Florence Knoll Bassett: Happy 100

Florence Schust Knoll Basset

Florence Schust Knoll Basset

Florence Schust Knoll Basset

Florence Schust Knoll Basset

Florence Schust Knoll Basset turned 100 last May...

Born in 1917 in Saginaw, Michigan, to parents that died early in her life, Knoll Bassett was orphaned by age 12. It was by fate and chance that a foster guardian enrolled her to Kingswood School, a boarding school for girls that was part of the Cranbrook Educational Community -- the legendary art, education, and museum campus whose chief architect, the world-renowned Finnish designer Eliel Saarinen, was also a teacher and president.

Noting her talents and interest in the campus buildings, Saarinen and his wife, Loja, a textile designer, took Florence under their wing. She also grew close to their son, Eero, who was seven years her senior, and she frequently spent summers in Finland with the family. 

By age 14, Knoll Bassett designed her first concept for a house, demonstrating an early aptitude for architecture.

As an alumnus of some of the most progressive design schools -- she studied architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (IIT), and spent a few years at London’s Architectural Association—Knoll Bassett’s social and intellectual orbits read like a who’s who of modern design. Her classmates at Cranbrook included Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, and Eero Saarinen -- all went on to create prominent furniture designs, often in collaboration with one another. 

At IIT, she studied under German-American architect Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus school and whose name has become synonymous with the spare ethos of the International Style. She later worked a stint in Boston with Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus school, and Marcel Breuer, one of its master teachers.

With her multidisciplinary approach in design and architecture, Knoll Bassett practiced a philosophy of “total design” -- one that considered form and whole environments at every scale -- from the building structure, to its interiors, furnishings, colors, graphics, material, and textiles. She often presented designs in her signature and pioneering “paste-up” method of space planning.

Harry Bertoia: Wire Chair Design

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia: Sonambient Sound Sculpture Recordings - The VintageVinyl LP Covers

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

These are the original vinyl LP album titles. Harry Bertoia's work fascinates me. I had never heard of him until recently -- when I began learning about Mid-Century Modern design. He is such a creative artist that I put him on a par with Paul Klee. I don't recall learning about him at all in my art school years of the seventies. He's really something. 

You can hear some of his "Somambient" recordings for free on YouTube. I enjoy playing them at a low volume level right as I start to lay down to go to sleep.

Harry Bertoia: Sonambiant Sound Sculpture Recordings - The CD Reissues

Harry Bertoia

After nearly 40 years of silence,sHarry Bertoia's "Sonambient" label has been resurrected in order to release the best of Bertoia's unheard recordings from his recently preserved archive of 1/4" tapes. "Clear Sounds" b/w "Perfetta" was cut straight from the original reels and is a true analog pressing. 

These two pieces were selected for their minimal, meditative and lush harmonic qualities; lacking in the abundance of dynamics and contrasts found on the original "Sonambient" records, these pieces show another approach to performance. Slow washes of shimmering metallic sculpture rustle thickly like the leaves of a white birch or tall grass in the summer sun. Gorgeous harmonics hover overhead, making audible measurements of the length and purity of Bertoia's metal rod sculptures. 

Both Harry Bertoia and his brother Oreste composed extensively in the Sonambient barn deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania where Harry kept over 100 Sonambient sculptures and gongs. The first "Sonambient" LP "Bellissima Bellissima Bellissima / Nova," released in 1970, contains a Harry Bertoia composition on side A and an Oreste Bertoia composition on side B. As an homage to the original "Sonambient" LP, "Clear Sounds" is a Harry Bertoia piece from June 30, 1973 and "Perfetta" is an Oreste Bertoia piece from June 28, 1971. 

Harry Bertoia first came into artistic prominence in the late 1930s and his sculptural, ergomonic chairs were soon Modernist furniture classics. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances -- Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures's sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania. 

Over nearly twenty years, adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills.

Masters of Mid-Century Modern Furniture Design

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Harry Bertoia: Jewelry

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

Harry Bertoia

In commemoration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia was the first museum exhibition devoted to Harry Bertoia’s designs for jewelry. 

The former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and metalsmithing instructor has received international acclaim for his metal furniture and sculpture, but his exploration of the medium originated in jewelry design while still a high school student in Detroit. 

Out of the hundreds of jewelry pieces attributed to Bertoia, the majority was produced during his years at Cranbrook, and this display of over thirty works offers an early glimpse of a creative vision that would crystallize as his career matured.  

Additionally, several early monotype prints are featured to illustrate how the artist harnessed the same intuitive and experimental approach to making in his planographic compositions. 

The objects in this exhibition highlight Bertoia’s investigations of form, dimension, and material on a concentrated and bankable scale -- establishing him as a pioneer of the American Studio Jewelry movement and a master of elevating fashionable adornment to objets d’art.