Table Piece CCXXXII. The Dance

Henry Moore’s assistant from 1951 to 1953, British sculptor Anthony Caro took an effective approach to abstraction that stemmed from a number of things: his meeting with the American critic Clement Greenberg in 1959, his knowledge of Kenneth Noland’s painting on the floor and, particularly, David Smith’s approach to monumental steel sculpture, which was key in the development of his mature work between 1966 and 1978. It was during this period that he produced Table Piece CCXXXII. The Dance, as part of the Table Sculptures series, which consisted of 400 works that defied the flat plane. The various pieces of the work are designed to be set out so that the horizontal plane overflows upwards, while sometimes other parts bring the plane downwards, in the style of still-life painting. They exploit the tensions of very different parts, like curved or cut steel plates or wires and rods welded together, to create, as a group, a number of possible viewpoints while retaining a general sense of harmony and, occasionally, a painterly feel. The reference to the dance is linked to the curved planes reminiscent of the natural forms of the human body and its movements.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio

Anthony Caro was one of the great sculptors of the 20th century. He embraced full abstraction after meeting the critic Clement Greenberg in 1959 and travelling to New York, where he came into contact with the sculptor David Smith and painters such as Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, who were working on the autonomy of painting from the perspective of anti-illusionism and full Colour-Field abstraction. His painted steel sculpture, which he presented in 1963 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, was based on improvisation, similar to that of the aforementioned painters, resulting in a fully abstract sculpture.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Caro’s Table Piece series followed a new intuition, proposing that sculpture could spill beyond its base. This series engages in a complex process of negating the pedestal by means of forms overflowing their own limits in all directions. Table Piece CCXXXII: The Dance grows similarly to a very free arabesque, just as its title encourages us to relate to the annotation of a body’s movement, dancing in space.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio