Willoughby Gerrish is delighted to open a major survey highlighting the relationship between two of the most important British sculptors of the twentieth century, Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Anthony Caro (1924-2013). The exhibition will explore how they were responsible for changing the face of sculpture on an international level, and who were each regarded in their own generations as leading ambassadors of British Modernism.
Both Caro and Moore are internationally renowned British sculptors whose works are widely on display around the world and viewed as groundbreaking in their shared field. This exhibition will assess the relationship between student and mentor and explore Caro’s dramatic shift in style following the development of his friendship with the American art critic, Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). It will also shed new light on Caro’s divergent abstractions whilst calling attention to the continued significance of Moore’s figurative works.
The two men first crossed paths in 1951 when Caro was a young student at the Royal Academy, and at which time he knocked unannounced on Moore’s farmhouse door in Hertfordshire. It took only six months for Caro to become Moore’s part-time studio assistant, staying in this capacity for a period of two years during which time the two men’s working relationship flourished. Under his mentorship Moore’s influence on Caro’s figurative work is unmistakable – as is evident in the piece Woman Standing (1957). Caro found that working with Moore broadened his understanding of modern and African art, stating how he introduced him to ‘to a whole new world of non-academic art that I had not ever come into contact with before’. Moore’s enthusiasm for exploring ideas and form in art outside of academic teaching first took shape during his time at Leeds School of Art, where he also met Barbara Hepworth who went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London alongside him. African art was one of many less conventional styles to capture the imagination of this keen young sculptor and ranged from Assyrian reliefs to Egyptian and Aztec figures, as well as Gothic and Byzantine architecture. Caro shared Moore’s inquisitive nature and questioned traditional assumptions about sculpture in terms of style and technique. He took from his time with Moore not only inspiration from African art but also in the works of Cubism and Surrealism, admiring in particular Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Jean Dubuffet.
Over the course of their working relationship, Caro viewed Moore’s modernist figurative work as the impetus to begin interrogating his own ideas about sculpture – especially on how to mould his pieces ‘to look like what it felt to be inside our physical body’. In an interview with Phyllis Tuchman in 1972 he highlighted how these early figurative pieces drew on the idea of dwelling inside the body; ‘what’s it like to be sitting in this chair, or lying down flat’ he mused – such physicality is central to Woman Waking Up (1955) and Seated Figure (1955). Notions of inhabiting the body were not themes so familiar to Moore’s work which, whilst figurative, sought to depict the relationship between the natural landscape and the human form instead – evidenced in Recumbent Figure (1938) and Reclining Woman No.2 (1980). In stark contrast to Caro’s figurative work, which emphasised the inherent physicality of the human body, Moore viewed sculpture as static, immoveable and asserted in a 1970 interview that ‘sculpture should not represent actual physical movement’.
Moore was born into a miner’s family in Castleford,Yorkshire, in 1898. Yorkshire’s topography was to leave an indelible mark on his sculptures as was his upbringing. He came from a large family, with a father whose ambitions for his children were shaped by the desire that they did not suffer the hardships ordinarily befalling a mining household. In contrast to the distant but respectful relationship with his father as befitted the period, Moore’s bond with his mother was one of great affection. In her he saw a strength, stamina and stability that he was to draw on in many of his figurative pieces for much of his career. Indeed, the dignity and resilience he associated with the maternal figure was a motif he returned to time and time again. Much has been said about the influence on Moore of his father’s occupation, with the subterranean world of mining and its association with the earth and terrain often evident in his work throughout his lifetime.The experience of two world wars also had a profound effect on him. Although there is evidence that witnessing widescale suffering, trauma, and death first-hand in the trenches during the First World War made a lasting impression on Moore in his youth, it is in his capacity as an official war artist from 1941 where we perhaps see this influence the most in his subsequent sculptures and drawings.
The spatial environment is a connecting feature of these artists’ careers. Yet despite significant changes in material, style and approach, Caro’s pieces continued to emphasise inhabitation in some way, turning later to questions of how space itself was occupied. Physical tension underpins all of Caro’s work, whether centred on our everyday movements and acts or in our internal feelings of movement. It has been suggested that Caro’s exploration with clay under Moore’s mentorship helped manifest the architectonic approach that would come to define his later works, enabling him to remove any suggestion of the human form by ‘eliminating totemic configurations’ as is evident in Table Piece 2-90 (EBB) (1982) and the painted steel work, Table Piece V (1966). Yet it was only after meeting the hugely influential art critic Clement Greenberg in 1959 that the course of Caro’s artistic style and subsequent influences changed dramatically – so much so that he has been seen as a leading figure in the radical and unorthodox branch of the Modern art movement of 1960s Britain. His discontent with traditional methods were reinforced further when in the same year as meeting Greenberg he visited the United States where he met the sculptor David Smith, with whom he shared a commonality in innovative abstraction. Thus in a remarkably short space of time Caro’s abstract steel forms came to redefine the premise and direction of sculpture in ways that were radical in their implications and yet authoritative in their means of expression. Through his metal abstractions Caro sought to shift perceptions of space and scale, form and composition – exploring what his son Paul recently defined as an ‘aesthetic puzzle’ unconfined by the dictates of artistic canon – and in this approach overturned conventional ideas about the use of materials, surface, method and finish. Caro’s landmark show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963 cemented his progressive experimental style, and confirmed his status as one of the ‘New Generation’ who overturned the classicism that until then had reigned in British sculpture. It was following his first major retrospective at the Hayward gallery in 1969 that Caro established his position as the leading sculptor of his generation after Moore.
The exhibition will examine the influence Moore had on his peer and protégée through the careful curation of a group of important bronze figures by Moore when juxtaposed against sculptures by Caro. It will include a range of early examples of Caro’s figurative work, such as Woman Waking Up (1955) and Woman Standing (1957) to show how their roughly pitted surfaces trace his initial reaction to the smooth finish of Moore’s bronzes. Thus it will discuss the development of Caro’s work in relation to Moore’s by supplementing his early figurative studies with a group of later abstract steel sculptures. These pieces will help emphasise the radical new approach in the young artist’s creative evolution from 1959. Caro’s non-representational, assembled metal and welded sculptures were in complete contrast to Moore’s curved natural forms, both in technique and use of material. They signalled a total break from figuration, and the dawn of a new and soon dominant direction in British sculpture. The exhibition will also display works on paper and archival material, including drawings, photographs, reviews and letters to further demonstrate the significance of the relationship between these two towers of British Modernism.