PORTLAND, ME.- On Monday, October 15 at 9 a.m., the Portland Museum of Art will install a monumental steel sculpture by celebrated artist Sir Anthony Caro. This 1500 lbs. sculpture entitled Moment (4’5” x 8’8” x 6’6”) will be lifted by a crane into the museum’s Joan B. Burns Sculpture Garden on High Street. Moment (1971) will be the PMA’s second outdoor sculpture, joining Celeste Roberge’s Raising Cairn (2000).

“Moment will form the cornerstone of the museum’s story of modern sculpture,” said Jessica May, PMA’s Curator of Contemporary and Modern Art. “This work represents a critical moment for Caro’s sculptural practice, as the artist transitioned away from the brightly colored, often lyrical works of the 1960s to the varnished steel, explicitly modernist constructions that he is best known for now.”

In addition to Moment, the PMA will welcome a second gift into the collection by Caro called Table Piece CXL (1973). Both gifts are from the collection of Dr. Guido Goldman of Concord, Massachusetts. Dr. Goldman is a political scientist, longtime Board member of the American Council on Germany, and the founding Director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Goldman, a noted collector of modern sculpture as well as Central Asian Ikats (silk and cotton resist-dyed textiles woven in the mid-19th century in Bukhara and Samarkand), offered the gifts in honor of longtime museum Trustee Leonard Nelson and his wife, Merle. Dr. Goldman has donated gifts of major Caro sculptures to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Sir Anthony Caro (British, born 1924) is one of the most celebrated sculptors of the post-war period, and his work is characterized by assemblages of metal using “found” industrial objects. He was trained by British sculptor Henry Moore in a figurative tradition, but by the late 1950s moved definitively towards a high modern style of steel construction, in which individual steel elements are added to one another and the sculpture is built from the ground up. His goal is not to create a resemblance to people and things in the natural world, but instead to convey the impression of perfect and improbable balance from each angle.