Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Anthony Caro, Writing Piece “Spick,” 1978
wood and steel
19 x 37 x 9 1/2 in.

Anthony Caro was born in London in 1924. One of Britain's most distinguished sculptors, Caro was knighted in 1987. Over the years he has forged a new language out of simplified architectonic shapes that simultaneously evoke the subtle strength of metal and the warm roundness of clay. He received an M.A. in engineering from Christ College in Cambridge in 1944. AFter serving in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy during World War II, he studied sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic in London and attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. From 1951 to 1953 he was assistant to Henry Moore. He taught at St. Martin's School of Art in London from 1953 to 1979 and continues to participate in workshops. In 1954 he began modeling figurative sculpture in clay and plaster. The following year he participated in his first group exhibition, at the INstitute of Contemporary Arts in London. Inspired by a 1960 trip to Brittany, where he studied menhirs and dolmens--ancient human-made stone formations--he created his first abstract sculptures in steel, adding color a year later. He visited the United States for the first time in 1959, returning to teach at Bennington College in Vermont from 1963 to 1965. He began making table sculptures, which often incorporated a handle or sometimes a tool to ensure that they would not be mistaken for models of his large-scale works. In 1967 he was given his first retrospective, at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo, and since then he has continued to be the subject of major exhibitions throughout the world. In 1970 he produced his first unpainted sculptures. He was commissioned to create a work for the 1978 inauguration of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His first visits to Greece in the 1980s inspired a body of work that includes After Olympia, his most monumental work to date. Intensely physical, Caro's work suggests a kind of primal struggle between rigid geometry and organic forms. Other recurring themes include the play between void and solid, frame and infill, and concave and convex.