Hoyland, Caro, Noland - Pace London

Kenneth Noland, Salute, 1963

Hoyland, Caro, Noland is at Pace London until 16 January 2016.
You wait years for a John Hoyland exhibition then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of the Newport Street Gallery's JohnHoyland: Power Stations: Paintings, 1964-1982 (continuing to 3 April 2016 - see below) Pace London  presents a selection of his work alongside his contemporaries and friends, Anthony Caro and KennethNoland. It's a triumvirate which harks back to the heady days of 1960s Post-Painterly Abstraction when all the talk was of colour, form, 'staining', 'flatness', 'openness and clarity' (Clement Greenberg) and 'shape as form' and the 'primacy of the literal over depicted shape' (Michael Fried). The present grouping calls to mind Michael Fried's championing in 1965 of Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. (Noland's and Stella's reputations seem assured - Stella currently being celebrated at theWhitney (a show I would love to see) - but Olitski has remained largely invisible, at least in the UK.

From the Pace Gallery press release:

Hoyland, Caro and Noland all emerged in the wake of the first generation of the New York School and sought to continue the legacies of their abstract forebears. Hoyland first met Noland in 1964 having already been deeply impressed by Caro's historic show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, the year before his own appearance there with the influential 'New Generation' Exhibition. Caro's work had shifted ground dramatically during his time in the United States, and his capacity for inventing new forms had made Hoyland recognise the value of meeting the artists, including Noland, who had had such an impact on his friend...

The friendship of Caro and Noland had first begun in 1959 when Caro found his ideas sharpened by his encounters with the American artist, who was a leading figure among the post-painterly abstraction painters that critic Clement Greenberg was at that time championing. Already well established as an important colour-field painter and figure in the Washington Colour School, Noland left an indelible impression on his British peer with his commitment to the exploration of colour’s psychic and phenomenological effects through serialized forms, including horizontal bands.
Read review by Robin Greenwood.

John Hoyland, 5.11.65, 1965

John Hoyland, 22.1.67, 1967

John Hoyland, Ait 10.9.72, 1972

John Hoyland, 18.6.73, 1973

Anthony Caro, Survey, 1971-73

Anthony Caro, Stainless Piece C, 1974-75

Kenneth Noland, 3 by 3, 1963

Kenneth Noland, Silent Adios III, 1969

Kenneth Noland, Cove, 1976

Hoyland, Caro, Noland - installation view, Pace London

Hoyland, Caro, Noland - installation view, Pace London

Anthony Caro - The Hepworth Wakefield & Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Anthony Caro, Month of May, 1963

Caro in Yorkshire is at The Hepworth Wakefield and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 1 November 2015.
The coincidence of these exhibitions of Caro with those of Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain (see below) and Henry Moore, also at YSP (see below), makes for an interesting comparison of the (arguably) major British, twentieth century abstract sculptors. Caro's innovatory, painted, welded sculptures of the 1960s represented a spectacular and radical turning away from the 'humanist', organic, carved work associated with Moore and Hepworth.
As noted in the entry marking his death in 2013 (see below)  Caro (having worked as an assistant to Moore) was profoundly influenced by the work of the Abstract Expressionists and, in particular, by the work of sculptor David Smith and the ideas of Clement Greenberg experienced during a visit to the United States in 1959.
I like Adrian Searle's description of  an encounter with Caro's best work: "[They] dance in front of you and you have to dance with them and around them. This involves lots of sidling and bending, squats and pirouettes, circling and shimmying." 
Personally, I like the painted work of the 1960s the best - it still seems fresh and lyrical.
Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Mark Hudson, Jackie Wullschlager, Karen Wright, Louisa Buck and William Cook.

Anthony Caro, Twenty Four Hours, 1960

Anthony Caro, Sculpture Seven, 1961

Anthony Caro, First National, 1964

Anthony Caro, Slow Movement, 1965

Anthony Caro, The Window, 1966-7

Anthony Caro, Double Shot, 1987-93

Anthony Caro, Forum, 1992-4

Anthony Caro, Promenade, 1996

Anthony Caro, Morning Shadows, 2012

Anthony Caro, Rhapsody, 2011-12

Anthony Caro, Terminus, 2013

Anthony Caro, End of Time, 2013

Sir Anthony Caro, 1924 - 2013

Sir Anthony Caro, Early One Morning, 1962

Sir Anthony Caro died on 23 October 2013.
The passing of Sir Anthony Caro feels like the end of a chapter in British art that looks back to the early 1960s. The prolific and ever developing sculptor was a major figure and a sculptural revolutionary. His brightly painted, welded, abstract sculptures of the 1960s were a spectacular and radical turning away from the organic carved sculpture of Henry Moore for whom Caro worked as an assistant in the 1950s. The shift came about following a visit to the United States in 1959 where he met Clement Greenberg - the influential critic who articulated the then dominant ethos of Modernism and abstraction - the painters Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland and the sculptor David Smith. On his return to the UK he swapped his chisels for a welding kit and never looked back.
Caro was an influential teacher at St Martins School of Art (1952-79) inspiring not only a generation of abstract sculptors ('The New Generation' - William Tucker, Phillip King, Tim Scott et al) but also a generation of anti-'heavy metal' conceptual artists (Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean et al) - I imagine Caro was amongst those lampooned by McLean:

The St. Martin’s sculpture forum would avoid every broader issue, discussing for hours the position of one piece of metal in relation to another. Twelve adult men with pipes would walk for hours around sculpture and mumble. Bruce McLean quoted from an interview with Nena Dimitrijevic, 1978-79 in Dimitrijevic, Nena (1981) Bruce McLean, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, p7

Read obituaries by Norbert Lynton and William Grimes, an appreciation by Alastair Sooke and a tribute from Nicholas Serota.

Sir Anthony Caro, Sculpture Seven, 1961

Anthony Caro, Midday, 1960

Sir Anthony Caro, The Window, 1966-7

Sir Anthony Caro, Sunfeast, 1969/70

Sir Anthony Caro, Blazon, 1987-90

Sir Anthony Caro, Goodwood Steps, 1994-5, installed at Chatsworth House

Sir Anthony Caro, installation commissioned for Le Choeur de Lumière (Chapel of Light), Eglise de Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg, France, inaugurated 2008