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Harry Bertoia
Untitled (Sounding Sculpture) - Post War Copper & Bronze, c. 1970
c. 1970

Name: Untitled (Sounding Sculpture) - Post War Copper & Bronze, c. 1970
Brand: Harry Bertoia
Rating: 4.8 (10 reviews)

$115,000

£87,001.64

€101,677.28

CA$164,589.50

A$167,236.96

CHF 94,743.68

MX$2,034,861.75

NOK 1,110,960.03

SEK 1,117,012.71

DKK 760,604.87

About the Item

"Untitled (Sounding Sculpture)" is a Post-War abstract metal sculpture created by Harry Bertoia in circa 1970. This artwork is 103 x 16 x 16 inches and weighs less than 50 lbs. Bertoia was enthralled by music and incorporated it into his designs. Crafted from slender metal rods delicately balanced and arranged, as each rod sways or is touched, it produces a subtle yet enchanting sound, filling the space with a symphony of gentle vibrations. Provenance: Staempfli Gallery, acquired from George Staempfli, c. 1983-1984 Private Collection, Japan Jason McCoy Gallery, New York Private Collection, Los Angeles Harry Bertoia was born on March 10, 1915, in San Lorenzo Isontino, Italy. After immigrating to Detroit at age 15, he studied art and design at Cass Technical High School and drawing and painting at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1937, Bertoia received a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he studied until 1943. At Cranbrook, Bertoia found a community of artists that embraced the union of art and design, including architect Walter Gropius, urban planner Edmund Bacon, and designers Charles and Ray Eames. From 1938 to 1943, Bertoia headed the metals department at Cranbrook, opening his own workshop for jewelry design. In the 1940s, Bertoia began experimenting with printmaking. His disinterest in the duplication inherent to the medium precipitated the use of movable plates and hand embellishments, distinguishing one print from the next through a series of flexible forms. In his search for a critical perspective on his experimentation, Bertoia sent 100 of his monoprints to Hilla Rebay, director and curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the first incarnation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), New York. To Bertoia's surprise, Rebay asked for pricing and purchased dozens of them, offering praise and encouragement and in 1943 exhibiting 19 of the prints at the museum. In 1943, 1945, and 1947, Bertoia's monoprints were shown alongside his commercially successful jewelry designs at the Nierendorf Gallery, New York. In 1950, Bertoia moved to Pennsylvania to work for fellow Cranbrook graduates Florence and Hans Knoll, who allowed him full ownership of his designs, including the popular Bertoia Collection of latticed, expertly welded chairs. By the mid-1950s, the artist's designs were selling so well that he was able to devote his time exclusively to sculpture. Creating thousands of works of varying sizes, Bertoia adapted the welding, brazing, and burnishing of industrial metalwork in artworks that explore the relationships among line, form, and negative space. The influence of utilitarian design in his artworks facilitates their assimilation within their environments, and from 1953 to 1978 Bertoia received commissions to create his spatially complex sculptures for myriad public spaces. In 1960 he integrated his lifelong love of music into his sculpture, choosing particular metals and manipulating their form and mass in ways that would allow for sonorous response to wind or touch, and then recording their sounds. These "sonambient" sculptures were a focus of Bertoia's work until the artist's death on November 6, 1978, in Barto, Pennsylvania. Solo exhibitions of Bertoia's works on paper and sculptures were held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1943); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (1974); Art Institute of Chicago (1975); and Muhlenberg College's Martin Art Gallery, Allentown, Pennsylvania (1975), which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1975. Major commissions can be found at such places as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chapel, Cambridge (1955); State Department building, Washington, D.C. (1956); Davies Auditorium, Yale University, New Haven (1958); and the Federal Reserve Bank building, Richmond, Virginia (1978). (Artist bio from Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Creator:
Harry Bertoia (1915 - 1978, American, Italian)
Creation Year:
c. 1970
Dimensions:
Height: 36.5 in (92.71 cm)Width: 8 in (20.32 cm)Depth: 8 in (20.32 cm)
Medium:
Metal,Bronze,Copper
Movement & Style:
Post-War
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Palm Desert, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: 474641stDibs: LU9316776762

Shop All Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Sculptor, furniture and jewelry designer, graphic artist and metalsmith, Harry Bertoia was one of the great cross-disciplinarians of 20th-century art and design and a central figure in American mid-century modernism. Among furniture aficionados, Bertoia is known for his chairs such as the wire-lattice Diamond chair (and its variants such as the tall-backed Bird chair) designed for Knoll Inc. and first released in 1952.

As an artist, he is revered for a style that was his alone. Bertoia’s metal sculptures are by turns expressive and austere, powerful and subtle, intimate in scale and monumental. All embody a tension between the intricacy and precision of Bertoia’s forms and the raw strength of his materials: steel, brass, bronze and copper.

Fortune seemed to guide Bertoia’s artistic development. Born in northeastern Italy, Bertoia immigrated to the United States at age 15, joining an older brother in Detroit. He studied drawing and metalworking in the gifted student program at Cass Technical High School. Recognition led to awards that culminated, in 1937, in a teaching scholarship to attend the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Bloomfield Hills, one of the great crucibles of modernism in America.

At Cranbrook, Bertoia made friendships — with architect Eero Saarinen, designers Charles and Ray Eames and Florence Schust Knoll and others — that shaped the course of his life. He taught metalworking at the school, and when materials rationing during World War II limited the availability of metals, Bertoia focused on jewelry design. He also experimented with monotype printmaking, and 19 of his earliest efforts were bought by the Guggenheim Museum.

In 1943, he left Cranbrook to work in California with the Eameses, helping them develop their now-famed plywood furniture. (Bertoia received scant credit.) Late in that decade, Florence and Hans Knoll persuaded him to move east and join Knoll Inc. His chairs became and remain perennial bestsellers. Royalties allowed Bertoia to devote himself full-time to metal sculpture, a medium he began to explore in earnest in 1947.

By the early 1950s Bertoia was receiving commissions for large-scale works from architects — the first came via Saarinen — as he refined his aesthetic vocabulary into two distinct skeins. One comprises his “sounding sculptures” — gongs and “Sonambient” groupings of rods that strike together and chime when touched by hand or by the wind. The other genre encompasses Bertoia’s naturalistic works: abstract sculptures that suggest bushes, flower petals, leaves, dandelions or sprays of grass.

As you will see on these pages, Harry Bertoia was truly unique; his art and designs manifest a wholly singular combination of delicacy and strength.

Find vintage Harry Bertoia sculptures, armchairs, benches and other furniture and art on 1stDibs.

By Harry Bertoia

Located in Phoenix, AZ

Free form wood and patinated brass sculpture after Harry Bertoia circa late 1960’s.

Category

Vintage 1960s American Mid-Century Modern Abstract Sculptures

Materials

Brass

At Hosfelt Gallery, Bertoia Masterworks Complement Dynamic Contemporary Art

For nearly three decades, San Francisco–based Todd Hosfelt has curated against the grain — with a show on the legendary modernist Harry Bertoia the latest case in point.