Sir Anthony Caro OM, CBE, RA

Henry Feiwel, New York
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Sue Pittman, Texas 
Acquired from the above by the present owner in December 1991

Washington, Gallery of Modern Art, Sculpture: 1960-64, 1965
Toronto, David Mirvish Gallery, Anthony Caro, 1966
New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Anthony Caro: Important Early Sculpture at Top Gallant Farm, 1985

David Annesley, et. al., 'Anthony Caro's Work: A Symposium for Four Sculptors', in Studio International, vol. 177, no. 907, January 1969, illustrated p. 19
Diane Waldeman, Anthony Caro, Oxford,1982, no. 29, illustrated n.p.
'Anthony Caro: Important Early Sculpture at Top Gallant Farm’, Exhibition Advertisement, in Art News, Summer 1985, n. p., illustrated in colour on the inside cover
Dieter Blume (ed.), Anthony Caro: Catalogue Raisonné, Steel Sculptures 1960-1980, Cologne, 1996, vol. III, no. 837, illustrated p. 188
Ian Barker, Anthony Caro: Quest for New Sculpture, Künzelsau, 2004, mentioned pp. 140 & 157

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Executed in 1964 during the artist’s stay in Bennington, Vermont, Sunshine represents an important juncture in Caro’s work. Caro wrote to André Emmerich in 1992, stating: ‘Sunshine was made very shortly after I started work at Bennington. I think it was the second sculpture I made in that series and was impressed by the sunny atmosphere of the place’. Created from thin sheets of brightly painted steel, Sunshine is an important example of the three principal changes Caro made to his art during this period in terms of their manufacture, viewer engagement and his use of the ground as a further dimension.

Having studied under the eminent figurative sculptor Henry Moore in the early 1950s, by the turn of the decade Caro’s art had begun to develop its own unique abstract language. In part, this artistic transformation came from a formative visit that the sculptor made in 1959 to America on a three-month travel grant. Here he briefly met for the first time artists such as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and David Smith. It was on his return to England that Caro began to make what is arguably his most famous work, the iconic Early One Morning that is part of the Tate collection in London. At once monumental and weighty, yet seemingly ethereal and delicate, the very weightlessness of Early One Morning had begun to trouble Caro in the years that followed. When the artist returned to America in 1963 he sought to resolve this issue by introducing new compositional elements and ended up creating some of the most spectacular works of his career, including Sunshine.