Anthony Caro, Who Followed Sculpture on a ‘Path to Abstraction,’ Dies at 89

In the 1970s, he abandoned color and began producing looser, more vertical sculptures with non-geometric shapes, often using rusted and varnished steel. These included the distorted I-beams of the “Straight” series, the 14 works he made in 1972 using soft-edge scraps from a steelworks in Italy and huge sheets from the York Steel Company in Toronto that he deployed, with cranes, for the “Flats” series.

“The things that he got to live together had never lived together before,” the critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times in 1975, “and there had been no reason to suppose that they would ever do so — or, for that matter, that they could be lifted clear of a utility situation.”

After visiting Greece in 1985, and closely studying classical friezes, he embarked on a series of large-scale narrative works, including “After Olympia,” a panorama more than 75 feet long, inspired by the temple to Zeus at Olympia. First exhibited in the rooftop sculpture garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1988, it alludes to the humans and horses of the original in twisted and buckled steel forms. (The Metropolitan’s rooftop became the setting for another Caro show, of five sculptures, in the spring of 2011.) In pushing at the boundaries of abstraction, “After Olympia” reflected the restlessness that led Mr. Caro, who was knighted in 1987, to readmit figure and story into his work, most tellingly in “The Trojan War” and “The Last Judgment,” and unapologetically in “The Barbarians” (2002), a series of sculptures in stoneware, wood and steel depicting warriors on horseback.

“I think it’s my job to try to push sculpture forward, to keep it moving, keep it alive,” he told The Observer of London in 1999. “And you don’t keep it alive just by doing what you can do; you keep it alive by trying to do things which are difficult.”