Caro, Sir Anthony Alfred, 1924–2014, British sculptor, one of the most important and influential modernist sculptors of the late 20th cent. Educated as an engineer (grad. Cambridge, 1944), he studied art after serving in the Royal Navy and was an assistant (1951–53) to Henry Moore. His early sculpture was figurative and expressionistic, but he became interested in the totemic abstract sculpture of David Smith and the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and other color-field painters during a 1959 trip to the United States. Caro began to make sprawling abstract metal sculpture of welded steel plates, beams, tubes, and mesh painted a bright color, e.g., Twenty-Four Hours (1960) and Prairie (1967). Beginning in 1966 he also created small abstract tabletop sculptures in steel and in bronze. He stopped using color in the 1970s and made more vertical pieces, often of rusted and varnished steel, e.g., Fossil Flats (1974). After Olympia (1988) is one of a series of large narrative pieces created following a 1985 trip to Greece, and figures entered his work again in such monumental works as The Last Judgement (1999) and The Barbarians (2002). Caro also worked closely with architects on various projects, e.g., Norman Foster on London's Millennium Footbridge. He was knighted in 1987.
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