Now and again New York's Museum of Modern Art gathers itself for a major act of certification. It launches some heavy metal. The show of 35 sculptures by the English artist Anthony Caro that opens this week is just such an event. The ponderous slipway has been checked and greased. Brochures prepare us for a new Cunarder, the latest in a steelworking tradition that goes back to such august four-funnelers as the M.V. Picasso. The chairman, Curator William Rubin, picks up the champagne bottle and takes aim. The grizzled chief engineer, Critic Clement Greenberg, puts down the disc grinder with which he had been stripping an American dreadnought, the U.S.S. David Smith; he wipes away one gruff tear of pride on an oily rag, then jerks the levers.
Down she slides: not a Blue Ribander, evidently; smaller than we were led to expect, and lighter; but so buoyant, so fresh and trim in line, that we only realize later and with the mildest disappointment that this Pride of the Clyde is in fact a yacht.
Out of the Monolith. Success sits easily on Caro. Few living sculptors have achieved more of it. At 51, a twinkling, compact man with a boxer's fleshy nose and a pepper-and-salt beard, he is by general consent the best sculptor to have emerged from England since Henry Moore. One powerful wing of American Establishment taste—the Greenberg circle, which includes such critics as Michael Fried and curators like Boston's Kenworth Moffett and MOMA'S Rubin—is disposed to think of him as the most important sculptor alive: the sole inheritor to David Smith. This has been announced so often in the past ten years that it has become a pedagogical dogma.
Like most such dogmas, it revolves around an idea of historical fulfillment: "modernism" transcending its "superfluities." We are by now so used to sculpture that lies on the ground, crawls up the wall or dangles from the ceiling that the convention of figure-on-base seems almost an archaeological memory. Yet it was Caro, 15 years ago, who came out with a real alternative to that convention. In the '50s, as a pupil at the stuffy Royal Academy School in London and later as a studio assistant to Henry Moore, Caro had been trained in a monolithic approach to sculpture. His work reflected it: scarred, blimpish nudes writhing lumpily on their pedestals. Then, in 1959, Caro made his first trip to America. He met Kenneth Noland, talked to Greenberg and saw Smith's welded-steel sculptures. He was 35 and, as he recalls, "waiting to be blown over."
The result was a conversion whose rapidity made St. Paul's fall from horseback on the road to Damascus look positively sluggish. Suddenly the issue was how to make sculpture that carried no association whatever with the human figure (which even David Smith's erect steel totems habitually do): "I wanted to make sculpture that was real, not metaphoric. I didn't want to make models of people." The pedestal, Caro argued to himself, puts a frame round the meaning of any sculpture. "A base says, 'This is the limit of the sculpture's world'; everything in that world is different from your reality." From a base, sculpture orates; from the floor, it talks.