Harry Bertoia: The Sculptor and His Wire Chairs

Harry Bertoia: The Sculptor and His Wire Chairs

Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) came to design almost by accident. A sculptor by training and vocation, he designed only one family of furniture, all at once, around 1952. That collection made him famous and paid for the rest of his life as an artist. He remains first of all a sculptor, who for the length of one project applied to furniture his way of thinking about space and emptiness.

From Italy to America

Born in San Lorenzo, in north-eastern Italy, Bertoia emigrated to the United States as a teenager. He studied drawing, metalsmithing and printmaking, then taught and ran a metal workshop at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen crossed paths at the same time. It was through this circle that he came to work for Knoll. Bertoia had no training as an industrial designer: he came from hand-worked metal and from sculpture.

The wire collection for Knoll, 1952

In 1950, Knoll set Bertoia up in a workshop in Pennsylvania and gave him a great deal of freedom: to explore rather than design a specific product. From this research came, in 1952, five pieces forming the wire collection, the Bertoia Collection. All rest on the same principle: a lattice of welded steel rods, bent into a shell that follows the body. Steel wire, an industrial material, becomes a continuous, supple surface. Knoll has produced this collection without interruption ever since, and its production is what a piece is compared against to authenticate it.

The best-known piece is the Diamond chair, whose shell forms a diamond. Commercial success was such, from the mid-1950s, that the royalties paid by Knoll allowed Bertoia never again to depend on furniture and to devote himself entirely to sculpture. In fact, he never designed another piece of furniture after this single collection.

"The chair is mostly air"

The best description of his work is Bertoia's own: "If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them." Where a classic chair is a mass, his is an empty volume bounded by a network of lines. Light passes through, the shadow draws a pattern, the eye meets no solid surface. He thought of the chair as a cut into space, just as he thought of sculpture.

This transparency is also practical. A wire chair weighs little, moves easily and does not crowd a room, which is why it fits into very different interiors.

The sound sculptures

From the late 1950s until his death, Bertoia devoted most of his work to sculpture, and notably to the sound sculptures he called Sonambient. He discovered almost by chance, while trying to bend a rod, that a bundle of struck metal rods produces a sound that resonates for a long time. He then made dozens of them, built from vertical rods that ring when brushed. He converted a barn near his studio into a concert hall, played his pieces there and recorded a series of albums, all titled Sonambient. These sculptures are sought after today by museums and collectors, and are a reminder that his work is first of all a sculptor's.

Chairs and sculptures

Across his work, the chairs and the sculptures answer each other: the same welded, bent, hand-worked metal, the same idea of space passing through the form. The Knoll collection applies the sculptor's thinking to the seated body, which is probably why these chairs have aged so little.

What we check

For a Bertoia chair, we identify Knoll production by the marking, the quality of the welds and the finish of the lattice, then check the metal under raking light (chrome, outdoor finish or lacquer, corrosion, welds) and the original cushion when the model has one. Any restoration is limited to cleaning and spot treatment that respect the original finish. The listing states the model, the identified production and the condition of the metal and cushion. Pieces for sale are on the Harry Bertoia page.