HARRY BERTOIA
Untitled (#1152).
Color monotype on thin rice paper. 620x997 mm; 24¼x39¼ inches (sheet), full margins. Inscribed "1152" in ink, lower right recto.Provenance: Private collection, New Jersey.Bertoia (1915-1978) worked on hundreds of monotypes at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he headed the metal craft department and operated his own jewelry workshop. Bertoia was not interested in duplicating compositions inherent to traditional printmaking. Instead, he cut up his woodblock matrices so that he could re-position the elements so that each monotype was unique. In 1943, Bertoia sent Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), 100 of his monotypes. Rebay asked to purchase them and exhibited 19 of them at the museum in 1943. Bertoia's monotypes were also shown alongside his jewelry designs at Nierendorf Gallery, New York, through the 1940s.