Showrooms

Small 2 Rods

Creator: Val Bertoia
Offered by: Jim's of Lambertville

Description
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by:

Harry Bertoia (1915 – 1978)

Artist, sound art sculptor, and furniture designer, Harry Bertoia, was born in Italy in 1915 before immigrating to America in 1930. In 1936, he attended the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts before moving to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Michigan, where he would later teach and establish a metalworking department. During this early artistic period, he experimented with jewelry forms, exploring creative concepts that would later emerge in his sculptures.

In 1943, he relocated to Venice, California, along with esteemed artist-designer couple Charles and Ray Eames, to participate in war efforts until 1946. During his first year in California, he began attending a welding class at Santa Monica City College. In 1947, he moved to La Jolla to work in the publications department of Point Loma Naval Electronics Laboratory creating training manuals for equipment operators. During this time, he continued making jewelry and monoprints and began his first experiments with metal sculpture.

In 1949, he moved to Barto, Pennsylvania to work alongside Hans and Florence Knoll at Knoll Associates, a design company and furniture manufacturer. From then on, he became a prolific architectural sculptor. While at Knoll Associates, he created the famous wire Bertoia Collection. Among the designs for this collection was his Diamond Chair, which quickly became an iconic and commercially successful model. His first sculpture exhibition was in 1951 at the Knoll Showroom in New York.

Besides his work in jewelry making and furniture design, during the 1960s, Bertoia began to devote himself to the production of sound sculptures, which are now some of his most notable works. Often incorporating metal rods that would move and hit one another to create the sculpture’s signature sound, these pieces varied greatly in size. In the barn on his property in Pennsylvania, Bertoia stored a collection of over one hundred sound sculptures, using the space to record and perform music with these artworks.

Val Bertoia (b. 1949)

Val Bertoia was born in Santa Monica, California in 1949 to the artist, Harry Bertoia and his wife, Brigitta Valentiner. The family relocated to Pennsylvania in the 1950s where Bertoia has lived and worked since. In the1960s, Bertoia attended the Indiana Institute of Technology in Fort Wayne, Indiana. After his release from the US Army in Fort Dix, NJ, Bertoia returned to Pennsylvania and began to work at Bertoia Studio with his father. Val worked extensively with his father from 1972 to 1978.

The two primarily worked on his father’s Sound Sculpture environment, trademarked “Sonambient”. Late in the 1970s, Harry and Val made Bertoia Sound Sculptures for large distribution. During this time, Val began to work on his own projects, in addition to his father’s.

After Harry Bertoia passed in 1978, Val Bertoia continued his father’s business and artistic practice with the encouragement of his mother. Val Bertoia sculptures made after November 1978, when Harry Bertoia died, are numbered, starting with B-01.

More Information

Documentation:	Signed
Notes:	Inscribed with artist number on base
Origin:	United States, Pennsylvania
Period:	1950-1979
Materials:	Metal
Condition:	Good.
Styles / Movements:	Modernism
Dealer Reference #:	B-HB B-1373
Incollect Reference #:	347356