Harry Bertoia

Celeste and Armand Bartos, New York

Christie's New York, May 16, 2013, lot 102

Acquired from the above by the present owner

This lot is included in the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné and assigned the catalogue raisonné number S.WI.68.

Harry Bertoia began experimenting with wire sculpture in 1947, following a welding course at Santa Monica Community College that had been arranged and funded by Charles Eames in 1944. The course gave Bertoia a new skill he was eager to develop, and wire quickly became one of his most natural and expressive materials. He spoke of an intrinsic connection to metal from an early age, remarking, “I was delighted to take a rod and bend it; it was in my nature.” Those who worked alongside him marveled at his intuitive facility with the medium — colleague Don Petitt recalled that Bertoia “could take a piece of wire and go like that [making hand gestures of bending and shaping]. He was incredible; I used to watch him do it. He’d just go like that, and it would end up just what he wanted.”

The early wire works were spare and deliberately restrained — more than wire simply arranged in space — that Bertoia described as achieving “a floating sense of balance.” He spoke eloquently of wire’s particular expressive potential: “Wire forms have a great range of expressions. Their constructions pertain to space rather than ground, and their configurations can be light, airy, almost floating...Wire is easy to work with, easy to experiment with. It can be flexed and formed quickly, by hand, allowing almost immediate visual inspection of the form of an idea.”

The present work is characteristic of this pioneering period in Bertoia’s sculptural development. The upright rectangular frame — a device that situates the composition between painting and sculpture — serves as a deliberate counterpoint to the freely configured wires within, their airy, almost weightless quality held in dynamic tension against the geometry of the enclosure. The incorporation of additional sculptural forms within the wire field adds rhythmic complexity, animating the interior space and demonstrating Bertoia’s sensitivity to the relationship between structure and openness, density and void. This push and pull between containment and freedom would remain a defining tension throughout his career.

Bertoia’s early wire works have often drawn comparisons to Alexander Calder’s mobiles, and the two artists’ work was shown together as early as the 1946 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Modern Handmade Jewelry. Bertoia acknowledged Calder’s achievement with genuine admiration, crediting him with bringing out “a beauty of line, a beauty of shape, and the relationship of line and shape.” Yet where Calder pursued movement and chance, Bertoia was drawn to the meditative stillness of fixed compositions — works that implied motion and lightness without surrendering to it. Some of Bertoia’s early wire pieces did incorporate kinetic elements, with sets of wires balanced precariously upon a base structure, and his later celebrated “sounding sculptures” would take this interest in movement and resonance considerably further.

Bertoia’s wire sculptures were featured prominently at Knoll showroom exhibitions in the early 1950s alongside his screen panel designs, attracting significant critical attention and establishing his reputation as one of the most innovative sculptors working in metal at mid-century. The wire experimentations of this period also laid the formal and conceptual groundwork for his celebrated hanging cloud pieces and “straw” works that followed — larger, more complex compositions that were, as Bertoia himself noted, simply wire taken to its furthest possibilities.