The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announces the gift of a large abstract steel sculpture by Sir Anthony Caro, titled First Light. Created in 1990-93, First Light is characteristic of a series of monumental, architectonic works that Caro produced in the early 1990s. As of May 1999, First Light is on view in the Nasher Sculpture Garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Italian branch of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, commented: “Tony Caro is one of the greatest and most celebrated sculptors alive today. Already firmly established in the history books, his work, like that of all talents of his stature, undergoes constant renewal and change. First Light is the first work in steel by Caro to enter the Foundation’s collections, thus significantly extending the range of post-war sculpture that we are able to present from the Guggenheim’s holdings world-wide.”
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation already owns Anthony Caro’s Bronze Screen Quiver, a work in cast and welded bronze of 1981. The gift of First Light coincides with the presentation of Caro’s latest work, The Last Judgement (Collection Museum Würth, Künzelsau/Germany), in the Antichi Granai (Giudecca, Venice) as part of the 48th Venice Biennale. Furthermore the exhibition of First Light in the Nasher Sculpture Garden has made possible a remarkable opportunity to compare and contrast an early and a later work by Britain’s leading living sculptor, in the sympathetic surroundings of the Venetian museum that bears Peggy Guggenheim’s name. This is thanks to the exhibition simultaneously of Sculpture Three, a green-painted ‘I’ beam sculpture of Caro’s of 1961, which is on long-term loan from the Patsy and Raymond D. Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. The early sixties are known as Caro’s ‘breakthrough’ period, when he abandoned figurative modelling in bronze of the kind that was normally shown on a pedestal and created revolutionary assemblages, welded and bolted, that were brightly painted and placed on the floor directly in the spectator’s space. With this, Caro at a stroke placed himself in the sculptural tradition of Picasso, Julio Gonzalez and David Smith. He has subsequently become internationally recognized as a pivotal figure in the development of Twentieth Century sculpture.
The open forms and bright color of Sculpture Three contrast strongly with the compact, tan-colored, earth-bound and more architectural forms and surfaces of First Light. First Light has been previously exhibited in ‘Anthony Caro – An Exhibition of Recent Sculpture on the Occasion of the Artist’s Seventieth Birthday’ at the André Emmerich Gallery, New York, April – May 1994.