Anthony Caro, “Veduggio Glimpse”

Anthony Caro, Veduggio Glimpse, 1972-1973.

British, 1924-2013

Before being drafted into the British Navy during World War II, Anthony Caro had studied engineering at Cambridge University. After the war, instead of returning to Cambridge, he enrolled at the Royal Academy in London to study sculpture. Caro went on to work as a studio assistant to Henry Moore (1898–1986), who was then the most important and renowned sculptor in Great Britain.

In the late 1950s, Caro sculpted figures, but his first extended visit to the United States in 1959 prompted a radically new direction in his work. He met the powerful modernist critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) and several notable abstract artists, particularly the sculptor David Smith (1906–1965). Upon his return to London, Caro created his first welded and painted steel works. During the 1970s, however, he found himself becoming “too comfortable” with color, and he stopped using paint in order to focus on the composition of forms and space, elements that Greenberg also emphasized. Thereafter he preferred raw Cor-ten steel that he allowed to weather naturally outdoors.

Despite the weight and unwieldiness of industrially produced steel, Caro composed his works spontaneously, without preliminary drawings or models. In this sense, his sculptures are sometimes considered three-dimensional equivalents of gestural drawings. Caro used sheets of steel as if they were sheets of paper: cutting, tearing, and folding them like three-dimensional collages on a large scale.

In November 1972, and again in May and November 1973, Caro worked at the Rigamonte factory in Veduggio, Italy. He used steel remnants from the factory's scrap yard to assemble fourteen sculptures (as David Smith had famously done at another factory in Volta, Italy, in 1959). Despite the titular reference to the place at which it was made and the suggestion that the form resembles a landscape, Veduggio Glimpse is a purely abstract work intended to be appreciated for its visual qualities.

Location: Pathway between GOL and SUT

GPS: 30.285453, -97.740814