Art: Song-&-Dance Man

Whether realistic or abstract, sculpture is essentially form that has been frozen: the trick is to make the form throb with life. The abstract constructions that lined the walls of Manhattan’s Staempfli Gallery last week gave the illusion in their own ways. One piece was a swirl that seemed to spill from the ceiling; another was a maze of darting shafts (see color opposite). Some of the sculptures, when touched, danced like plants swaying under water; others, when plucked, sang like a forest in the wind. Italian-born Sculptor Harry Bertoia, 46, is only one of many artists who work with metal and welding torch, but few have managed to release from metal so much graceful versatility.

Bertoia came to the U.S. with his father when he was 15. In 1937 he enrolled at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills. Mich. He taught for a while, worked with Charles Eames designing chairs, in time was turning out chairs of his own as well as large metal screens of innumerable golden rectangles for big public buildings. But primarily, Bertoia is a sculptor whose goal is to find ever freer ways of using metal.

Shooting Particles. Though his constructions often resemble something in nature—a huge sun, a giant dandelion, a weeping willow—Bertoia does not work directly from nature. Usually he places a piece of paper over an inked surface and with a wire brush gently traces out a quick, freehand design. For more solid forms he may press the paper with his fingers, or use a piece of metal to print a sharp edge. When the design pleases him, he tries to reproduce it in metal, twisting and bending bunches of rods this way and that. As he wrestles with it, the metal may rebel and suggest new forms of its own. These in turn Bertoia tries to draw, and the give-and-take process between the drawing and the sculpture continues until the work is done.

Like many abstract painters, Bertoia sees the universe as one great cup of energy. He is fascinated by the thought of “particles shooting through space,” and the spiky mesh shown in color is his conception of the “track of these particles.” Each wire had to be pulled separately through molten brass to give it a rough-textured coat. As wire after wire was welded into place, each tended to lose its identity. “The line,” says Bertoia, “finally disappears and becomes a diffusion.” In a sense, the sculpture has no beginning and no end. Though the particle tracks shoot off in all directions, the effect is not of chaos but of limitlessness.

Rustling Grain. For so dramatic a piece, the golden burst had a prosaic beginning : Bertoia was simply trying to find a way of making metal wires spring from a core, like petals from a flower or rays from the sun. In other pieces Bertoia clusters metal rods that stand straight up like bronze-colored grass and, when touched, resound like tiny organ pipes. In these the secret of Bertoia’s work comes clear. “In my walks home,” says he in his whitewashed garage-studio near his farm in Bally, Pa., “I pass by wheat fields swaying in the breeze and can hear the rustling. Sculpture comes alive when the sculptor works with the same basic things that please us in nature—color, light, motion and sound.”