Sir Anthony Caro, “Early One Morning.” 1962
© Anthony Caro Estate/Barford Sculptures Ltd. Image courtesy Tate Galleries, under fair use guidelines.

If you’re old enough to remember the TV show that inspired the name of this post (both the British original and its American incarnation that aired on NBC a year after the BBC canned it), then you’re old enough to remember when Anthony Caro began making open-form sculpture that challenged received ideas of rhythm, structure and space. That was in 1962, the year Caro made “Early One Morning.” He thought that particular sculpture important because “you don’t get it all in one.” By that, he meant you have to walk it–an idea that, in 1962, was both retro (Giotto^†) and prescient (Serra). It was his wife, the painter Sheila Girling, who suggested he paint “Early One Morning” red. Painting his sculptures was an idea he’d later give up, thinking that coloring them made them feel decorative. “Color hits you hard,” Caro said. “It doesn’t last as long as form, but it hits you harder.”

Sir Anthony Caro died in London last Wednesday at age 89. Read David Cohen‘s 1998 review of Anthony Caro at London’s National Gallery here.

Tate vids here.

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We also lost Arthur Danto, philosopher artist this week. And, of course, we lost Lou Reed.

Here’s Danto, famously:

“In my own version of the idea of ‘what art wants,’ the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.”

And Reed, more so:

“My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds.”

We’ll have more and proper on both Danto and Reed in a few days. Stay tuned.

—Richard Benari