Table Piece CII, 1970, painted stainless steel, 29 1⁄2 x 80 x 34 inches, Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund

The Yale Center for British Art, Louis Kahn’s last project, completed after his death in 1974, is one of the great modernist buildings, both lean and sumptuous, a paradigm of sensitive proportions and luxurious minimalism. With its sequence of “rooms” around an atrium, its sky-lit “great room” hung with enormous Stubbses, its exquisite orchestration of suave concrete, steel, and pale oak, and, above all, its floods of light, the building feels less like a museum than a wholly contemporary, remarkably splendid English country house. It was this domestic quality that prompted a visiting British scholar, Julius Bryant, to think some years ago about Kahn’s glorious building as a setting for an exhibition of Anthony Caro’s small sculptures. (Bryant, who rejoices in the title “Keeper of Word and Image” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, had previously mounted two shows of modest sized Caros when he was a curator at Kenwood House, an elegant eighteenth-century Robert Adam edifice on Hampstead Heath, with a program of contemporary exhibits to complement its old master collections.) Fast-forward to October 2012 and “Caro: Close Up.”1 Organized by Bryant in collaboration with Martina Droth, the Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture at the YCBA, the show presents a highly selective, wide-ranging “tasting menu” of some of Caro’s most intimate works, encompassing his endlessly inventive, restless explorations of diverse