ANTHONY CARO — Sculpture 1969–84, Serpentine Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1984

Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain for Anthony Caro: Sculpture 1969–84, which opened at the Serpentine Gallery, London, on 12 April 1984 and then travelled to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Leeds City Art Gallery, before continuing to Copenhagen and Düsseldorf.

The dates on the cover describe a continuation. The Arts Council invited Caro to show the sculpture he had made since his last major solo exhibition, at the Hayward Gallery in 1969. Thirty-one works came to the Serpentine, from table-scale pieces to monumental steel, and none of them had been shown in Britain before. Fifteen years of work, presented as a survey, and almost entirely new to the audience seeing it.

The cover builds the name like a small construction. ANTHONY sits in white above CARO in heavy black capitals, the A and R locked into a single form, the whole word standing directly on a band of green under a blue sky. No plinth. The back repeats the sky and the ground with nothing on them at all.

Inside, the plates are captioned like a register: number, title, date, materials, dimensions, a Blume catalogue number, and an owner. Midnight Gap, 1976–78, steel, rusted, varnished and painted green, spreads across two pages, lent from a private collection in British Columbia.

With this copy comes a typed errata slip. Page 64: bottom illustration upside-down. Pages 66 and 69: the captions to two Cézanne still lifes swapped, Apples and Oranges and Nature morte avec l'Amour en plâtre. In correcting the captions, the slip introduces another apparent error: the date “1985–1900” for Apples and Oranges.

Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1984.  Square illustrated softcover, linen-textured wrappers. 

Condition: Good. Light wear to edges and corners; scattered small dark specks and a faint stain to the green band of the rear wrapper. Errata slip with a creased corner.