Sir Anthony Caro, O.M., C.B.E., R.A.

André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Private Collection
André Emmerich Gallery, New York 
Sale, Christie's New York, 8th May 1990, lot 375
André Emmerich, New York

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Classic Modernist Art, 1992;
Youngstown, Butler Institute of American Art, Anthony Caro - A Sculpture Survey, 2000;
New York, Ameringer Howard Fine Art, Coloured Sculpture, 2000.

William Rubin, Anthony Caro, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975, illustrated p.112;
Diane Waldman, Anthony Caro, Abbeville Press, New York, 1982, illustrated p.101;
Conor Joyce, 'Non Troppo Caro,' Artscribe, issue no.89, November/December 1991, p.117;
Mary Reid, Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2009, p.96, 98, illustrated p.99;
Dieter Blume (ed.), Anthony Caro, Catalogue Raisonné Volume III, Verlag Galerie Wentzel, Cologne, 1981-2007, cat. no.967, illustrated p.90 and 209.

The sculpture appears sound. There are one or two minor indentations to the steel, which are inherent to the work. The sculpture has recently benefited from being fully reconditioned by Barford Sculptures Ltd, however whilst in transit to the galleries two elements of the painted surface have been lightly scuffed. This is apparent towards the top of the tallest of the two vertical elements, and along the edge of the furthermost horizontal rectangular element. These scuffs will be fully restored following the sale, and this will be arranged by Sotheby's. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in excellent overall condition. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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‘I have been trying to eliminate references and make truly abstract sculpture, composing the parts of the pieces like notes in music. Just as a succession of these make up a melody or sonata, so I take anonymous units and try to make them cohere in an open way into a sculptural whole. Like music, I would like my sculpture to be the expression of feeling in terms of the material, and like music, I don’t want the entirety of the experience to be given all at once.’

Anthony Caro, quoted in William Rubin, Anthony Caro, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975, p.99

That Serenade should eventually find its way back into the collection of the esteemed New York gallerist André Emmerich seems entirely appropriate. It was Emmerich, after all, who had been responsible for Caro’s success in America, far beyond that of any other British sculptor of his generation, to the extent that almost every major collection of modern art, public and private and from coast to coast, had a Caro in it. And the work Emmerich did was certainly influential in Caro being chosen for a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1975: a 96-work affirmation of the sculptor’s brilliant contribution to contemporary sculpture, which included Serenade – at that point marking the final phase of Caro’s painted steel works and the beginning of a new era of raw, rolled-steel sculptures.

Serenade was made towards the end of a four-year period during which Caro had been equally focused on his ‘table sculptures,' which, having previously ‘taken sculpture down from the plinth’ (to use his own expression) he raised back up to the viewer’s eye level (see lot 32). The ‘table sculptures’, however, shared the same idiom and process as his break-through floor pieces, sharing their horizontality, even going further as they often tumble over the edge of the table or plinth to below the work’s nominal ‘base.' Yet in their delicacy and reduction (often being made of just a few of found elements welded together) they feel like a form of drawing, of sketching in space, or a kind of writing that preserves the movement of the hand across the page.

This calligraphic sensibility bleeds over into works such as Serenade – as the economy of the table pieces is scaled-up for the floor: two vertical strokes are held by a single horizontal which is then intersected by a curve, itself counterpointed with small ‘serifs.' Above this floats the contrasting section of two ‘grilles,' which – to extend the calligraphic metaphor further – acts as the infill between the pen-strokes, as if in the illumination of a capital letter.

All of Caro’s floor pieces demand to be walked around (and through), to be experienced at all four points of the compass. As the eminent art historian Michael Fried noted in 1969 – the year before Serenade was begun – unlike the work of American sculptor David Smith (to whom Caro is often compared), whose works ‘even at their most abstract, striding or attenuated, stand and confront us like traditional statues,' Caro’s sculptures ‘neither stand nor lie: they open, or rise, or suspend, or spread, or turn, or bend, or stretch, or extend, or recede…’(Michael Fried, introduction to Anthony Caro, The Arts Council / Hayward Gallery, London 1969, p.11). And as William Rubin adds in his text for the MoMA retrospective catalogue, Caro's sculpture differs from American abstraction and Minimalism at the time ‘in the way it values lightness of touch, casualness and digression.’ (William Rubin, ibid., p.65)  

By changing their position, the viewer not only animates the sculpture, changing the relationships between the elements that float and bind, divide and coalesce according to your viewpoint, but also brings into play the sculpture’s colour that whilst uniform and unarticulated in its application, takes on a painterly dynamism as it flickers and darts in and out of shadow.

One of Caro’s major innovations in the early 60s was to introduce colour as a key element in abstract sculpture. On the one hand, by painting his sculptures evenly, in flat commercial paints, he could push the work further from art history and its fascination with patina as final evidence of the artist’s hand and into the everyday industrial world (and this is why Caro was so insistent that his works be repainted as soon as the original finish began to fade or was cracked and broken by weathering). On the other, it allowed him to use colour – in symbiosis with the sculptural form – as an emotive force, taking his work away from the more straight-up attitude of Minimalism’s appropriation of industrial material. Caro’s use of colour, despite its neutral application, is in fact very painterly in its intention. A sculpture made from similar base elements has a radically different physical presence – and altogether different emotive power – when painted a deep red, bottle green or bright blue. As William Rubin noted in 1975, colour, for Caro, acts ‘as a function of the expressive and structural character of each piece, its precise hue and value seen as analogous to key and mode in music’ (William Rubin, ibid., p. 56). A sculpture entitled Serenade, inevitably it seems, has to be a shade of red.