Harry Bertoia
Harry Bertoia, son of Giuseppe Antonio Bertoia and Maria Secunda Mussio, was an Italian-born American artist, sound art sculptor, and modern furniture designer.
Early life and education
Bertoia was born March 10, 1915 in San Lorenzo d'Arzene, Pordenone, Italy, about 50 miles north of Venice and 70 miles south of the Austrian border. "Arri" Lorenzo, had one older brother, Oreste, and one younger sister, Ave. Ada, another sister, died as an infant of eighteen months old; she was the subject of one of his first paintings.Until Grade 5, Arri, nicknamed Arieto, went to school in nearby Arzene, Carsara. By the time he was a teenager his teacher told Arri's parents that Arri needed further training.
At age 15, given the opportunity to move to Detroit, Harry chose to adventure to America and live with his older brother, Oreste. Upon arrival to the United States, his name Arri was americanized to Harry. 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. At the time Cranbrook was an eclectic fusion of creativity. Many now famous artists and designers such as Carl Milles, resident-sculptor, Maija Grotell, resident-ceramist, the Saarinen family and others were enticed to participate as teachers at the school. Students were encouraged to seek their passion rather than receiving a degree.
Career
Starting out as a painting student but soon after asked by Eliel Saarinen, Director of the Cranbrook, to reopen the metal workshop in 1939, Bertoia taught jewelry design and metal work. 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. In his after hours time he experimented with different printing methods, developing a series of prints he called monotypes. Being uninterested in the traditional duplication of graphics prints led Bertoia to the use of movable plates and hand embellishments, separating one print from another via a series of flexible forms. These prints of the 1940s are regarded as some of his most creative graphics. While searching for a critical analysis of these prints, he sent 100 of them to Hilla Rebay, director and curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, later known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York city. Rebay responded by asking for the prices of the monotypes; to Bertoia's surprise she purchased dozens of them, some for herself as well as for the museum totaling about $1000.00. She offered Bertoia praise and encouragement. Subsequently the museum exhibited 19 of these prints in 1943; in this show Harry had the most works of any artist there, including works by Moholy-Nagy, Werner Drewes and Charles Smith.
While working and studying at Crandon, Harry met Brigitta Valentiner, the daughter of Wilhelm Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1940. Besides being the foremost expert on Rembrandt in the U.S., Wilhelm Valentiner was acquainted with many European modernists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joan Miró. He introduced Harry to all these artists and more, which had a profound influence on Harry.
Still at Cranbrook, in 1943 Harry married Brigitta Valentiner, and then they moved to California where he went to work for Charles and Ray at the Molded Plywood Division of the Evans Product Company. Bertoia also learned welding techniques at Santa Monica College and began experimenting with sound sculptures. He worked there until 1946, then sold his jewelry and monotypes until obtaining 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. Knoll acquired an old leaky garage for Harry to set up shop in Bally, PA. 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 lattice work of steel. The chairs became part of the “modern” furniture movement of the 1950s, later to be referred to as Midcentury Modern.
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 grid-work, 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 still produced. 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.
Sound sculpture
By the mid-1950s, the chairs being produced by Knoll sold so well that the lump sum payment arrangement from Knoll allowed Bertoia to devote himself exclusively to sculpture and put a down payment on the 18th century Barto farmhouse he had been renting. With the help of his Cranbrook friend architect Eero Saarinen, Harry's first architectural sculpture commission was in 1953 for the General Motors Technical Center. He ultimately produced over 50 commissioned public sculptures, many of which remain viewable. One of those was a sculpture created in 1955, commissioned by Eero Saarinen: the altar piece in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chapel.Bertoia recounts how the first Sound Sculpture came about by chance: “I accidentally struck one rod when I wanted to bend it,” The sound echoed in my mind for a very long time." This started a search to understand "what a group of wires would do."
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 box set with a booklet of the history and previously unseen photos.
The sound sculptures are also featured on a 1975 record titled "The Sounds of Sound Sculpture".
Bertoia's work can be found in The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Reading Public Museum, the Allentown Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Vero Beach Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center.
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. 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. The Herbert F Johnson Museum has 29 Bertoias of sculpture and print in its collection. As explained in October 3, 1995 piece in the weekly "Dear Uncle Ezra" column of the university newspaper:
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.
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 on the second floor of the Johnson Museum. The chimes sway back and forth on tall rods and "ping" or "gong" into each other 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