Baby with Ball is one of a series of works on paper Caro produced in the mid-fifties. Mostly completed in simple brush and black ink on thin, mass-produced paper, these impactful drawings depict figures or bulls in a variety of positions with occasional dashes of lurid red. Many figures’ faces and limbs are barbed with animalistic features to the extent that they are are barely distinguishable from the bulls Caro depicts elsewhere. Man and bull mingle with one another, clearly inspired by Picasso’s motif of the minotaur. This metamorphosis of human to creature or vice versa is made all the more disturbing in the present work with its title connoting play and innocence. Although it may have been inspired by watching his son Timothy (b.1951) at play, the ball is barely distinguishable and the child’s body forms a contorted angular mass which appears to press against the edges of the paper. Baby with a Ball is particularly important for a number of reasons. Through its association with inter-war surrealism, particularly Picasso’s Guernica (1937), it shows Caro’s important connective role in two differing eras of modern art: on the one hand, that of Picasso and his teacher Henry Moore, and on the other the era in which his own entirely abstract constructions redefined modern sculpture. In this drawing, Caro already shows a clear desire to abstract from his observed reality. Tessellated blocks construct the baby’s body and pre-empting straight-cut steel of his first abstract works like Twenty-Four Hours (1960). The similarities between such drawings and later sculpture are much more apparent than any that emerge from comparison between Caro’s figurative ‘50s sculpture and his later abstract work; the energy and distortion at play in in Baby with a Ball are an early indication of the originality and radicalism that would shape the rest of Caro long and esteemed career.