I went to the Nasher Sculpture Center today to view some of Harry Bertoia’s works, some of which are in the photo. According to the exhibition “Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life,” it is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in the U.S. in almost 50 years. It is also the first survey of Bertoia’s work to bring together noteworthy examples from his multifaceted practice encompassing jewelry, metalsmithing, furniture design, monotypes and the hundreds of singular, handmade sculptures including large-scale commissions and pioneering sounding sculptures. They were drawn from public and private collections across the country. As you can see from the photo, the sculptures were quite extraordinary, providing a sense of open airiness and playfulness while being constructed of rigid stainless steel or bronze wires. The one in the very front of the photo is Untitled from 1965 and is made from stainless steel wires set in artist’s concrete base with aluminum trim. The sculpture to the right of the photo is Untitled (Dandelion) from the 1960s and is made of gilded stainless steel.
The sculpture on the floor behind the large one on the pedestal is titled “Willow” from 1968 and is made of steel. According to the exhibition placard, wire was a constant within Bertoia’s creative practice. He used the material, made from multiple types of metal, in a wide variety of ways. Wire provided structure in his early sculptural constructions and furniture designs as well as texture for his handing clouds and straw sculptures. Bertoia also harnessed its more fluid qualities for his gathered wire pieces. Sometimes referred to by descriptive titles like willows, sprays, and pine trees, these sculptures all include bundles of wire bound together at one or more points. In “Willow,” hundreds of individual wires emerge from a central steel rod and extend downward, spilling out and over the top like a willow tree or umbrella. The core of the sculpture is just open space, an enclosure defined only by the sheathing created by wires that sway with the air current. Let’s learn more about Harry Bertoia.
According to Wikipedia, Harry Bertoia (March 10, 1915 – November 1978) was an Italian-born American artist, sound art sculptor and modern furniture designer.
He was born in San Lorenzo, Pordenone, Italy. At the age of 15, given the opportunity to move to Detroit, Harry chose to adventure to America and live with his older brother, Oreste. After learning English and the bus schedule, he enrolled in Cass Technical High School, where he studied art and design and learned the skill of handmade jewelry-making ca.1930-1936. At that time, there were three jewelry and metals teachers — Louise Green, Mary Davis and Greta Pack. In 1936 he attended the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, now known as the College for Creative Studies. The following year in 1937 he received a scholarship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he encountered Walter Gropius, Edmund N. Bacon, Ray and Charles Eames and Florence Knoll for the first time.
According to the exhibition, Bertoia’s time at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1937-1943) proved formative. The Academy, established in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1932, was modeled after avant-garde European academies such as the Bauhaus, which flourished in Germany between 1919 and 1933. The founding administration, led by noted Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, drew from a Bauhaus curriculum and ideology that sought to unify all the arts in service of the material world, ennobling the entirety of the build environment through the aesthetic rigor and conceptual aspiration of art and design. Like the Bauhaus, Cranbrook sought to dismantle traditional hierarchies in the arts while privileging artistic experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, qualities that became hallmarks of Bertoia’s career. The environment at Cranbrook enabled Bertoia to envision art having a positive impact on every facet of life.
Bertoia’s time at the Academy also provided one of the most enduring artistic provocations of his career. In the early 1940s, architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius visited Cranbrook. The encounter made a profound impact on Bertoia given that 30 years later, in 1972, he still remembered being seated at a luncheon across the table from Gropius, who “popped a very important question … ‘What can you do with objects in space?’”
“I didn’t have an answer,” Bertoia recalled, “and I probably am still working on it.”
According to Wikipedia, in 2019, the Harry Bertoia Foundation launched a catalogue raisonné project, which seeks to document and research the diverse and extensive artistic practice of the artist. The goal is to provide a comprehensive record and resource of Bertoia's work, and will include his painting, graphics including monotypes, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, sound recordings and sculpture. An ongoing project, the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné will be available online, published in stages and regularly updated to reflect ongoing research. It will be accessible to scholars, educators, collectors, arts professionals and any member of the public wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Bertoia's work.
Career
Starting out as a painting student but soon being asked to reopen the metal workshop in 1939, Bertoia taught jewelry design and metal work. Later, as the war effort made metal a rare and very expensive commodity, he began to focus his efforts on jewelry-making, even designing and creating wedding rings for Ray Eames and Edmund Bacon's wife Ruth. When all the metal was taken up by war efforts, he became the graphics instructor. Still at Cranbrook, in 1943 he married Brigitta Valentiner and then moved to California to work for Charles and Ray at the Molded Plywood Division of the Evans Product Co. Bertoia also learned welding techniques at Santa Monica College and began experimenting with sound sculptures. Bertoia worked at the Evans Product Co. until 1946, then sold his jewelry and monotypes when he obtained work with the Electronics Naval Lab in La Jolla. In 1950, he was invited to move to Pennsylvania to work with Hans and Florence Knoll. Florence also had studied at Cranbrook. During this period, he designed five wire pieces that became known as the Bertoia Collection for Knoll. Among these was the famous diamond chair, a fluid, sculptural form made from a welded latticework of steel.
In Bertoia's own words, "If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them."
The chairs were produced with varying degrees of upholstery over their light gridwork, and they were handmade at first because a suitable mass production process could not be found. Unfortunately, the chair edge utilized two thin wires welded on either side of the mesh seat. This design had been granted a patent to the Eames for the wire chair produced by Herman Miller. Herman Miller eventually won, and Bertoia & Knoll redesigned the seat edge, using a thicker, single wire and grinding down the edge of the seat wires at a smooth angle — the same way the chairs are produced today. Nonetheless, the commercial success enjoyed by Bertoia's diamond chair was immediate. It was only in 2005 that Bertoia's asymmetrical chaise longue was introduced at the Milan Furniture Fair and sold out immediately.
Spill casting
According to the exhibition, in the early 1960s, Bertoia developed a new technique called spill casting, which involved pouring and working molten bronze in a shallow pit. After cooling the bronze hardened and emerged as a sculptural object with an intricately textured and colored surface. He manipulated the bronze in its liquid form by swirling or moving the molten metal with tools and adding water or foreign elements like rocks and crystallized chemicals that caused small explosions, all of which led to varying degrees of punctured and patinated surfaces in the final works.
He had begun to think about the forces of nature, which inspired the spill casting technique while visiting friends who lived on Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia. The idea did not fully crystalize until he witnessed tons of metal spilling out of an unattended furnace at the Anaconda American Brass Co. in Waterbury, Connecticut. He saw in the technique the ability to harness and convey the dynamic energy of metal. As he stated:
Bronze is probably one of the most living, if I can use that word, materials; it goes with constant change and is subject to its surrounding much more so than many other things. So color keeps coming or going depending on what surrounds it, and I hope these changes will continue.
According to Wikipedia, while Bertoia’s most ambitious use of the spill casting technique was for the nine seven-by-four-foot bronze panels commissioned for Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., he also made numerous smaller-scale, freestanding sculptures using this method.
Large-scale commissions
According to the exhibition, Bertoia realized over 50 large-scale commissions — that is, a sculpture or group of sculptures made for a specific site, architectural project or outdoor civic space, in close collaboration with the architect or client. He created sculptures for lobbies, corporate offices, banks, shopping malls, libraries, performing arts centers, airports and even one ambitious private residence, in cities across the U.S. as well as Belgium, Germany, Norway and Venezuela. He worked with some of the most noted modernist architects of the postwar period, including Gordon Bunshaft, Kevin Roche, Eero Saarinen, Edward Durell Stone and Minoru Yamasaki, often on multiple projects.
The photo shows a large-scale commission for Zenith Radio Corp. In 1959 the architectural firm of Shaw, Metz & Dolio commissioned Bertoia to create a sculpture for the new Zenith Radio Corp. display salon in Chicago. The showroom did not sell anything, but rather highlighted the newest Zenith radio and television products. The only other decorative element in the space was a dramatic, curved red wall, upon which hung foud shimmering, pulsing sculptures by Bertoia. The artist had originally intended to make only one large spherical piece, but through close collaboration with the architects modified his design to be more referential to the context of the project. The result was a group of objects meant to convey the wonder of modern communication. Bertoia created a rhythmic, syncopated lighting sequence that played across each individual piece. He said of the work, “We live in a time dominated by these invisible forces. It is, in a sense, these forces, these elements of the atomic and electronic age, that I am trying to give sculptural shape and form.”
Bertoia’s first large-scale commission was a monumental multiplane screen for the Saarinen-designed General Motors Technical Center in 1953. The last was a single-row tonal sounding sculpture, installed posthumously by the artist’s son in 1979 at the Glenville Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, designed by his friend, the architect Thomas T.K. Zung. According to the Cleveland Public Library, the work is a linear arrangement of 55 rods set on a base, meant to be activated by a striker or breeze. The rods sway when touched, making a soft, chiming sound. Bertoia called his musical sculpture "sonambient."
According to the exhibition, large-scale commissions became a core part of Bertoia’s artistic practice, giving him a high-profile platform to share his work with the public. These types of projects also provided economic stability and independence, enabling Bertoia to work full time as an artist without any teaching or gallery obligations. He received more requests than he could handle, usually due to scheduling conflicts, but also because each sculpture was handcrafted by the artist and a small group of studio assistants. While the large-scale commissions were inherently transactional and functional, Bertoia believed they enabled his art to reach wider, more diverse audiences. As he stated in 1972:
It is my meaning that art should belong to everyday life. It should be incorporated in the society where it can be seen by everyone, where it can encourage a more open attitude toward art.
Sound sculptures
According to Wikipedia, in the 1960s, he began experimenting with sounding sculptures of tall vertical rods on flat bases. He renovated the old barn into an atypical concert hall and put in about 100 of his favorite "Sonambient" sculptures. Bertoia played the pieces in a number of concerts and even produced a series of eleven albums, all entitled "Sonambient," of the music made by his art, manipulated by his hands along with the elements of nature. In the late 1990s, his daughter found a large collection of near mint condition original albums stored away on his property in Pennsylvania. These were sold as collector's items. In 2015, these Sonambient recordings were re-issued by Important Records as a boxed set with a booklet of the history and previously unseen photos. Bertoia's work can be found in The Addison Gallery of American Art at Andover, Massachusetts; Brooklyn Museum in New York City; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Public Library; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.; Honolulu Museum of Art; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania; Allentown Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.; Vero Beach Museum of Art in Vero Beach, Florida; and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Bertoia's "Sunburst Sculpture" owned by the Joslyn Art Museum was originally installed in the Joslyn's Fountain Court. It is now located in the lobby of the Milton R. Abrahams Branch of the Omaha Public Library. Lord Palumbo owns several Bertoia works which are on display at Kentuck Knob, a house designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in rural Stewart Township near the village of Chalk Hill, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Bertoia's "Sounding Sculpture" can be found in the plaza of The Aon Center, Chicago's fourth-tallest building. Another "Sounding Sculpture" — considerably smaller than the one mentioned above — is featured in the Rose Terrace of the Chicago Botanic Garden, and a third very similar to the piece in Chicago called "Sounding Piece" was until 2003 on display at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. As explained in October 3, 1995, piece in the weekly "Dear Uncle Ezra" column of the university newspaper:
Dear Uncle Ezra,
What is that sound coming from the Johnson Museum? It's a pingy type sound that I guess could be some kind of wind chime but it seems like it's coming from the building itself.
— Just wondering
Dear Chiming In,
Well, it almost is coming from the building itself. What you hear is "Sounding Piece," a sculpture by Harry Bertoia that permanently resides on the sculpture court or outdoor balcony on the second floor of the Johnson Museum. The chimes sway back and forth on tall rods and "ping" or "gong" into each other — depending on which chime and how hard they collide — when winds move them. It's one of my all-time favorites, well worth a visit if you haven't seen it. You can go out on to the sculpture court until at least the end of October. Once winter sets in, the chimes are secured so that they won't snap in the windy, icy weather.
Uncle Ezra
The sculpture was taken off view after it was damaged in a storm in 2003. Audiovisual footage of many of Bertoia's sound sculptures can be viewed on websites such as YouTube.
Other work
Bertoia was the sculptor commissioned to create the Marshall University fountain in Huntington, West Virginia, to honor the university's football team in the wake of the plane crash that killed them on November 14, 1970.
The 1954 Gordon Bunshaft building for Manufacturers Hanover Trust — now JPMorgan Chase (510 Fifth Avenue at West 43rd Street, New York City) — included a full building-width, second-floor screen-sculpture by Bertoia. It was dismantled and removed in 2010 by J. P. Morgan Chase.
The “Golden Sun” was commissioned in 1967 for The Whiting, an auditorium in Flint, Michigan. Seven feet in diameter, the spherical sculpture consists of 675 gold-plated stainless steel branches and hangs in the building's lobby.
Personal life
Bertoia fathered one son, Val, and two daughters, Lesta and Celia. One grandson and two granddaughters (one died young) and three great grandchildren have carried on his lineage. Some members of the subsequent two generations are engaged in artistic endeavors.
Bertoia died of lung cancer in Barto, Pennsylvania, at the age of 63 on November 6, 1978. His wife, Brigitta Valentiner, died in 2007, aged 87.
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