Nasher Sculpture Center

Carriage belongs to a series of works from 1966-67 in which Anthony Caro introduced into his low-lying, horizontal, segmented compositions the use of mesh planes. Open, transparent grids replaced solidity with spatial penetration and lightened even further the graceful cadences characteristic of his work of the period. As William Rubin has observed:

"In the sculptures of 1966 Caro solved the "problem" of the opacity of vertical panels-such as that of Early One Morning-by introducing rectangular grids made of street gratings or expanded-metal mesh of the type used for reinforcing walls. These made possible compositions based on semitransparent upright planes dispersed through lateral space with an autonomy that Caro emphasized by making their linkages extremely tenuous…The relative transparency of the grids permits them to function almost as surrounding walls." [Rubin, 1975, p. 136]

According to the artist's records, the sequence of major works incorporating mesh grids consists of Aroma (1966), Red Splash (1966), Carriage (1966), Span (1966), The Window (1966-67), and Source (1967) (Rubin, 1975, p. 7). It is a stylistic device, however, that almost completely disappeared from Caro's work after 1967.

In Carriage, two discrete upright segments are joined by a gently curved tubular bar that spans an open space of almost twelve feet, raising the possibility that the title derives from a vague suggestion of a horse linked by drooping reins to a carriage. Viewed from the side, the sculpture is read primarily as a two-walled delimiter of open space. From the ends, it merges several complex pictorial themes: the rectilinear interaction of the solid vertical and horizontal elements, the foreshortened collapse of space between the two vertical planes, and the changing patterns of one mesh grid seen against the two superimposed grids. Caro's choice of a blue-green color tends to emphasize a pictorial rather than a tactile or literal quality. When Carriage was first exhibited in New York in 1966, it immediately drew considerable critical attention as one of Caro's most important sculptures to date (see Krauss, 1967; Michael Fried, Artforum 5, no. 6, February 1967, pp. 46-47; and Cindy Nemser, Arts Magazine 41, no. 3, December 1966-January 1967, p. 63).