Background
Anthony was born on March 8, 1924, in New Malden, Surrey, England, the youngest of three siblings born to parents Alfred and Mary.
Christ's College, Cambridge
Royal Academy
Anthony was born on March 8, 1924, in New Malden, Surrey, England, the youngest of three siblings born to parents Alfred and Mary.
Anthony Caro was sent to Charterhouse, a private school in Surrey, where one of his housemasters introduced him to the sculptor Charles Wheeler, a future president of the Royal Academy who would tutor Caro during the school holidays. In 1942, Caro started an engineering degree at Christ's College, Cambridge, but he still felt the pull of Wheeler's influence, and continued to study sculpture with him at Farnham Art School in Surrey during his vacations. After graduating from Cambridge, Caro joined the Royal Navy, serving for two years in the Fleet Air Arm. He became a full-time student at the Regent Street Polytechnic, studying under the artist Geoffrey Deeley. Caro continued his artistic education at the Royal Academy between 1947 and 1953, learning traditional sculptural techniques, and making copies of classical statuary.
By 1946, Caro had decided to pursue a career as a sculptor. While at the Royal Academy, Caro met the painter Sheila Girling, a fellow student. They married in 1949, and had two sons, Timothy and Paul, in 1951 and 1958. The year their eldest son was born, Caro made an unsolicited visit to Henry Moore's studio in Hertfordshire, apparently simply knocking on the artist's door. He was invited in, and six months later was given a part-time job as Moore's assistant; he moved his family to the area shortly afterwards.
In 1953, Caro started teaching part-time at St Martin's School of Art in London, a position he held until 1981. Teaching would become a significant part of his life, and during that period he tutored some of the most significant British sculptors of the later 20th century, including Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, and Gilbert & George.
Caro's first solo show took place in 1956 at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, followed quickly by a solo show at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London. Two years later, one of his sculptures was included in the Venice Biennale of 1958; in 1959, the Tate Gallery purchased one of his works, and he was awarded first prize for sculpture at the Paris Biennale des Jeunes. At this time, Caro was still working in what might be called his early style, drawing on the classical influences which had underpinned his training, but a trip to the United States the same year turned out to be a transformative experience. Funded by the Ford Foundation English Speaking Union, his visit included meetings with the influential art critic Clement Greenberg and the painters Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. Caro also discovered the innovative sculptural constructions of David Smith, whom he would get to know better on a later visit in 1963.
These experiences fundamentally altered Caro's perception of art, and of sculpture in particular. Upon his return to London, he abandoned the figurative approach of his early work, and began purchasing welding equipment and scrap metal. The importance of his first entirely abstract sculptures was recognized quickly by the art-world, and he was offered a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963.
During the mid-1960s, Caro made regular visits to the US, teaching and working at Bennington College in Vermont. He renewed several of his friendships with American artists, including with Kenneth Noland, whose suggestion that he work in series had a powerful effect on Caro. He worked regularly in collaboration with other artists at this time - as he had done, to some extent, throughout his career - and often drew inspiration from the advice of friends.
In the late 1960s, for example, the critic Michael Fried prompted him to work on a sequence of small table-top pieces, designed to adhere to the edges of flat surfaces. In 1969, Caro moved his studio to a former piano factory in Camden, London, where he employed the engineer Patrick Cunningham as his studio assistant (a role that Cunnigham would fulfil for the next 35 years).
The same year, Caro began to buy pieces of agricultural machinery, with a view to incorporate them into his sculptures. Two years later, he traveled the world with his family, visiting Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and India, giving lectures at various art schools and universities. In 1976, he was presented with a key to the City of New York, in acknowledgement of his contribution to American culture.
During the later decades of his life, Caro began to experiment with a wider range of sculptural materials, including clay, bronze, and handmade paper. In the mid-1980s he made a number of pieces inspired by his travels, including works in bronze based on Indian reliefs, and a series of sculptures influenced by ancient Greek architectural pediments. His interest in architecture also led him, from 1984 onwards, to move into the area of what he called "sculpitecture", a practice which pushed the boundaries between artistic and architectural design. Noting that "architects do not get their hands dirty enough", he worked on a range of projects, including a sculpitectural "village" with the architect Frank Gehry, and, in the 1990s, the famous Millennium Bridge linking St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery, with the architect Norman Foster.
In the year 2000, Anthony Caro was awarded the Order of Merit by the UK government, a title restricted to 24 living recipients; he was the first sculptor to receive the award since Henry Moore in 1963. As active as ever, Caro continued to create and exhibit work right up until his death of a heart attack in 2013, at the age of 89.
Caro abandoned the anthropomorphic motifs of his early work in favor of dynamic, expressionistic assemblages of steel and other materials.
Quotations:
"I would like to continue being radical. As you get older, some of the world catches up and it's passed you. In the '60s you were on the crest of a wave because you were part of the wave. I don't want be a stick in the mud and do the same thing as I did last year, I want to do something different and see what happens."
"Steel is such a nice material to use. It can move. It's terribly easy, you just stick it or you cut it off, and bang! you're there: it's so direct. I think Manet was very direct, he didn't prepare his canvases like Courbet, he just put paint straight on and it's very like that with steel."
"I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed, it, and that had led on to the next one and the next."
Quotes from others about the person
Without maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner, I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to the genuine grand manner - genuine because original and unsynthetic - than any English artist before him.
While at the Royal Academy, Caro met the painter Sheila Girling, a fellow student. They married in 1949, and had two sons, Timothy Martin and Paul Gideon, in 1951 and 1958.