Anthony Caro made sculpture you read like a sentence. A long, low work such as Early One Morning stretches across the floor, a sequence of beams, plates and tubes that you take in one after another as you walk beside it. There is no plinth, and a single coat of colour ties many different parts into one form. Those two moves, losing the pedestal and letting colour do the joining, are why designers keep coming back to Anthony Caro. They map neatly onto layout, branding and exhibition design: build from standard components, and unify them with one decisive choice.
Caro died in 2013, and his works remain in copyright. The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art all hold his sculpture but none flags it as public domain or CC0, so this guide describes the works in text only. Treat his sculptures and images of them as protected and license any reproduction; our guide to public domain art explains the difference. For historic images that are cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Anthony Caro?
Caro was born in New Malden, Surrey, in March 1924, and died in London on 23 October 2013, aged 89, according to obituaries in The Scotsman and The Irish Times. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art both record his dates as 1924–2013.
He did not start out as an artist. He read engineering at Christ’s College, Cambridge, then studied sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where published chronologies date his time to 1947–52. In 1951 he asked Henry Moore for work and spent about two years as a part-time assistant at Moore’s studio at Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. He also taught for many years at St Martin’s School of Art in London. His wife was the painter Sheila Girling.
A dated career outline
- 1951–53, with Henry Moore. Caro works as Moore’s assistant. His own sculpture of the 1950s is figurative.
- 1959, the trip to America. A travel grant takes him to the United States, where he meets the critic Clement Greenberg, the painter Kenneth Noland and the sculptor David Smith, according to the Caro estate’s biography and the St Andrews magazine HASTA. On his return he abandons modelling and begins building in steel.
- 1960, Twenty Four Hours. One of his earliest abstract steel works, now in Tate’s collection. Tate dates it 1960; the Caro estate’s biography gives 1961.
- 1962, Early One Morning. A long, horizontal steel sculpture painted bright red, in Tate’s collection since 1965.
- 1963, Whitechapel Gallery. A solo show of new abstract steel sculpture organised by the gallery’s director, Bryan Robertson, included Twenty Four Hours and Early One Morning.
- 1964, Wide. Painted steel and aluminium, about 1.5 metres high and just over 4 metres long, in the Art Institute of Chicago.
- 1967, Prairie. A low, open construction painted a matt yellow, first shown at the Kasmin Gallery in London that year, as described by the journal British Art Studies and a 1967 review in The Spectator.
- 1969–70, Wending Back. Painted steel, in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
- 1972–73, Veduggio Glimpse. Steel, nearly three metres long but only 76 cm high, in the Met.
- 1982 and 1993, paper sculpture. Paper relief series made with Tyler Graphics; the Met holds examples from both years.
- 1984, Odalisque. Steel, in the Met.
- 1987 and 2000, honours. Caro is knighted in 1987 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000.
- 1990–91, “Minoan”. Stoneware on a maple-veneered plywood base, in the Met.
- 1996–2000, the Millennium Bridge. With the architect Norman Foster and the engineer Chris Wise, he is part of the team that won the competition for the Millennium Footbridge across the Thames in London.
- 2008, Chapel of Light. His Chapel of Light at Bourbourg in northern France opens, accompanied by exhibitions in the region.
What to look at in an Anthony Caro sculpture
The floor as the base. Most of Caro’s large works of the 1960s sit directly on the ground. Without a plinth, the sculpture shares the viewer’s space and the floor becomes part of the composition. Gaps between parts and the floor are as deliberate as the parts themselves.
Horizontal reading. Early One Morning, Wide and Prairie are long and low rather than tall. You cannot grasp them from one point; you walk alongside and read them in sequence, like a frieze or a page of text. Veduggio Glimpse, almost four times longer than it is high, pushes the same idea onto a smaller scale.
Stock parts, new syntax. His materials were industrial: I-beams, steel plates, tubes, mesh and sheet, welded or bolted together. Each part keeps its identity as a standard component, yet the arrangement is entirely his. It is a sculptural version of a modular system.
Colour as glue. In works such as the red Early One Morning and the yellow Prairie, a single flat colour covers every part. Colour hides the difference between a beam and a sheet and makes the eye read the whole thing as one shape. It also removes the weight associated with raw steel, so heavy members seem to float. Later works, such as Veduggio Glimpse and Odalisque, are catalogued simply as steel, which shows how much the painted surface changes the character of the same material.
Technique: welding, bolting and the table pieces
Caro’s steel works were put together by welding or bolting. Welding makes a permanent joint; bolting allows parts to be moved, adjusted or taken apart. Because the method is additive, decisions stay visible: you can usually see exactly where one piece meets the next.
From the late 1960s he also made smaller “table pieces”, works designed to sit on a table top and to hang over its edge. Elements dip below the table’s surface, so the edge becomes a line the sculpture crosses, in much the same way a bleed crosses the trim of a printed page. The paper reliefs he made with Tyler Graphics in 1982 carry the same constructive thinking into folded, layered paper, and the 1990–91 stoneware “Minoan”, set on a wooden base, shows the same assembling instinct applied to fired clay and a wooden base.
Anthony Caro and modern sculpture
Caro’s turn to steel in 1960 is closely linked with American art he saw on the 1959 trip, particularly David Smith’s welded sculpture and the flat, saturated colour of Kenneth Noland’s painting. Welded metal sculpture had an older European history too: Julio González and Pablo Picasso were welding iron in Paris around 1930. Caro’s contribution was to take that open construction off the pedestal, lay it out horizontally and paint it, so that colour and spacing carry the meaning rather than any reference to the figure.
How designers can borrow from Anthony Caro
- Build from a component library. Like Caro’s beams and plates, a design system is strongest when the parts are standard and the arrangement is the creative act. Keep parts honest; change the syntax, not the parts.
- Unify with one colour. When a layout or an exhibition stand has many disparate elements, a single flat colour can bind them into one read. Try the colour palette generator to test one dominant colour against neutrals.
- Remove the plinth. Drop boxes, frames and borders that only say “content here”. Let elements sit directly on the page or the screen, and design the space between them.
- Design for walking past. For signage, long web pages or retail displays, think in sequence: what the viewer sees first, next and last as they move.
- Cross the edge. Like a table piece hanging over its table, let one element break the frame or bleed off the trim to create tension at the boundary.
Where to see his work
Tate in London holds Twenty Four Hours and Early One Morning. In the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago holds Wide, the Cleveland Museum of Art holds Wending Back, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds Veduggio Glimpse, Odalisque, “Minoan” and paper reliefs. In London, the Millennium Bridge links the south bank near Tate Modern with the City near St Paul’s Cathedral.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Anthony Caro?
Anthony Caro (1924–2013) was a British sculptor, trained in engineering and at the Royal Academy Schools, who assisted Henry Moore in the early 1950s and from about 1960 made abstract sculpture from welded and bolted steel.
What is Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning?
A 1962 steel sculpture painted bright red, long and low, set directly on the floor. It has been in Tate’s collection in London since 1965.
Why did Caro paint his steel sculptures?
A single flat colour unifies parts of different shapes and weights and makes heavy steel look lighter, so the eye reads the arrangement as one form rather than a collection of industrial pieces.
Are Anthony Caro’s sculptures public domain?
No. Caro died in 2013, and the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art do not flag his works as public domain or CC0. License any image of his sculpture before reproducing it.
