Harry Bertoia

An extraordinary artist and designer: a fresh view of Harry Bertoia's entire body of work

Italian-born American Harry Bertoia (191578) was one of the most prolific and innovative artists and designers of the postwar period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators, such as Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewelry, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavor but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal.

Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first US museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice and feature important examples of his furniture, jewelry, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalog of the artist's numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculptureand what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.

• Harry Bertoia is a major figure of mid-20th-century American art and design
• Offers a fresh view of Bertoia's achievements based on recent research by a new generation of expert scholars
• Examines the full scope of Bertoia's broad, interdisciplinary practice
• Places Bertoia in the context of modernism and explores his pioneering role in contemporary practice

• Reconsiders the impact of Bertoia's innovations in design, sculpture, and architecture at mid-century and now

  Autorentext

Jed Morse ist Kunsthistoriker und Chefkurator des Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Marin R. Sullivan lebt als freie Kunstpublizistin und Kuratorin in Chicago. Sie leitet das Projekt eines Werkverzeichnisses zu Harry Bertoia und ist auch als Kuratorin für moderne und zeitgenössische Skulptur am Cheekwood Estate and Gardens in Nashville tätig.