Untitled

Renowned for his abstract, boldly coloured and radically de-centred sculptures, Sir Anthony Caro is often said to be the most important British sculptor since Henry Moore. He began his career as Moore’s part-time assistant in the early 1950s. Yet it was his encounters with American abstractionists—as well as their formalist critic and supporter Clement Greenberg—that would prove most formative for Caro’s practice. His own collection not only includes remarkable works by these artists, but also reveals an extraordinary richness of personal, artistic and collecting connections between them and Caro. Untitled (1974), a dynamic circular canvas by the leading Colour Field painter Kenneth Noland, was acquired directly from Noland by Caro soon after its creation. Developing from his iconic concentric-circle paintings begun in the late 1950s, Noland’s shaped canvases have a spatial presence that reveals a sculptural turn in his own thinking: here, the circular arena contrasts with speckled blue-grey and pale rose gradients cut through by strips of dark and light silver, shimmering like shafts of light.

After meeting Greenberg in his London studio in 1959, Caro made his first trip to the United States in October that year. He visited museums, galleries and art schools across the country, and met artists including Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and David Smith. He was inspired to break away completely from his previous figurative style, which had hitherto consisted of weighty, roughhewn human figures in clay and bronze. On his return to London he began to assemble abstract sculptures from discrete scrap-metal components, and abandoned the plinth to occupy the viewer’s space. He was fascinated by the American attitude to abstraction, and his visit to Noland’s studio in Washington, D.C. had a particularly powerful impact. The two became close friends. He wrote to Noland afterwards that their encounter ‘could be more fruitful to me than all the rest of my trip to America, because in some way I think there were some keys to a new way of thinking about sculpture for me’ (letter to K. Noland, 15 December 1959, in I. Barker, Anthony Caro: Quest for the New Sculpture, Aldershot, 2004, p. 88).

Greenberg championed the radical clarity of colour and surface in the work of Noland and his colleagues, and Caro’s own rethinking of geometry, colour and form in space chimed closely with their ideas. ‘I saw [Noland’s] first show where he hit his own thing’, Caro recalled. ‘… I felt that it was important and I thought it was interesting as hell … the meetings with Ken were very formulative for me, not only because he later became … my closest friend, but also because he gave me the confidence of being able to make art which counted’ (A. Caro in conversation with N. Chanan, September 1974, in ibid., p. 88). Across his career, he would continue his warm associations with Noland, Frankenthaler, David Smith, Larry Poons, Jack Bush, and Jules Olitski, and acquired superb examples of their work. The appreciation was mutual. In 1975, when William Rubin staged the landmark retrospective Anthony Caro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Greenberg, Olitski, Frankenthaler and Noland all lent important Caro sculptures from their personal collections to the exhibition.