A Review of "Caro - Close Up," in New Haven - NYTimes.com Anthony Caro SURE-HANDED "Table Piece LXXX" (1969), painted steel, among the works by the British sculptor Anthony Caro at the Yale Center for British Art. Steel that bends like a palm frond. Porcelain that mimics paper. And paper that flows like a river. The famed British sculptor Anthony Caro, still at work at 88, is a kind of alchemist, transmuting a range of materials and playing with our perceptions. These tricks of his can be contemplated at intimate range in the strong, lively small-scale works - most from private collections - that make up "Caro: Close Up," at the Yale Center for British Art. It's been nearly 40 years since an American museum mounted a major show devoted to Mr. Caro's work, and there's much to catch up with. This one begins at the start of his career, in the early and mid-1950s, with staid figure drawings (some with annotations from his mentor, Henry Moore) and dense, blocky bronzes like "Man Holding His Foot" and "Woman Waking Up." The exhibition spans the decades, as Mr. Caro abandons representation for abstraction and explores a variety of media, ending with two recent bronzes, "Cuckoo" and "Sackbut," that share only the same composition materials with the earlier pieces. In between, "Caro: Close Up" revels in surprises at every turn. You expect to see line in drawing, but Mr. Caro incorporates it into sculpture: the scrolling curves weaving through three horizontal rods in "Table Piece LXXX" call to mind musical notation on a staff; the delicate crescents animating "Table Piece LXXXVIII - Deluge" merge into an ornate calligraphy in steel. And color, which you look for in painting, turns up repeatedly in Mr. Caro's sculptures: in the sparely elegant "Table Piece XLII," he sprays a gleaming sheath of emerald green on the polished metal; in "Table Piece CII," he paints the rhythmic sequence of tilted steel panels a flat banana yellow. Although these works don't move through space (in the way that a Calder mobile does), they move in space in innovative ways. Sculpture usually rises, whether from a base or from the ground, whether conceived on a horizontal axis or a vertical one. But Mr. Caro's small sculptures frequently swoop and dip below their supports, hanging down from the edges of a table, jutting out into the viewer's space. The sculptor shocked the British art world in the "60s, when he dispensed with the traditional pedestal and began placing his monumental steel sculptures directly on the ground. The works in "Up Close" constantly remind us that Mr. Caro taught sculpture to get down. An example greets the visitor right in the entrance lobby, where Mr. Caro's "Orangerie," from 1969, seems to sit in judgment on its companions, a heroic 18th-century statue of William III and an equally forthright, semi-abstract marble head by Barbara Hepworth, a contemporary of Moore's. Resting lightly on the floor, its airy fretwork of orange blades and beams referencing only itself, "Orangerie" needs neither history nor pictorial imagery to make its laconic point. While they look nothing alike, you can see the link between the sure-handed, effortless strength of "Orangerie" and the contained power in the show's rough mid-"50s drawings, like "Bull." It's harder to reconcile the lyrical "Table" pieces with the artist's later, more enigmatic work in ceramics, bronze and paper. The porcelains of the "Book" series - "Drummer's Book," "Small Wedge Book" and "Little Book of Opera" are on view here - can be read only as mysteries, reminders that there are secrets within a sculpture that only the sculptor can know. Similarly, the late bronzes seem to exist within private enclosures - the architectural fantasy in "Cuckoo" is partly screened from view by a thick curved wall. Curving planes also characterize many of the show's remarkable paper sculptures and reliefs from the "80s and "90s. Using drawing, origami and a technique similar to papier-mâché, these works can be multimedia extravaganzas. In "Paper Sculpture No. 98," the most elaborate, pencil, chalk, acrylic, handmade paper, Tycore and cardboard tubes filled with lead shot are among the substances that went into the creation of its ebullient cascading forms. But don't look for that information on or near the object. "Caro: Up Close" has been installed - beautifully, it must be said - without wall labels. If you want to know the name, the date, the material, or the provenance of a specific object, you have to consult the exhibition brochure, which you must pick up as you enter the show. It's a minor inconvenience, given the extraordinary pleasure to be derived from just looking at these sculptures, whether yielding metal or rock-hard paper. "Caro: Close Up" is on view at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, through Dec. 30. For further Information: (203) 432-280 or britishart.yale.edu.