Wright Auction

Marin R. Sullivan, PhD
Director of Research, Harry Bertoia Foundation

The sculptor Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) is perhaps best known for the now-iconic suite of seating he designed for Knoll in 1952. Over the course of his forty-year career, however, Bertoia produced a vast array of jewelry, metalwork, monotypes, and other two-dimensional works, as well as thousands of unique sculptures and sounding sculptures, all made in various forms of metals and alloys. Bertoia learned to weld while living in Southern California during the late 1940s, and began making sculpture there, just prior to relocating to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in 1950 to work for Knoll. His earliest pieces are linear in nature: lithe wire constructions that share some resonance with his seating designs while also suggesting the tremendous technical prowess and formal brilliance that defined his prolific sculptural practice. Many of Bertoia’s early sculptures also incorporated delicately balanced elements, infusing the works with kinetic possibility and a lyrical, almost surrealistic quality. The present example (Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné [HBCR] S.WI.90) is one of only a handful of wire form sculptures that include multiple vertical components emerging from a single horizontal slab, made from ebony, sandstone, or other stones. Today described as “landscape sculptures,” Bertoia included several of these pieces in The Art of Harry Bertoia: Paintings, Drawings, Metal Sculpture, Chairs, a solo exhibition of his work held at the Knoll Showroom at 575 Madison Avenue in New York from December 10-20, 1952. In an ARTnews review, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter furthered a surrealist reading, calling out these “Landscape Fantasies” as the highlight of the show and noting how these works, with their “vertical steel wires balancing on their ends” and “bell shapes and further wires, which can be lifted off,” were “like a development of a phase of [Alberto] Giacometti.”¹

Many of Bertoia’s early sculptures also incorporated delicately balanced elements, infusing the works with kinetic possibility and a lyrical, almost surrealistic quality.

Beyond the rarity and significance of its form, this work is also notable for its early provenance, purchased from Knoll by the noted modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft and his wife, Nina (née Wayler) Bunshaft. The Bunshafts were notable collectors of contemporary art, amassing a substantial collection of work by artists like Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miró. Following Nina Bunshaft’s death in 1994, part of their collection was gifted to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Gordon Bunshaft had been a trustee. Other works as well as their East Hampton home designed by the architect himself, were also sold, with the proceeds going to the establishment of an acquisitions endowment for the museum: the Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Fund. The Bunshafts did not only collect art but also developed enduring friendships with many artists, including Jean Dubuffet, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi. These relationships were partly cultivated—and sometimes tested—through collaborations on Gordon Bunshaft’s architectural projects. An architect and partner at the internationally renowned firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Bunshaft sought to integrate art with architecture, frequently incorporating modern sculpture into his designs.²

Beyond the rarity and significance of its form, this work is also notable for its early provenance, purchased from Knoll by the noted modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft and his wife, Nina (née Wayler) Bunshaft.

Bertoia was the recipient of both forms of patronage from the Bunshafts. They acquired several pieces by the artist for their collection, including a stunning early nail form sculpture (HBCR S.NF.9) that the Bunshafts gifted to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum) in 1964. Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo and remained an avid supporter of that institution throughout his life, donating, along with his wife, numerous pieces of art during the 1960s and 1970s. Gordon Bunshaft also designed the museum’s 1962 expansion, which included a collaboration with Bertoia: a group of four large screens made of thick Tobin bronze and iron rods made for the lounge and restaurant space in the new building (HBCR S.RF.4). The large-scale commission for the Albright-Knox in 1961 was the last of four projects Bunshaft and Bertoia realized together. In the mid-1950s, Bunshaft commissioned Bertoia to create large free-standing sculptures for United States Consulate-General buildings he designed for SOM in Düsseldorf and Bremen, Germany (HBCR SO.GO.8 and S.MP.36). The most significant of their collaborations, however, was their first: a massive multiplane screen and hanging wire form “cloud” Bertoia made for the main banking floor of Bunshaft’s modernist masterpiece, the Manufacturers Trust Bank at 510 Fifth Avenue in New York (HBCR S.MP.18 and S.WI.25).

¹ Fairfield Porter, “Reviews & Previews: Harry Bertoia,” ARTnews 51, no. 9 (January 1953): 44-45.

² For more on Gordon Bunshaft’s collaborations with artists, including those with Harry Bertoia, see Marin R. Sullivan, Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).