Word: steels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...assistant to Henry Moore, Caro had been trained in a monolithic approach to sculpture. His work reflected it: scarred, blimpish nudes writhing lumpily on their pedestals. Then, in 1959, Caro made his first trip to America. He met Kenneth Noland, talked to Greenberg and saw Smith's welded-steel sculptures. He was 35 and, as he recalls, "waiting to be blown over...
...result was a conversion whose rapidity made St. Paul's fall from horseback on the road to Damascus look positively sluggish. Suddenly the 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...
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...
...reinforced by the forms; they touch and spring away from one another with a delectably airy insouciance. Caro's sculpture from now on would be a matter of touch and gesture rather than accumulation and structure. Later works like Orangerie or even some of the unpainted, varnished steel pieces he made in 1974 at Veduggio, in Italy, conspire, in their deft placement and laconic sufficiency, toward an elegance unmatched in contemporary sculpture...
France so far is leading the export race, showing marked ability to sell "product-in-hand" plants-highly automated factories already functioning with trained personnel. Premier Jacques Chirac recently agreed in principle on more than $6 billion worth of contracts in Iran: a subway for Tehran, a steel mill, an auto assembly plant, a color television system and 200 housing units. In Iraq, he signed a similar $3 billion deal...