
There are so many varieties of Bertoia sculpture that it is perhaps too broad to plunk them all in one category.
But, just as Bertoia rarely signed his work, feeling that his gift to the universe needed no man’s mark on it to be appreciated or interpreted, the sculpture speaks for itself and needs no definition or classification. An estimate of total Bertoia sculptures is in the tens of thousands—a phenomenal number of works for a man who passed at age 63. An in-progress Catalogue Raisonné is being compiled by the HarryBertoia Foundation.
Bertoia learned welding at Santa Monica City College in California in the late 1940s, and immediately began to experiment in his personal evening time. Wire and platform sculptures were his first efforts in the late 1940s. These evolved into the panels and screens in the 1950s, which led to his early public pieces. He discovered that light would perform wonderful dances if enough space was left between the metal shapes.