Sir Anthony Caro profoundly influenced a younger generation of sculptors, several of whom are represented at Storm King, when he taught at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in the 1950s and 1960s. He began working with welded metal in 1960, immediately following a six-week grant-funded trip to the United States and Mexico. During his time abroad, he encountered the work of sculptor David Smith, an artist at the core of Storm King’s collection (see p. 182), in addition to the Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, and was influenced by the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg. Upon returning to London, Caro promptly bought his own welding equipment and began to create abstract sculptures made from welded steel and other industrial materials.

Reel and Bitter Sky represent two distinctly different stylistic periods in Caro’s career. His sculptures from the 1960s, such as the low-slung, curvilinear Reel, are horizontally oriented, painted a uniform color, and placed directly on the ground, though they appear to float or hover. Bitter Sky, made almost two decades later, is darker, vertical, planar, and more architectonic. The bolts and seams that join its constituent parts remain clearly visible; they are integrated into the whole structure and not “hidden,” as they were in the earlier work. Bitter Sky reflects Caro’s renewed interest in the heritage of Cubism, with its overlapping planes and explorations of volume and mass in space—precisely those issues that he rejected two decades earlier with works such as Reel.