Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia was born in San Lorenzo, Italy in 1915, and immigrated to the US in 1930 to join his brother in Detroit, Michigan. Initially he studied art and design at the Cass Technical High School and began making jewelry. In 1936 he moved on to the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. A year later he received a scholarship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where his classmates included Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Florence Knoll. Bertoia established and taught in the metal working department at Cranbrook, where he explored a number of forms and ideas that would appear in his sculpture years later.

In 1943, Bertoia moved to Venice, California to work with designers Charles and Ray Eames. During his three-year tenure there, he helped to design a number of signature furniture pieces. He is informally credited with creating the metal spine/leg structure of the Eames Plywood Dining & Lounge chairs (DCM/LCM). Bertoia also began experimenting with metal sculpture, studying welding at Santa Monica City College while continuing to design jewelry and make monoprints. He left Santa Monica in 1946 to work at Point Loma Naval Electrical Lab in La Jolla, where he experimented with welding techniques and began making his first wire and platform sculptures.

In 1949, Bertoia became a US citizen and moved to Barto, Pennsylvania to join Florence and Hans Knoll at Knoll Associates. His work as an architectural sculptor landed his first sculpture exhibition in 1951 at the Knoll Showroom in NYC. Due to the success of his signature “Diamond Chair” design for Knoll, Bertoia was able to pursue his artwork full time by the early 1960s.

Bertoia’s Sonambient sculptures, created in the 1970s, are the result of the artist’s experiments in the manipulation of metal. Featuring rods of different lengths and widths, the sculptures achieve a range of gentle to sharp sounds. Though the work has a strong architectural design, the magic of the sculptures is in their sound. When touched or brushed, the sculptures become abstractions of sound as they sway back and forth, knocking against one another.

Throughout his career, Bertoia received several important large-scale commissions, including a screen for the General Motors Tech Center in Detroit in 1953, a bronze mural for Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia in 1963, and the fountain at Philadelphia’s Civic Center in 1967. He died in 1976.