison with only at the last moment as it were, surreptitiously more tellingly countered in another. By the tilting,
Smith's. With him it has become possible at long and indirectly. Planar and linear shapes of steel tipping and odd-angle cantilevering of his rectan-
last to talk of a generation in sculpture that really (there are no solidly enclosed volumes in Caro's gular shapes Caro achieves a kind of sprawling
comes after Smith's. vocabulary) gather together in what the surprised cursiveness that is all his own, and which makes