Elegantly extending across an eight-foot expanse of horizontal space, Kenneth Noland’s And For is an exceptional early work from the famed Color Field painter’s horizontals series. Painted in 1964, a decisive year for the artist, and acquired soon after by Noland’s close friend, the British sculptor Anthony Caro, And For provides an interior view into the artistic developments explored by Noland at the summit of his success.

After exhibiting his famous Chevron series, Noland began to focus on how to explore his visual vernacular in vertically and horizontally-oriented paintings. A transitional picture from the same year in The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tropical Zone, shows the evolution from chevrons to straight lines, with Noland flattening out his forms into an almost-parallel structure. And Or constitutes one of his earliest full-fledged horizontal paintings. The great Noland scholar Kenworth Moffett describes the series, noting how in this series “the strikes make or constitute the surface, which is pulled taut by dramatic extension” (K. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1977, p. 62).

Noland was inspired at once by Piet Mondrian’s exploratory expansion of the picture plane through regimented grid-like structures, as well as Barnett Newman’s searing vertical forms. Contemporaneously, Noland’s fellow Washington D.C. artist Morris Louis had created similar horizontal color bands a few years previously, as in his Partition from 1962, now at the Tate Modern, London. For Moffett, “the real originality of the horizontals” come from the “dramatic sense of extension and openness” expanding the realm of the picture plane out from the boundaries of the canvas to encapsulate the entire space of the viewer (op. cit., p. 68).

Anthony Caro first met Noland on his inaugural tour of the United States in 1959, visiting the artist’s studio in Washington D.C. The two artists became fast friends and would continue to influence each other throughout their respective careers. Caro immediately recognized the significance Noland would go on to have on his life and artistic career, and wrote Noland on his return to London: “I cannot help thinking that together and talking to [Clement Greenberg] it could be more fruitful to me than all the rest of my trip to America, because in some way I think there were some keys to a new way of thinking about sculpture for me” (“Letter from Caro to Kenneth Noland, December 15, 1959,” in I. Barker, Anthony Caro: Quest for the New Sculpture, Hampshire, UK, 2004, p. 88).

1954 proved a pivotal year for Noland. That year, Clement Greenberg selected Noland for inclusion in his influential traveling exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction, which toured the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Gallery of Toronto. He was also one of the eight American artists, along with Robert Rauschenberg, to be included in the famed thirty-second Biennale de Venezia. Noland was then living in Vermont, where he was united with Anthony Caro, who was then teaching at Bennington College. The two artists would see each other daily, along with their fellow artist Jules Olitski, convening each evening to engage in prolonged artistic conversations. Caro later recalled that “the conversations with those guys were incredible, because it was a whole new way of thinking… the way they drove themselves to the edge of possibility was different” (op. cjt., 125).

Noland and Caro would continue to be lifelong friends, with Noland generously lending studio space to Caro during the sculptor’s frequent trips to the United States. In a later interview, Sir Anthony Caro articulated just how important Noland was to him as a friend and artistic confident: “I saw [Noland’s] first show where he hit his own thing…I felt that it was important and I thought it was interesting as hell… the meetings with Ken were very formulative for me, not only because he later became… my closest friend, but also because he gave me the confidence of being able to make art which counted… I know nobody who can talk more intelligently about painting than Ken—no artist” (“Noel Chanan interview, September 1974,” in I. Baker, op. cit., p. 88).

Renowned for his abstract, boldly colored and radically de-centered sculptures, Anthony Caro is often said to be the most important British sculptor since Henry Moore. He began his career as Moore’s part-time assistant in the early 1950s. Yet it was his later encounters with American abstractionists—as well as their formalist critic-champion, Clement Greenberg—that would prove most formative for Caro’s practice. His own collection not only features remarkable works by these leading figures, but also reveals an extraordinary richness of personal, artistic and collecting connections between Caro and his fellow artists, particularly with Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he cultivated a rich artistic relationship that inspired both artists to delve into each other's mediums and reside in each other's studios in New York and London. This collaboration engendered a profound exchange and cross-pollination, significantly advancing global artistic development of the time.

Across his career, Caro would grow closer to Noland, Frankenthaler, David Smith, Larry Poons, Jack Bush, and Jules Olitski—the latter of whom was alongside him on the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught from 1963 to 1965—and acquired superb examples of their work. The appreciation was mutual. In 1975, when William Rubin staged a major Caro retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Greenberg, Olitski, Frankenthaler and Noland all lent important sculptures from their personal collections.

Having first met Greenberg in his London studio in 1959, in October that year Caro made his first trip to the United States. He visited museums, galleries and art schools across the country, and met artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and David Smith. He was inspired to break away completely from his previous figurative style, which had hitherto consisted of weighty, roughhewn human figures in clay and bronze. On his return to London he began to assemble abstract sculptures from discrete scrap-metal components, and abandoned the plinth to occupy the viewer’s space. “I was very taken by American thinking and the whole abstraction idea”, he later reflected. “It was getting away from the English harking towards surrealism and the literary” (A. Caro quoted in N. Wroe, “Anthony Caro: a life in sculpture”, The Guardian, March 16th, 2012).

Greenberg extolled the clarity and lucidity of the “Color Fields” of artists such as Noland, and Caro’s own rethinking of geometry, color and form in space chimed closely with these ideas. Noland was a particularly close friend, and is well-represented in Caro’s collection. Purkinje Effect (1964)—an impressive “chevron” painting that is a highlight of the group—is complemented by examples of Noland’s other series including his distinctive shaped canvases. With their unusual silhouettes and spatial presence, these might be seen to reflect a sculptural influence from Caro: one such work, Untitled (to Tony, Sheila, Tim and Paul) (1976) is dedicated to the artist and his family.

Caro also maintained friendships with British artists, and was an influential teacher. His students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London—where he taught from 1953 until 1981—included many who would go on to develop their own boundary-breaking sculptural practices, such as Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Phillip King, and Richard Long. Among the British artists in Caro’s collection are Winston Branch, John Hoyland, and David Hockney. Hockney—a stablemate of Caro’s at the London gallery of John Kasmin, who also championed post-painterly American abstraction—created intimate portraits in ink of Caro and his wife, the artist Sheila Girling.

A spectacular array of color, form and innovation, the collection of Anthony Caro captures a thrilling period in American and British art. It also represents a transatlantic exchange of ideas that was enormously significant for Caro himself, and thus to the course of sculpture in the twentieth century.

With influences going in both directions, it demonstrates how great art is never made in a vacuum, but is nourished by a rich complexity of personal and creative connections. “… I rely profoundly on an inner insistence that work and friendship—when they’re both from the gut, transcend the devils”, wrote Frankenthaler to Caro after her time in London. “I was able to silhouette that thought much more after the London visit, thanks to you … Wasn’t it wonderful?” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in L. Mahony, “Helen Frankenthaler: A Painter’s Sculptures”, Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021).