Five Decades After His Passing, Rediscover the Brilliant Harry Bertoia at the Nasher Sculpture Center

Seventy years ago, Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) came up with his greatest hit for Knoll Furniture while tinkering out of a former garage turned workshop in the hamlet of Bally, eastern Pennsylvania. The diamond chair and eponymous Bertoia collection that followed, still in production, were the result of a friendship with a fellow Cranbrook alum, Florence Knoll, that revolutionized modern furniture. For most design and architectural acolytes, that was the end of the conversation. Until now.

Expect that all to change this month, thanks to the Nasher Sculpture Center and its inquisitive chief curator, Jed Morse, and his collaborator, independent art historian Dr. Marin R. Sullivan (a specialist in sculpture as it relates to photography, design, and the built environment, who directs the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné project). The pioneering curatorial pair have put together a compelling, very now exhibit that will transform our view of the sculptor/designer/monotype maker/jeweler/public-art creator/sound artist forever — opening up fresh, rich art-historical chapters in the book of Bertoia.

Dallas is the only venue for “Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life,” so we predict the Nasher Sculpture Center will become a pilgrimage site over the run of the exhibition this spring, as devotees of modern and contemporary design travel to Texas for the artist’s most comprehensive American museum retrospective ever presented. Visitors will encounter some 100 works loaned from public and private holdings, ranging from a delicate hammered brass centipede to a rare chaise lounge prototype. There’s a robust spilled-cast bronze, as well as lacy sculptures that conjure dandelions and constellations formed from polished bronze and brazed-steel wire. (Fortuitously, “Harry Bertoia” overlaps with the opening days of the Dallas Art Fair 2022.)

Two important pendants for this exhibit are, respectively, a must-acquire and a must-experience. Begin with the accompanying catalog, which brims with key new scholarship told in chapters by Morse and Marin, as well as guest contributors Dr. Glenn Adamson, known for his incisive insights into the history of craft, and Dr. Sydney Skelton Simon, whose dissertation at Stanford probed the confluence of art, design, science, and corporate culture in Cold War America through the lens of Bertoia. Then there’s melodic accompanying programming that marks a milestone in terms of musical connoisseurship in dialogue with Bertoia. Throughout the final week of February, the Nasher museum has commissioned nightly pairings of musicians playing Bertoia’s sounding sculptures, a series of Sonambient happenings, “Sculpting Sound,” that promise to be extraordinary.

A Concise Bertoia Biography

The Italian-born Bertoia, a naturalized American citizen who never lost the cadence of his native language, immigrated as a teenager to Detroit during the early Depression to join his older brother. He spoke years later of a boyhood encounter with Hungarian gypsies in his hometown of San Lorenzo; the gypsies made a living repairing pots and pans, and their clanging upon metal household goods made an impression that stayed with the artist for life. At a technical high school in Detroit and later at Cranbrook, Bertoia stood out for his gifts with the medium, and he was made the director of the metal lab at Cranbrook — a rare responsibility for a student. During the height of the war, he left Michigan to join his classmate Charles Eames in California and work on mass production of the destined-to-be iconic molded plywood chair. When his engineering solutions made the chair possible (but were solely credited to Eames), Bertoia moved on to other endeavors. His life changed when Hans and Florence Knoll recruited him to come to design for them in Knoll’s production HQ in eastern Pennsylvania — and the rest if only a small part of Bertoia’s history, as “Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life” demonstrates.

As Morse underscores in the catalog, “It is Bertoia’s success in such disparate arenas — from the intimate and personal space of jewelry to the domestic sphere of furniture, and the corporate, governmental, and public realm of commissions — that places him at the forefront of shaping the experience of life in the United States at mid-century.” This life possessed utopian elements, as the curator notes: “Bertoia’s sculptural output reflected a moment when the possibilities wrought by scientific discoveries and technological innovation seemed endless.” Morse also emphasizes the artist/designer’s embrace of Emersonian nature: “That abstract compositions of metal squares and wires could evoke such powerful experiences outside of themselves is the manna of Abstract Expressionism and highlights a transcendentalist streak running throughout Bertoia’s work.”

“Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life,” January 29 – April 23, at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, nashersculpturecenter.org.