Published as ‘Anthony Caro invites you to
lunch’ Independent Saturday Magazine (February 21 1998)
Some wag in the artworld once said that sculpture is what you trip over in a gallery when you step back to get a better view of a painting. Whoever made this wisecrack (variously attributed to Ad Reinhardt and Baudelaire) would have felt at home in London's National Gallery: the collection is devoid of sculpture, indeed of anything except framed paintings hanging from walls. The monopoly of flat depictive art is finally being challenged, however, with an exhibition of Anthony Caro opening there this week, the first by a living sculptor.
The
show is of Caro's interpretations in sculptural form of some of his favourite
paintings. Images by Giotto and
Mantegna, Manet and Van Gogh, Matisse and Goya, are translated into his own
distinctive abstract language. Giotto's
Ognissanti Madonna, for instance, a picture in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,
finds herself introduced to the third dimension in the form of a polished wooden
cylinder, her new throne a frame of red painted steel.
For
its initiation into sculpture, the National Gallery has jumped into the deep
end. Caro's international reputation
dates back to the 1960s when he gave British sculpture a radical shake-out. His sprawling works in welded steel, painted
in loud and daring colours, tested the boundaries of what sculture was supposed
to look like. They were, indeed, easy
to trip over, and could do one serious mischief. His pieces were wide-open, formally speaking, and dispensed with
plinths. The idea was to get away from
the polite conventions of the statue as a self-contained entity, and instead to
confront viewers with an all-embracing and decentred sculptural
experience. He favoured clunky, brutal
materials - I-beams and tank tops straight from the factory or scrap yard -
neutralized and shed of all prior associations in their coloured state.
Caro
belongs to the modernist tradition of sculpture in that he stresses the
physicality of sculpture, its working "in the round" - abolishing any
sense of a single-point perspective - and in that he uses modern, experimental
materials. But he would have nothing to
do with the traditional modernist notion of primitivism. Not for him the sculpture as surrogate
totem. His breakthrough works didn't
invite touch or elicit empathy. Instead
they are about internal formal relations, and in that respect are supremely
optical. The experience of looking is
more pictorial than sculptural, in other words, which makes him a winner for
the National Gallery.
Asked
about the sense of physical interaction at the time, Caro made the point that
his works are "for the eyes only".
The ideal viewing situation for his coloured steel works, he has always
insisted, is the pure white cube of a modernist art gallery. That way the forms float, relatively
unburdened by gravity and their relation to the rest of the world, defining
their own internal spatial dynamics with freedom and detachment.
Since
the 1960s, though, Caro's work has moved on from its purist beginnings. Bright colours and open forms have given way
to richer, darker, heavier materials and handling. Works now tend to be more grave and expressive. He started out being so reductive he looked
like a minimalist avant la lettre, but since the real minimalists stepped forward to play their conceptual
games with the meaning of art in light strips and piles of bricks, Caro has
gone in the opposite direction. In
reconstituting the expressive base of his sculptural language he has even taken
to visiting the old masters for inspiration and ideas. (Transcriptions, though, account for a
fraction of his gargantuan output.)
Caro
himself prefers to account for the
shift in his work in a way that stresses continuity. In the early work, he has written, "we were trying to find ways
to make art with clarity and economy, to establish our grammar. Now we can write fuller sentences. We can allow for more weight and pressure
without throwing overboard the gains that were won then." It is true that the recent work is still
unmistakably in the same handwriting as the radical work of the 1960s. There are the same tensions between rough
material and effete handling. The same upfrontness and unexpectedness and tight
economy of means. But in recent years a
richness and robust awkwardness has entered his sculptural language. The metal is more beaten about, the finish
rusty. There are earthy, expressive
contrasts of different materials: metal against wood, wood against
ceramic. Once Caro wore Modernism with
a capital "M" on his sleeve; now his sculptures increasingly have an
old-master feel about them.
He
even looks comfortable in opulent, history-laden spaces. In another groundbreaking exhibition, Caro
was the first contemporary artist to be shown in Rome's Trajan Markets back in
1992. His work held its own against the
sumptuous, theatrical backdrop of the Forum, invidual pieces framed by Roman
arches and marble porticos, the metal offset against earthy Roman brickwork. The Trajan Markets exhibition opened twenty
years to the day after Henry Moore's similarly apotheothic retrospective at the
Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Caro
had been Moore's assistant and protege, and still measures himself against the
giant whose successor he is taken to be.
Ironically, a centenary tribute to Moore at the National Gallery will
overlap the Caro show.
Caro
has always felt as much, if not more, kinship to painting as to sculpture. In a way, this might be part of his
"anxiety of influence" towards his "fathers" in sculpture,
Moore and the American welder David Smith.
His debt to painters is necessarily tangential as influence cuts from
one medium to another. Paintings are
the perfect source for Caro as they give him the right balance of freedom and
connection. He take the energy from the
paintings without being constricted by the formal means. He can be an innovator and part of tradition
at the same time.
Caro's
great champion at the outset of his career was the guru of post-war formalist
art criticism, the American Clement Greenberg, who proclaimed him the greatest
English artist since Turner, not to mention the leading sculptor of his day
(the successor of Picasso, Gonzalez and David Smith). It is to seminal painters within the formalist canon that Caro
turned to first: Manet and Matisse. His
interpretation of Manet's "Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe" finds meanings as
remote from Manet's original work (and probable intentions) as the radical and
reductive readings by his formalist critic friends. It would take an astute eye to guess the source of Caro's
transcription without the title, which anway begs the question: are Caro's
beaten metal shapes sprawling across the divide of a right-angled plinth the
picknickers or their meal? The
sculpture is not unlike the basket and provisions spilling out beneath Manet's
nude who fixes her gaze upon the viewer.
As the eye adjusts to Caro's sculptural vision some shapes begin to read
as touching, if not convincing, renderings of the voluptuous turn of a thigh or
prop of an elbow. But the reading
remains highly selective and subjective.
It is an account of an energy in the original quite remote from its
particulars.
Manet,
Matisse and Mantegna, different panels of whose Triumph of Ceasar at Hampton
Court have prompted a transcription, are all "cool" painters whose
vision and touch suggest corresponding qualities in Caro's sculptural approach:
a certain aloofness, in his case ensured by working with assistants, and lack
of sentimantality. More surprising is
that he should also tackle Rembrandt, Goya and most recently Van Gogh. When the idea of his National Gallery show
was muted it was noticed that none of his reworkings were of pictures in
London, so he was asked to knock something out. What emerged were five versions of the Gallery's most popular
picture, Van Gogh's Chair, of which three are included in the show. Whereas the other transpositions take
individual components within a picture and treat them as three-dimensional
objects within the viewer's own space, in the Chair series Caro respects the
claustrophobic sense in Van Gogh's original of the chair bursting within the
psychologically-charged space of his room.
Van Gogh painted this picture days before Gauguin's dramatic exit from
his life which precipitated the nervous breakdown in which he cut off his
ear. Caro makes the chair from
stoneware which contrasts with the rusted steel which denotes the surrounding
room. The chair is actually made up of
"loaves" (a ceramicist's term for the received shape of blocks of
material) that Caro has squashed and pulverised into expressive shape. They are awkward, heavy, almost gawkish
forms, sometimes looking like elephants' feet, sometimes like arches from
stonehenge. Its ironic that through
engagement with the painting canon Caro has finally entered his primitive
phase.
In
reworking such old masters as Rembrandt and Goya Caro keeps company with some
unlikely contemporaries. Frank
Auerbach, the expressive realist painter who showed his old master transcriptions
at the National Gallery three years ago, has also tackled a Rembrandt
deposition (his in London, Caro's in Munich) while Goya's anti-war images have
also found contemporary sculptural form as shop mannequins, thanks to the
brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman whose tree hanging mutilated corpses was a
centre piece of the recent Sensation show.
But Caro's whole relationship to the old masters is of a different order
either to School of London painters or YBAs.
There is no sense of Caro "taking on" the masters in some
heroic, existential struggle to receive their reluctant blessing. Nor is there a whiff of irony or
deconstruction in his approach.
Tradition is neither a club he is desperate to join nor a pool of images
to be raided but a place he likes to visit for assured aesthetic experience.