Modern & Contemporary Art (1691) November 17, 2020 EDT, ONLINE ONLY Lot 61 Estimate: $40000 - $60000 (plus Buyer's Premium) Harry Bertoia (American, 1915-1978) Untitled (Tonal Sound Sculpture) Beryllium copper on brass base. Four by four configuration (16 rods with cylinder tops). Executed in 1973. height: 51 in. (129.5cm) width: 12 in. (30.5cm) depth: 12 in. (30.5cm) Provenance: The Artist. Private Collection, Penn Valley, Pennsylvania (acquired directly from the above in 1974). Private Collection, Penn Valley, Pennsylvania (by family descent). NOTE: This lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Harry Bertoia Foundation and signed by Celia Bertoia, Director and will be included in the upcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work. Best known for his large public sculptures and fountains throughout the United States, Harry Bertoia grew up in Italy, moving to the Detroit area at age 15 to pursue his study of art. After a year at the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, Bertoia received a scholarship to the Cranbook Academy where he made formative friendships with Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. The school's director Eliel Saarinen asked Bertoia to restart a metal working program at the school where the artist's early experimentation in jewelry- making set him on a new path. Bertoia moved to California in 1943 with Charles Eames and began working on early iterations of "ergonomics" (although the term was not coined yet) and helped with war efforts in making airplane parts. Here he began making sculptures in the evenings in his spare time, as well as continuing the monotype printmaking he had begun in his student days. Bertoia and his young family stayed in California for a few years before moving to Bally, Pennsylvania at the request of Hans and Florence Knoll (Florence was also a classmate at Cranbrook) to design chairs for their furniture business. His designs earned him immense popularity and granted him the income to begin pursuing his sculpture in earnest. In Pennsylvania, Bertoia remodeled a barn into a studio space and began experimenting with different materials and techniques to create bush and tree forms. Throughout the 1960s, the artist moved into creating sound sculptures, building on a lifelong love of music and cooperating with his brother to produce small concerts and recordings of the tones and reverberations of his works. The two works presented here were acquired by the owner's father, who visited the barn in the 1970s to select these works directly from the artist. One can imagine the rich soundscape of the barn as one after another sculpture resonated and filled the air with its luxuriant tones. Bertoia's career was cut short by cancer, but it is estimated he made tens of thousands of works in his life. Untitled (Tonal Sound Sculpture) Bertoia's sound sculptures originated in a studio mishap, a single wire that bent and broke, creating an intriguing sound as it snapped. The experimentations that developed were plentiful, involving thicker and thinner wire, different weights of cylinders on top, varying flexibility of the support to promote more or less sway. Beryllium copper in particular, of which Untitled (Tonal Sound Sculpture) is constructed, provided a wealth of tonal variability for Bertoia's exploration. The artist hosted small concerts of his Sonambient Collection in his barn studio for friends and guests, and recorded eleven albums of the sounds from his sculptures, capturing the deep, powerful and wildly different reverberations of his pieces. The present work's delicate four by four grid with heavy cattail cylinders on top, produces its own particular tones, as no two Bertoia works create the same auditory effect..