Harry Bertoia
Untitled (Monumental Sonambient)
Auction Closed
June 10, 03:47 PM GMT
Estimate
250,000 - 350,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Harry Bertoia
Untitled (Monumental Sonambient)
1973
five staggered rows of three and two rods (13 rods total)
beryllium copper, naval bronze
180 x 36 x 28¾ in. (457.2 x 91.4 x 73 cm)
Colorado National Bank, Denver, commissioned directly from the artist by architect Minoru Yamasaki, 1973
Private Collection, circa 2006
Wright, Chicago, May 22, 2007, lot 824
Private Collection
Sotheby's New York, Bertoia: Featuring Masterworks from the Kaare Berntsen Collection, November 16, 2016, lot 28
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Private Collection, circa 2006
Wright, Chicago, May 22, 2007, lot 824
Private Collection
Sotheby's New York, Bertoia: Featuring Masterworks from the Kaare Berntsen Collection, November 16, 2016, lot 28
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Nancy N. Schiffer and Val O. Bertoia, The World of Bertoia, Atglen, 2003, pp. 186 and 188 (for an illustration of another Sonambient in the Colorado National Bank commission)
Celia Bertoia, The Life and Work of Harry Bertoia, Atglen, 2015, p. 141 (for an illustration of a related monumental Sonambient public commission at Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, OH)
Celia Bertoia, The Life and Work of Harry Bertoia, Atglen, 2015, p. 141 (for an illustration of a related monumental Sonambient public commission at Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, OH)
This lot is offered together with a certificate of authenticity from the Harry Bertoia Foundation, St. George, Utah.
Charles and Ray Eames’ famed Powers of Ten – “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe” – begins with a shot of a picnicking couple, and then zooms out. Way, way out, to the edge of the galaxy and beyond. Then the image plunges back in again, down to the cellular, the molecular, the atomic. We have just enough time to meditate upon the abstraction of the largest known things and the smallest, before the nine-minute film ends.
As the Eames were working on Powers of Ten, their old colleague Harry Bertoia was finishing this Monumental Sonambient.1 Towering fifteen feet high, it is among the largest of an extended family of “tonal” works made of upright rods. Most were realized at human scale, some as tabletop miniatures, but each of them, whatever its size, strikes an ideal combination between sculpture and instrument. When standing still, they present themselves as elegant modular geometries – in tune with the idiom of minimalism that prevailed when Bertoia first developed the series in the mid-1960s.2 When sounded, however, the pieces are stirringly maximalist: they emit deep, thrumming notes, like a town full of church bells.
Bertoia had been making large-scale Sonambients for public commission since 1966. The present example, featuring thirteen rods of beryllium copper in a staggered pattern, was created for the interior of the Colorado National Bank, Denver, at the invitation of Minoru Yamasaki (best known today as the architect of two tragically ill-fated projects, the Pruitt-Igoe Building and the World Trade Center).3 Bertoia also made a larger, twenty-foot tonal to position outside the building. When the wind was high, it would, in a sense, play itself. Both Monumental Sonambients were removed from the site in the late 1980s, carrying with them their potential for immersive, body-vibrating, celestial music. Bertoia knew well what the Eames did, too: When it comes to scale, the mind has no limits. It can go right down the rabbit hole, then ascend up to the realm of the cosmic.
[1] Bertoia met Charles and Ray Eames at Cranbrook, then worked alongside them in California from 1943 to 1946.
[2] Bertoia’s first experimental sounding sculptures were made in 1959-60, but it took him several years to arrive at the basic formula for his tonal Sonambients, a grid of rods set into a drilled base.
[3] The building is now the US Bank Tower. See Marin R. Sullivan, “Catalogue of Large-Scale Commissions,” in Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life (Nasher Sculpture Center, 2022), 209.
GLENN ADAMSON
Charles and Ray Eames’ famed Powers of Ten – “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe” – begins with a shot of a picnicking couple, and then zooms out. Way, way out, to the edge of the galaxy and beyond. Then the image plunges back in again, down to the cellular, the molecular, the atomic. We have just enough time to meditate upon the abstraction of the largest known things and the smallest, before the nine-minute film ends.
As the Eames were working on Powers of Ten, their old colleague Harry Bertoia was finishing this Monumental Sonambient.1 Towering fifteen feet high, it is among the largest of an extended family of “tonal” works made of upright rods. Most were realized at human scale, some as tabletop miniatures, but each of them, whatever its size, strikes an ideal combination between sculpture and instrument. When standing still, they present themselves as elegant modular geometries – in tune with the idiom of minimalism that prevailed when Bertoia first developed the series in the mid-1960s.2 When sounded, however, the pieces are stirringly maximalist: they emit deep, thrumming notes, like a town full of church bells.
Bertoia had been making large-scale Sonambients for public commission since 1966. The present example, featuring thirteen rods of beryllium copper in a staggered pattern, was created for the interior of the Colorado National Bank, Denver, at the invitation of Minoru Yamasaki (best known today as the architect of two tragically ill-fated projects, the Pruitt-Igoe Building and the World Trade Center).3 Bertoia also made a larger, twenty-foot tonal to position outside the building. When the wind was high, it would, in a sense, play itself. Both Monumental Sonambients were removed from the site in the late 1980s, carrying with them their potential for immersive, body-vibrating, celestial music. Bertoia knew well what the Eames did, too: When it comes to scale, the mind has no limits. It can go right down the rabbit hole, then ascend up to the realm of the cosmic.
[1] Bertoia met Charles and Ray Eames at Cranbrook, then worked alongside them in California from 1943 to 1946.
[2] Bertoia’s first experimental sounding sculptures were made in 1959-60, but it took him several years to arrive at the basic formula for his tonal Sonambients, a grid of rods set into a drilled base.
[3] The building is now the US Bank Tower. See Marin R. Sullivan, “Catalogue of Large-Scale Commissions,” in Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life (Nasher Sculpture Center, 2022), 209.
GLENN ADAMSON
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