Caro and Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure

The British sculptor Anthony Caro and the American painter Jules Olitski were separated by their disparate origins and their choice of divergent media, but they were also closely linked. Almost exact contemporaries—Caro was born in 1924, Olitski in 1922—they were friends for more than four decades, from the early 1960s until Olitski’s death in 2007. They first became close when they both taught at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, from 1963 through 1965. It was an important period of mutual challenge, stimulating cross-fertilization, and intense exchange that Caro describes as “when we made each other what we are now.” (Kenneth Noland, also a coeval, who lived nearby, was a crucial third part of the equation.) Olitski recalled it as a time when the three were “finding our way into making art . . . Through each other’s eyes, supportive and competitive, our art took off.”

These eager, deeply engaged young artists frequented each other’s studios almost daily and held passionate discussions about what they were doing at the moment and their aspirations for their work. What brought them together, then, as during their enduring friendship, were their shared convictions: a belief that art is neither replica nor illustration, that it must stir both the intellect and the emotions, and that meaning and feeling can be communicated wordlessly, by the formal and material elements of painting and sculpture. The first perceptive critics of Caro’s and Olitski’s work, perhaps most notably Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, remarked on its invention, originality, and abstractness. Caro’s compelling steel sculptures of the period were lauded for defining an eloquent new visual language of interval, touch, and placement, while the expanses of subtly modulated color that Olitski made during the Bennington years were praised for translating the drama and expressiveness of Old Master painting into ambiguous twentieth-century terms. Even immutable physical laws seemed to be suspended in their radically inventive work of the 1960s. Caro’s athletic steel constructions, often more place than object, seemed to have abolished gravity, a condition mirrored in Olitski’s paintings, as embodiments of his observation that “an ideal situation would be to spray color in the air and somehow have it remain there.” (It’s worth nothing that he first voiced this ambition in Noland’s studio, when he and Caro brought their Bennington students to visit and the three artists were comparing their various conceptions of what a painting or sculpture could be; Caro, by contrast and counter to the apparent character of his work of the 1960s, is supposed to have said he wanted to express the density of his material.) In the decades after these formative years, Caro and Olitski (and Noland) all continued to challenge themselves as their work evolved, exploring new directions, responding to the possibilities of new materials, and never settling for known or familiar solutions. Throughout these shifts and variations, they always remained resolute in their commitment to abstraction.

All of which makes it surprising that these acclaimed abstract artists also share a common interest in drawing from the model. The practice dates to the earliest years of their formation. Caro had a strict academic education at the Royal Academy Schools, London, while Olitski followed a no less conservative course at the National Academy of Design, New York. For both of them, as for all traditionally trained painters and sculptors, life drawing was an essential part of their first ventures into making art. What is noteworthy is that Olitski, long after abandoning overt reference in his painting, continued to draw regularly from the model, until his very last sessions in the studio, and Caro, who declared that he was “forced into abstraction” because “the figure got in my way,” has returned at intervals throughout his long working life to draw and model from the nude. For both artists, life drawing was stimulating because it was so unlike their usual studio activity, physically as well as conceptually. Drawing depends on intimate hand and wrist gestures; Caro’s sculpture and Olitski’s painting demanded full body actions, as they manipulated...