ANTHONY CARO — Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1969

Hayward Gallery, London, 24 January–9 March 1969. Exhibition catalogue published by the Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1968. Introduction by Michael Fried. Square softcover; photographic wrappers; black-and-white and colour reproductions throughout. 23 × 23 cm.

"Father in sculpture" is how Anthony Caro later described Henry Moore. By 1969, the family relationship had become an art-historical position.

Caro had entered Moore's studio at Perry Green in the early 1950s as an assistant. The proximity was real and the inheritance initially visible. The early works reproduced here—Man Holding his Foot (1954), Woman Waking Up (1955)—still belong to a world of modelling, bronze, figure and bodily mass. Caro learned modern British sculpture from inside the room in which much of its authority was being produced.

Then he left the room.

America in 1959 brought David Smith, Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland into view. Back in Britain, Caro began removing the signs by which sculpture had previously announced itself. Bronze became industrial steel. Modelling became construction. Colour arrived. The pedestal disappeared. By his 1963 Whitechapel exhibition, Moore's former assistant had developed a language that looked remarkably unlike the one he had inherited.

Caro understood that the shift must have felt to Moore like rejection. It was also succession.

By 1967, the separation had moved beyond form and into the institution. Caro was among the artists who objected publicly to the terms surrounding Moore's proposed gift to Tate. The question was no longer simply what sculpture should look like. It was who would be allowed to occupy the position of British sculpture itself.

Then the chronology becomes almost indecently tidy.

1968: Henry Moore at Tate. The master, seventy, institutionalised at monumental scale.
1969: Anthony Caro at the Hayward. The former assistant, presented retrospectively as the figure through whom another account of sculpture could now be organised.

Moore at Tate. Caro at the Hayward. The transfer is not quite official. But it is difficult not to see it.

And this catalogue does more than record the occasion. Its sequence converts development into argument: the figurative bronzes first, then Month of May, Carriage, Span and the open painted-steel constructions of the 1960s. Michael Fried provides the critical language. The Arts Council provides publication. The Hayward provides the institutional address. Biography becomes sequence. Sequence becomes position. Position enters circulation as a book.

The human body apparently disappears along the way, yet it never quite leaves. Caro's steel works continue to operate through weight, reach, balance, interval, obstruction and movement. He abandoned Moore's image of the body without abandoning the body as sculpture's measure. Perhaps that is the sharper inheritance.

Condition: good. Visible rubbing, handling, edge wear and surface marking to wrappers; light age toning internally. A used copy with its circulation intact.

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