Anthony Caro

By the time he died on Oct. 23 at age 89, the British sculptor Anthony Caro had long been recognized as one of the pivotal artists of the postwar era. But when his first welded-steel works began appearing in the early 1960s, people had no idea what to make of them. In fact, when art critic David Sylvester invited students from London’s Royal College of Art to discuss Caro’s blunt masterpiece Midday–three sheets of bent steel bolted upright to a diagonal steel base like a tilted table, all painted bright yellow–one answered that he couldn’t, because it wasn’t a work of art.

It was, of course, but it yielded nothing to expectations about what a work of art should be. Instead, Caro had created new expectations for the future to work with. Even the abstract sculpture of the American David Smith, work that had greatly inspired Caro and prompted his move to industrial materials, generally offered the eye a few more familiar pathways in. That we can now easily recognize as art the abstract steel of Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra is just one of the new understandings–and pleasures–we owe to Anthony Caro.

–RICHARD LACAYO