‘I think it’s my job to try to push sculpture forward, to keep it moving, keep it alive’ – Antony Caro

Joyfully unfolding in three dimensions, Table Bronze Bud (1980) is a superb example of Anthony Caro’s groundbreaking abstract sculpture. Considered by many at the time to be Britain’s greatest living sculptor, by 1980 Caro had spent two decades liberating the genre from its closed, monumental and monolithic tradition. Composed of found sheet metal, Table Bronze Bud’s flat planes, cylindrical sections and arcing shapes are welded together, freely bearing their industrial origin. The work’s overall impression is one of concertina-like expansion; without a plinth, its abstract interplay of shape and balance takes place in the viewer’s world, becoming an open and direct exploration of form in space. It offers no fixed or central point of focus, and demands to be experienced from all sides, appearing constantly and surprisingly different from each angle. Caro recalled in a late interview that he ‘wanted sculpture to be something in its own right, not an illustration or representation, and as real as talking to another person’ (A. Caro, quoted in A. Ramchandani, ‘Anthony Caro,’ The Paris Review, 24 May 2011). Table Bronze Bud represents a triumph of this artistic mission, and the blossoming of a new era for sculpture.
Early in his career, working on weightily modelled human figures in clay and bronze, Caro had reached a dead end. In 1959 he met the critic Clement Greenberg, who convinced him that he needed a radically new direction. Shortly afterwards, Caro won a scholarship to spend two months in the United States, where he befriended Abstract Expressionist painters including Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and Kenneth Noland, and the sculptor David Smith. Smith’s collage-like constructions in welded metal, which assembled found objects and separate parts into expressive, decentralised wholes, were revelatory for Caro. He saw that sculpture could be like drawing or painting in three dimensions: that it needn’t be tied to the figure or confined to the plinth. On his return from New York, he salvaged scrap beams and girders from the London docks and set about constructing the seminal work Twenty Four Hours (1960, Tate Britain). Sculpture was never to be the same again. Over the following decades, Caro developed a formidable abstract vocabulary centred around steel, creating works that unfurled as syntheses of discrete elements. In 1975 he received a major travelling American retrospective that opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; it was around this time that he abandoned colour, focusing purely on unadorned metal, and creating table-top sculptures such as the present work. Table Bronze Bud sees the artist at the height of his practice, bringing his medium’s potential to glorious full bloom.