Page 42 - Studio International - September 1974

designer, and a generation or so later a railway bridges. Caro's use of fat tubular elements in Caro Ordinance 1971
viaduct - also similar to Roman arcaded connexion with angular trusswork suggests Steel, 51 x 76 x 143 in.
Photo: Andre Emmerich, New York
aqueducts in design - came to run immediately I. K. Brunel's railway bridge across the
behind it. A similar railway viaduct art Wye art Chepstow (1852) as well as Fowler's and Kasimir Medunetsky's Construction No. 557
Stockport, near Manchester (well photographed Baker's wonderful Firth of Forth bridge (1919), as illustrated in Martin, Nicholson,
by Eric de Mare in J. M. Richards's 'The (1883-89; used formidably by Hitchcock in and Gabo's Circle: International Survey of
Functional Tradition in Early Industrial The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1935); the Firth bridge Constructive Art (1937), long before it occurred
Buildings', 1958) struck Friedrich Engels with seems especially evoked in the repeated, bulging in David Smith's Zig 111(1961). Similarly, the
its drama: 'The railway from Manchester to convex shell-like forms of Caro's After empty frame-like rectangles used by Caro in
Birmingham passes over the town and the Summer (1968). Caro's Ordinance (197i) Span (1966) and other works have a precedent
whole ravine in which it lies by means of a resembles the Bailey bridges of World in the constructivist paintings of J. C.
lofty viaduct' (chapter 3). War Two, designed by Donald Bailey of the Stephenson in the later 1930s.
The great British viaduct type, evoked by Ministry of Supply. In common with these The influence of David Smith on Caro was
Lyonel Feininger in a watercolour called portable, prefabricated metal bridges Caro's profound, fruitful, and enduring, buffeted as
The Disparagers (1911) and revived by the piece has not only a pattern of regular diagonal it was by Smith's own cosmopolitanism and
architect Paul Bonatz for the Autobahn, are braces connecting parallel horizontal members, his international stature. But in Caro's show art
pertinent here because they relate to the Caro but also the more purely structural motif Marlborough in New York last spring one saw
motif of a flat rectangle out of which a pair of of a short horizontal strengthening section a less productive involvement with
opposed semicircles has been cut, as in Span in the middle on top. contemporary American art, in large, flabby,
(1966). Similar forms occur in 1-64-65 (1964) I have already commented (in Artforum, inflationary versions in pretty rusted steel of
and other sculptures by Nassos Daphnis, in April 1972) on the relation between Caro's motifs that look appropriated from the paintings
America, but Daphnis seems more involved art and that of his exact Scottish contemporary of Helen Frankenthaler. Veduggio Sun (1973) is
with the plane-geometrical conjunction of circle Paolozzi, and on Caro's influence on younger only one example. The picturesque, by now Caro
and square, whereas with Caro the shape sculptors in America. Many other relations should know, cannot simply be transliterated
implies more about structural support, just remain to be discussed. For example, Caro into the sculpturesque, and Americanisms
as the title Span may even hint art bridge uses a motif suggesting a Hogarthian S-curve, cannot simply be borrowed - almost in the sense
construction. composed of two reciprocal semi-cylindrical of capital. Caro's sculpture is art its best and -
Besides the viaducts, pieces by Caro can shapes. This can be found in the circumstances the irony of tradition - its most original when it
even call to mind the most famous British of British Constructivism: it is present in is art its most English, wherever he makes it.q
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