Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia

Coming to MAD from the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bent, Cast & Forged explores the jewelry designs of Harry Bertoia (b. 1915 – d. 1978) and follows his investigations of form and material in his early days as an artist and designer.

A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and a former metal-smithing instructor, Bertoia has received international acclaim for his woven wire metal furniture and large bronze and copper sculptures. His exploration of the medium, though, originated in jewelry design while he was still a high school student in Detroit in the 1930s. Of the hundreds of jewelry pieces attributed to Bertoia, the majority were produced during his years at Cranbrook in the early 1940s.

Bent, Cast & Forged: The Jewelry of Harry Bertoia displays jewelry works and monotype prints, and offers an early glimpse of a creative vision that would crystallize as his career matured. Though he showed an early talent for silver-plated tableware at Cranbrook, wartime rationing forced Bertoia to work on a smaller scale, and he began to create jewelry from melted-down metal scraps—including wedding rings for Cranbrook friends Charles and Ray Eames.

Several early monotype prints are featured to illustrate how the artist harnessed the same intuitive and experimental approach to making for 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.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website