Word: caro
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...again New York's Museum of Modern Art gathers itself for a major act of certification. It launches some heavy metal. The show of 35 sculptures by the English artist Anthony Caro that opens this week is just such an event. The ponderous slipway has been checked and greased. Brochures prepare us for a new Cunarder, the latest in a steelworking tradition that goes back to such august four-funnelers as the M.V. Picasso. The chairman, Curator William Rubin, picks up the champagne bottle and takes aim. The grizzled chief engineer, Critic Clement Greenberg, puts down the disc grinder...
...Monolith. Success sits easily on Caro. Few living sculptors have achieved more of it. At 51, a twinkling, compact man with a boxer's fleshy nose and a pepper-and-salt beard, he is by general consent the best sculptor to have emerged from England since Henry Moore. One powerful wing of American Establishment taste-the Greenberg circle, which includes such critics as Michael Fried and curators like Boston's Kenworth Moffett and MOMA'S Rubin-is disposed to think of him as the most important sculptor alive: the sole inheritor to David Smith. This has been...
...revolves around an idea of historical fulfillment: "modernism" transcending its "superfluities." We are by now so used to sculpture that lies on the ground, crawls up the wall or dangles from the ceiling that the convention of figure-on-base seems almost an archaeological memory. Yet it was Caro, 15 years ago, who came out with a real alternative to that convention. In the '50s, as a pupil at the stuffy Royal Academy School in London and later as a studio assistant to Henry Moore, Caro had been trained in a monolithic approach to sculpture. His work reflected...
...issue was how to make sculpture that carried no association whatever with the human figure (which even David Smith's erect steel totems habitually do): "I wanted to make sculpture that was real, not metaphoric. I didn't want to make models of people." The pedestal, Caro argued to himself, puts a frame round the meaning of any sculpture. "A base says, 'This is the limit of the sculpture's world'; everything in that world is different from your reality." From a base, sculpture orates; from the floor, it talks...
...Caro abandoned modeling and put together steel shapes-girders, plates, tubes-on the floor in a spirit of improvisation, pushing and tilting them around until they "locked" aesthetically. The result was a uniquely conversational and approachable kind of sculpture, quite free from the massy rhetoric of bulge and handmade texture that a younger generation of English artists found oppressive in Moore's work...