Anthony Caro
Took sculpture off the plinth in 1960 and welded it out of steel on the floor.
Anthony Caro was born in New Malden in 1924, read engineering at Cambridge, and worked as an assistant to Henry Moore before a trip to America in 1959 and a meeting with David Smith and Clement Greenberg turned his practice entirely. From 1960 he made abstract sculpture from bought steel — I-beams, plate, tubing, girders — bolted and welded together and set directly on the ground with no base, usually painted a single flat colour. Early Morning and Midday are the pieces that made the argument. He taught at Saint Martin's, where he shaped a generation of British sculptors, was knighted in 1987, and worked until his death in 2013.
Scale spans a very long way, and the small table pieces of the 1960s onwards — designed to sit on and over the edge of a surface — are a distinct and much more frequently traded body of work than the large floor sculptures. Painted steel is the recurring condition issue: the colour is integral to the piece, repainting is a substantive intervention, and the correct paint specification is a matter of record rather than a matter of matching by eye. Works are usually signed or stamped and dated, and the Caro archive holds the documentation.
If you own a work by Anthony Caro
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