Anthony Caro
Santa Barbara Museum of
Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Children’s Drawing
Anthony Caro’s Intermezzo
(1987, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art) is a great tall pile or stack of
lacquered steel behind the Museum building that you pass as you go in the
rear entrance. It exhibits Caro’s collapsible structures par
excellence, looking like a memory of Stravinsky’s Renard
performed on a ramshackle set of trestles, or who knows maybe Parade
with the Ballets Russes. And then, as you turn, it’s a sort of soft
Calder, and again a Miró, as planes become lines and angles or vice versa,
or a representation of something to be called London Cubism, which is a way
of looking at things.
Caro’s Saddle (1976, at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art), is a curving plate of unpainted steel, rust-colored,
standing on one of its long sides at an upward angle, ornamented with welded
pieces above and below, and set between upright girder segments. The direct,
noble sentiments expressed by its proportions are complemented and set off by
the extreme refinement of the upper curled edge of the plate, which is
treated with the elegance and exactitude of a painter’s brushstroke.
The photograph (from LACMA) does not convey this. An unusual feature of this
sculpture, quietly rusting and ignored but for the singular event of wrath
spewed from a professor thousands and thousands of miles away, is the beautiful
eclipsing movement it makes when walked around, which is difficult to do in
its present situation. At the left it folds up and redeploys very musically, a
delightful effect.
