Anthony Caro valuation
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.
What a work by Anthony Caro is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 8 March 1924, Surrey
- Died
- 23 October 2013, London
- Movements
- Abstract art, Contemporary art
More on Wikipedia.
Triangle, the Millennium Bridge and Bourbourg
In 1982 Caro and Robert Loder started the first Triangle workshop for professional artists in New York State, which grew into an international network. He worked with Norman Foster and the engineers Arup on the Millennium Bridge in London, opened in 2000, and in 2008 completed the Chapel of Light in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Bourbourg in northern France, a permanent installation he had worked on since 2001.
Tate Britain gave him a retrospective in 2005, and he died in 2013. His sculpture is recorded in the catalogue raisonné by Dieter Blume, and the catalogue number, with the material, finish and date, is what identifies a piece.
Churt, Charles Wheeler and Bennington
When Caro was three his father, a stockbroker, moved the family to a farm at Churt in Surrey. At Charterhouse his housemaster introduced him to the sculptor Charles Wheeler, and in the holidays he worked in Wheeler's studio and studied at the Farnham School of Art. After a spell drawing plans in an architect's office in Guildford he read engineering at Christ's College, Cambridge, served in the Royal Navy, and then studied sculpture at the Regent Street Polytechnic and at the Royal Academy Schools from 1947 to 1952. He married the painter Sheila Girling in 1949.
He showed two sculptures in New Painters and Painter-Sculptors at the ICA in London in 1955, and had his first solo show at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in 1956. The 1959 trip to America was on a Ford Foundation scholarship, and there he also met Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. He taught at Saint Martin's from 1953 to 1981, where his students included Phillip King, Tim Scott and Richard Deacon, and at Bennington College from 1963 to 1965 alongside Jules Olitski and David Smith. In 1987 he built a wooden village in New York with Frank Gehry. He received the Praemium Imperiale in 1992 and the Order of Merit in 2000.
Best auction results
- Sculpture Two £1.4m
- Sculpture, 1962 · London · February 2006
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
