Archives – Fall 2011

HARRY BERTOIA, Untitled, Bronze and copper, 1975.

Born in Italy in 1915, Harry Bertoia immigrated to the United States as a teenager and studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Perhaps best known for his innovative diamond-shaped wire chairs designed for Knoll Associates, Bertoia was also a jewelry designer, printmaker, and sculptor. This piece, an abstraction of a bush, is part of a series of welded plant sculptures he created over a 20-year period beginning in 1956. It was featured in an exhibition of his work at the National Academy of Sciences in 1976.