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Harry Bertoia - Wholesale Designer Furniture

Harry Bertoia (b. March 10, 1915 in San Lorenzo, Pordenone, Italy. d. November 6, 1978 in Barto, Pennsylvania, United States), was an
Italian-born artist and modern furniture designer.

At the age of 15 he traveled from Italy to Detroit to visit his older brother, however he chose to stay and enrolled in Cass Technical High
School, where he studied art and design and learned the art of handmade jewelry making. In 1938 he attended the Art School of the
Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, now known as the College for Creative Studies. The following year in 1937 he received a scholarship
to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he encountered Walter Gropius, Edmund N. Bacon and Ray and Charles Eames for the first time.

Opening his own metal workshop in 1939 he taught jewelry design and metal work. Later, as the war effort made metal a rare and very
expensive commodity he began to focus his efforts on jewelry making, even designing and creating wedding rings for Charles and Ray Eames
and Edmund Bacon's wife Ruth. Later in 1943, he married Brigitta Valentiner, and moved to California to work with Charles and Ray for
the Evans Product Company. Evans provided technical work for airplane and medical equipment. Bertoia was also drawing training manuals. At
this point they began to experiment with molded plywood under the auspices of their Plyformed Products Company, which was later bought
out by Evans. With Eero Saarinen they developed a method for making molded plywood splints that would later evolve into processes for
designing furniture. Bertoia remained as part of their staff, working on a variety of projects. He is informally credited with creating the
metal spine/leg structure of the Eames Plywood Dining & Lounge chairs (DCM/LCM) Three years later he split with the Eames, concerned that
his work was not receiving due credit, and preferring to work with metal rather than wood. In the same year he finally became a US
citizen.

In 1950, he moved to Pennsylvania, to establish a studio, and to work with Hans and Florence Knoll. (Florence was also a Cranbrook
Graduate). During this period he designed five wire pieces that became known as the Bertoia Collection for Knoll. Among them the famous
'Diamond chair' a fluid, sculptural form made from a molded lattice work of welded steel.

In Bertoia's own words, "If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them."

They were produced with varying degrees of upholstery over their light grid-work, and they were handmade because a suitable mass production
process could not be found. Unfortunately, the chair edge utilized two thin wires welded on either side of the mesh seat. This design had
been granted a patent to the Eames for the wire chair produced by Herman Miller. Herman Miller took Knoll to court on the grounds that
they were taking wrongful credit for a bent-wire technique owned by the Eames. Herman Miller eventually won and Bertoia & Knoll redesigned
the seat edge, using a thicker, single wire, and grinding down the edge of the seat wires at a smooth angle - the same way the chairs are
produced today. However, knowing that the Eames and Bertoia worked closely for so long, the "genealogy" of inspiration seems difficult
and maybe even unnecessary to pin down.

Nonetheless, the commercial success enjoyed by Bertoia's diamond chair was immediate and in the mid-50's the chairs, being produced by Knoll,
sold so well, that the royalties he received for them allowed him to devote himself exclusively to sculpture. In 1957 he was a fellow at
the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The sculptural work that he produced on his own explored the ways in which metal could be manipulated to
produce sound. By stretching and bending the metal, he made it respond to wind or to touch, creating different tones.