A noble gesture: Tate Britain has succeeded in making sense of 50 years' worth of Anthony Caro's sculpture

Apollo, March, 2005 by Samson Spanier

The Duveen galleries at Tare Britain currently hold a big surprise. Anyone walking along the main atrium hallway towards the temporary exhibition space is confonted by a series of huge steel stepped arches. Intimidating in their size, they nevertheless fit the human body on its own terms, as one walks through, because the first inward step is at shoulder height. This is the debut of Millbank steps, eighty-one-year-old Caro's latest work. It is the first of several surprising vistas deployed by curator Paul Moorhouse for his Caro exhibition, and it is a fitting initiative since Caro's oeuvre is itself surprising. Unlike, say, Mondrian, who developed his identifiable style over a tortuous two decades, Caro in 1960 changed from a pupil and follower of Henry Moore who made massy, textured figures, into a sculptor of unprecedented and highly influential free-stranding welded steel abstractions, in which the concepts of the pedestal and of the human form were jettisoned.

The layout of the exhibition proper sums up the change immediately. In the foreground is a statue, on a pedestal, of two feet, above which rises a volume--this is the back of the billowing shirt of Man taking off his shirt (1955-56). Framing this sculpture some way beyond is a trapezoid plane perpendicular to the floor, behind which a disc floats, Twenty four hours (1960). The first of the welded steel constructions, it is preoccupied with space and suspension rather than volume.

Caro proceeded from this point to explore space by brightly painted welded steel, whose twisting forms invoke dynamism. As visitors enter the gallery that contains these works, the large red cross of Early one morning (1962) looms towards them, 'pushed' forward because stereoscopic depth perception detaches it from the simple flat sheet of the other end of the sculpture, lying a few metres behind it. This unusual effect sets the tone. Some stacked girders (no. 13, 1961) might be a Donald Judd, except that one girder is balanced diagonally on its end with impossible lightness. Such lyricism reaches its apotheosis in Orangerie (1969), which seems to float in mid air because the few parts that touch the floor are subsumed into an overall scheme in which mass emanates, propellor-like, from a central point at head height.

Comfortable with his new style, Caro explored variations, such as small sculptures designed for the edges of tables. Far from returning to the need for a pedestal, these sculptures swoop both above and below the table, and could not sit anywhere else. There are also reductions of his theme--Eyelit (1965) is an elegant pole that juts out from the floor--and expansions, such as the use of metal grilles to delineate space without filling it (The window, 1966-67).

Feeling at this point that his sculptures were 'too much liked', Caro then embarked on heavier works of unpainted steel, whose mass and gravity reassert themselves. The work increasingly explores space with hints of the human figure as a minor (as opposed to non-existent) theme, since the battle for abstract sculpture no longer had to be fought. Volumes and interiors that seem architectural--be they walls of steel or trianular structures inspired by Greek pediment sculpture--anticipate The Last Judgement (1995-99), a complex installation of doors, cupboards, shelves and human body parts.

Caro's journey shows that despite--or because of--his originality, the old and new masters were rarely far away once he had created his early exuberant language. Tundra (1975), a bulky and buckling wall of steel, has the undulating solidity of Henry Moore, and a patina to match. Certainly, as he grew older, Caro made sculptural reductions of both Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and a Rembrandt Descent from the Cross. The Last Judgement may well be a musing on the tragedies and cruelties of the world, but seems redolent also of Michelangelo and Rodin's The Gates of Hell.

Caro's fecund and Protean development is so wide-ranging that there is a danger of finding no unifying factor apart from the rejection of the pedestal, but Paul Moorhouse's catalogue essay--which, like the sculptures, has its feet firmly on the ground--teases out interconnections. Perhaps most notable is the horizontal plane as a structuring principle, which may have been suggested once the true ground touched each sculpture. Man holding his toe (1954) is very much in the vein of Moore, but the leg sticking out at right angles is reaching for a different orientation. Prairie (1967) acheives it completely: four long steel pipes float in air and draw a plane parallel to the ground, that, because it is higher than the floor, seems to continue indefinitely, beyond the gallery walls. The table sculptures are structured around a similar plane, and Moorhouse compares them to Orangerie's flat plane at head height.

An unusual but worthwhile inclusion in the catalogue is a reprinted article by Michael Fried of 1963. It may be overly-theoretical, as a postscript warns, but it is a facinating document both as the first serious attempt to appreciate Caro, and as the cause of the influential view that in the absence of human form, the sculptures invoke human gesture.