![]() ![]() “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.” A few of Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures on display at the Harry Bertoia Foundation in St. “When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique. Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso. (Aaron Richter/The New York Times)įollowing the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry Bertoia established in 1952. At an auction, 20 of Harry Bertoia’s “sounding sculptures” sold for millions - but his children can’t agree on the future of his work. ![]() Val Bertoia, the son of the artist Harry Bertoia, plays one of his father’s sounding sculptures in Bally, Pa., Jan. You should get these out,’” Celia Bertoia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the backstory, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” - which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes - and his lung cancer. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. When she entered her 50s, Celia Bertoia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. ![]() She became a real estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidant who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. Celia Bertoia, the daughter of Harry Bertoia, at the Harry Bertoia Foundation in St. Celia Bertoia’s father - the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia - had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy. ![]()
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