Sheila Girling on Anthony Caro: 'It ended too soon but it was a good life'
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Version 0 of 1. Speaking a year before he died, at the age of 89 in 2013, Anthony Caro complained about being badgered to write an autobiography. "I couldn't think of anything worse," he said. "I want to look forward, not back. I've always kept going by thinking about tomorrow, not yesterday." It is a philosophy evidenced in a long career that began with figurative sculpture in clay and plaster when he was an assistant to Henry Moore, before moving to abstract sculpture in steel. Then came his bold removal of the plinth from sculpture, putting the work on the same level as the viewer, and the painting of his muscular yet airy works in bright colours. He went on to work with bronze, lead, wood and paper. In the last two years of his life, he began to explore the possibilities of Perspex, a material he had barely worked with before. The results will be on show in an exhibition of his final works opening next week in London. "The fact that, shortly before his death, Caro decided to turn his hand to a new material offers us, in hindsight," writes Alastair Sooke in the catalogue essay, "a final flourish that completely sums him up." But alongside Caro's impressive forward propulsion and enthusiasm for change, there were also elements of great consistency. Not least the "64-year conversation about art" that he conducted with his wife, the painter and collagist Sheila Girling who was an integral influence on both his life and art from the beginning of his career. In the early 60s it was Girling who chose the colour red – and applied the paint to the sculpture herself – for one of Caro's most important works, "Early One Morning", a key piece in the ground-breaking 1963 show at London's Whitechapel Gallery that shot him to fame. Five decades later, Girling is still making important contributions to his work and she chose the blue for the disc used in "Blue Moon", one of the Perspex and steel sculptures in the new show. "Tony was into form," Girling says of Caro in the early 60s. "And he really didn't care what colour a form took, as long as the form was right. But when he then wanted to make steel look less like steel he first painted "Early One Morning" green. It looked terrible and I told him so. I said it had to be red. And he replied, in his characteristic way: 'Really? OK. Red it is.' That's the way he was. He bounced off people and would always be asking 'What do you think?'" Girling says it was another "bouncing off", after a conversation in Venice, that prompted Caro to attempt to work in glass, which led to the Perspex works of his last years. "The things he wanted to achieve with glass proved very difficult. He couldn't cut it into the shapes he wanted. It began to crack and break. But Perspex has the same transparency and can be cut. That's how it began." The new work combined wood and steel with Perspex, and allowed Caro to pay homage to other artists – two pieces are inspired by Cézanne's painting of card players – as well as to experiment with colour. When Caro died unexpectedly after a heart attack, much of the work had been completed, but it was left to Girling to choose exactly what shade of blue the Perspex in "Blue Moon" would be painted. She identified it from a string of samples Caro had taken to wearing, "like a sort of necklace", as he put the pieces together in the studio. "I didn't hand paint it myself this time, but I was pretty sure it was the right colour and what Tony would have wanted. After all that time together we were pretty in touch with each other and the way our minds worked." Girling is speaking in the studio space she and Caro shared in Camden, north London. The heavy metal work for the sculptures was done in a former piano factory, while she and Caro worked – her upstairs, him down – in the next-door building, which used to be the Dunhill pipe factory. "They were still in business when Tony first came here in 1969 and they'd give him a pipe as a present every Christmas." In Camden, Caro and Girling would continually discuss each other's work. "He would say to 'Give me an hour before you go home', and we'd talk about what we'd been doing that day. He'd say 'What do you think?' and I'd say you should cut a bit off there, and he'd say 'No, that's where I wanted it.' But other times he would say that I was right. I used to wait until I was pretty sure of my work before I'd ask him up to look at it. He was always so emphatic about things, which I couldn't cope with too early because it might put me off. But he was terribly helpful and we relied on each other's eye. In a way it was a chat between two eyes." Girling had exhibited a discerning eye regarding Caro's work before they even met at the Royal Academy schools in 1948. "I visited the sculpture school and, looking at all the students' work, I thought there were only two real artists in the place. They turned out to be Tony, and Frank Martin" (later head of the sculpture department at St Martin's art school and the person who employed Caro there as an influential tutor). Caro and Girling met when Caro used Girling's personal drawing board: "He said he thought anyone could use them, which was never the case. Then, when he was apologising, he made some outlandish remark about art and we started arguing. So he said 'Let's have lunch and talk about it more' and that started it." Six months later they were married. "Tony wanted to do it in three. When he makes up his mind, it happens! I did manage to get him up to six months, but no longer. There were some complications, although not for us, in that Tony was Jewish, but his family were never strict – his father would allow the ham to be carved on the sideboard, but not on the table." Girling was from a much more arty background than Caro, whose father was a stockbroker. There were several professional artists on her mother's side and an art dealer on her father's, "who was an old rogue, apparently, with a big studio at the back of his gallery where young artists would paint old masters. My mother's father knew of his reputation and described them as a 'very worldly' family." Although Girling was brought up with art all around her, she says she initially wanted to study science but her mother worried that she'd "catch too many germs in a hospital" and so insisted she go to art school, "so long as I promised that I would never marry an artist. My grandfather, who was a well-known Midlands artist, had never made a tremendous amount of money and it was his mother who really had to keep everybody." So Girling attended Birmingham School of Art before going on to the Royal Academy schools where she won the gold medal for painting and silver medal for portraiture. After marrying Caro, she continued to study until their first son, Tim, now a zoologist working in California, was born in 1951. "There was a very friendly doorman who used to write our names down as we went in and I just kept using Miss Girling so as not to cause confusion. Eventually he had to ask: 'Is Miss Girling married?'." Though Girling stopped exhibiting while her children grew up – their second son, Paul, now also a painter, was born in 1958 – she never stopped drawing, and made sketches of her children as well as of Caro, a habit she kept up until the end with her last drawing of her husband made just a week before he died (pictured left). "I was just sitting at the other end of the table and saw he was asleep. I've done a lot of Tony over the years, but that was the last one." She also maintained a keen and practical interest in art and the art world. As a young couple they had moved to Much Hadham in Hertfordshire when Caro worked with Henry Moore at his studio there. They then went back to London and lived in a converted stable in Hampstead. The house had been designed by "the brutalist architects" Alison and Peter Smithson – "who were very clever about putting staircases where you wouldn't expect them" – and Caro used the garage as his studio. "In those days we were living fairly near the edge. Tony had no helpers and I would physically paint some of the sculptures, including 'Early One Morning'. We were working and living together then and we sort of carried on the same way ever since." Caro's move to America in the mid-60s, to a teaching job in Bennington, Vermont, was a crucial part of his artistic development, and it was also important for Girling. "I learned an awful lot, although I wasn't painting myself. I was talking art as well as visiting studios. The artist Kenneth Noland, who became a friend, showed me acrylic paints, which I'd never seen used before. I learned how to mix them and saw what you could do with them. All the time I kept in touch." Eventually, she says, "the children had grown up and you ask yourself 'Am I just going to sit at home and wash dishes?'". But it wasn't until the late 70s, nearly 30 years after she had last exhibited at the Royal Academy schools, that Girling had another exhibition. "For a while it was terribly daunting. I even went into analysis for a time to try and get rid of the block. It didn't help. In the end you get so sick of saying 'I can't do it' over and over again that you wonder why you are wasting all this money just to say it to someone else. You just have to get on with it, which I eventually did." So she took the upstairs space in the old pipe factory and, whenever they were both there, they would have lunch together. She would then leave the studio in the late afternoon, with Caro following an hour or two later. "Tony was a man from a period when men just didn't cook, so I'd generally start the dinner and he'd come in at about 6.30 and have 'one lovely whisky', which was his only drink of the day. Even when he was on his way home after trips away he would phone and say 'Get the whisky out, I've got so much to tell you'. We always shared the same humour and the same interests." Girling says the last time she saw Caro, as ever looking forward, was when he left to go to a medical appointment. "Our son was over from America and as Tony was dropped off at the clinic his last words to me were 'We'll have a Chinese with the boys tonight'." She says: "It ended too soon, but it was a good life", and that she now has so much to do with both his and her work. Since suffering a small stroke, she has – like Matisse before her – started to make paper cutouts because, she says, paper is physically easier to move around than painted pieces of canvas. She is also illustrating a book by Tim Caro, about zebras. "Did you know that every single one has different stripes? They are like fingerprints so I have to be very accurate." Girling and Caro's work still stands next to each other's in the studio they shared. Since she began exhibiting again she has featured in more than 50 shows, sometimes alongside her husband, although she "never wanted to exhibit together too often because I always wanted to be separate". But seeing the work together, in the space where they both worked for so long, does she think they somehow speak to each other? "I suppose they must do in some way; you can't live together and work together for such a long time without it brushing off somewhere." • Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures is at Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, London W1, from 11 September. Anthony Caro, a monograph, will be published by Phaidon in October. |