My life in art: How Anthony Caro's steel works stole my heart
All artists are selfish. They have to be. You can't create a masterpiece if you're worrying about whether it's your turn on the kitchen rota. Writing requires a similar single-mindedness, where the needs of the creator come before all else. At least that's what I told my family – wife and four young children – when I recently insisted on a four-hour detour on a drive through France. As far as they were concerned, I was being a prat. I wanted to go and look at a bridge.
We drove across the Massif Central and headed for Millau, a town that had been largely unknown to the outside world. That was until the French decided to spend €400m (£314m) building the world's largest vehicle bridge, and invited Norman Foster to design it. The Millau Viaduct opened in 2004. This was one bridge I had to see.
My six-year-old was the first to spot it. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "There's a big white ship sailing on top of that mountain." Up to a point he was right; it did look like a three-masted white sailing ship. But it didn't look big: it looked colossal, truly monumental. It was awesome. A feeling that was accentuated with each passing kilometre. By the time we reached the bridge, nobody was complaining. This was a detour worth taking: a family moment to treasure. But my mind wasn't with Foster and his bridge, nor even with my family. It was with an octogenarian British sculptor called Anthony Caro.
Caro was on my mind for two reasons. The first was that I suspect Foster could not have achieved such an aesthetic bullseye without first having worked with Caro on the Millennium Bridge in London a few years before. The second reason was more profound. When I first saw Anthony Caro's 1962 sculpture, the goal-sized Early One Morning, 10 years ago, I realised that, in the right hands, steel had the ability to be breathtakingly beautiful.
Let's be clear about this: Anthony Caro is a great man. He is not only one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, he is also one of the most important teachers of sculpture in the 20th century. The alumni from his time lecturing at St Martins School of Art (now Central St Martins College of Art and Design) in London (1953-81) reads like a who's who of contemporary British sculpture: Bruce McLean, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long and Gilbert and George are all graduates of his inspiring and innovative classes. He challenged what a sculpture could and should be. He took the artform off its pedestal – literally.
Early One Morning does not look down upon the viewer from a plinth, a column or any other raised device to give it perceived grandeur. The sculpture sits on the floor: all hierarchy removed. That might not seem particularly radical in light of today's pickled sharks and exploding sheds, but at the time it was revolutionary. It marked the end of classicism. It changed everything.
Placing Early One Morning directly on to the floor was a stroke of genius. The work changed from being an impressive piece of non-figurative sculpture in to a magical masterpiece. And I do mean magical, in the sense of suspending belief. When you look at Early One Morning it simply is not possible to believe that the sculpture is made of steel; it looks weightless. Which would be fine if it was a teaspoon, but it's not. It is very big, very red and very heavy.
The artwork stands at three metres high, is three metres across and is over six metres in length. It is a misshapen, scaffold-like construction of metal poles and beams, which at first glance appears to be the sort of twisted configuration a young child makes out of pipe-cleaners and cardboard. But spend a moment or two with the sculpture: walk around it, peer through it. The illusion is of watching a prima ballerina dancing only for you. To my mind it is one of the most significant abstract expressionist sculptures ever created. I think if Willem de Kooning, the God of abstract expressionism, had been a sculptor and not a painter, this is the sort of work he would have made.
The clues to Caro's radicalism lie in his backstory. He was born in 1924 and after a brief stint in the navy he became an assistant to Henry Moore. It was while he was working for Moore that Caro met an American sculptor called David Smith, who had spent the early part of his working life as a welder. An intelligent and sensitive man, Smith had enrolled in evening art classes to see if he could use his metalwork skills to create artworks. The ensuing sculptures made of welded steel and bent metal were a revelation, changing Smith from artisan to artist.
Caro was captivated and liberated. He quickly moved away from making figurative sculptures to abstraction. Suddenly sculpture to Caro was not a lump of carved stone; monolithic and opaque: it was about creating three-dimensional forms that explored the themes of balance, tension and translucence. It was the classic Damascene moment we all dream of – he was away. By the mid 1950s he was teaching regularly at St Martins, had an admiring American art world, and was making sculptures as good as any in the world. Early One Morning is a result of this purple patch, a sculpture so powerful that after encountering it you can no longer see an old-fashioned plough or a roll of barbed wire in the same way again. They too become light and lyrical: almost musical.
And the same applies to Norman Foster's bridge at Millau. On the one hand, it's a functional piece of design; on the other, it is a sublime piece of sculpture. The effect it has on you really depends how you see things. And that is what Anthony Caro has spent his life teaching us.
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