Enjoy a Bertoia? Nasher announces exhibition on midcentury modern designer Harry Bertoia

In June 1955, when Harry Bertoia’s first sculpture was unveiled in Dallas, the reception was far from welcoming. “It looks like a bunch of painted scrap to me,” said Mayor RL Thornton, not to mention “cheap welding.” The piece in question was a gold screen installed in what was then the new Dallas Public Library (the building now houses the Dallas Morning News) on Commerce Street. You can still see it today when it hovers over the entrance to the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, across from City Hall.

This January, after well over half a century, the city will make up for this rude introduction when the Nasher Sculpture Center opens “Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life,” the first museum retrospective on the work by the Italian-born artist and designer. Although Bertoia is best known today for the line of metal frame chairs of the same name, which he designed for the modern furniture company Knoll in the 1950s, Bertoia also produced paintings, drawings, sculptures and jewelry in various scales, but always of great delicacy and craftsmanship (whole not to mention the ill-informed deliberations of the Dallas Politicos). More than 100 of these objects will be on display in the Nasher exhibition, which includes a week of musical performances that respond to several of Bertoia’s “sounding sculptures” that activate the visual and tactile senses as well as the hearing.

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Jan. 29-23 April, nashersculpturecenter.org

Harry Bertoia, c.  1970s.  Photo: Courtesy of the Harry Bertoia Foundation and the Nasher Sculpture CenterHarry Bertoia, c. 1970s. Photo: Courtesy of the Harry Bertoia Foundation and the Nasher Sculpture CenterThom was hired regularly to document the Californian work of the architectural giant SOM, including this 1977 data center for Bank of America in San Francisco, where his sense of color and form is underlined by the figure of a young woman.An aerial view shows the new Nancy and Rich Children's Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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