This past December, following an extensive restoration, a 1970 masterwork by sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia (1915–1978) was installed in the atrium of General Motors’s new global headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. General Motors announced the news in December, and the Detroit Free Press reported on the sculpture this month.
In 1970, the J.L. Hudson Company, an anchor store for the Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan, commissioned Bertoia, already famous for his furniture designs for Knoll and his later public sculptures, to create an artwork for the mall’s open court. The 26-foot-tall hanging sculpture comprises two cloud-like aggregations of brazed steel rods—a technique Bertoia called “sunlit straw”—one suspended below the other.
The Genesee Valley Mall closed in 1980 for renovations, and the Bertoia was moved to the Northland Mall in Southfield, Michigan. It never went on view, and the Northland Mall closed in 2015. Six years later, the mall was demolished.
In 2017, appraisers from the Southfield Arts Commission discovered the sculpture, now badly damaged and covered in dust, in the basement of the abandoned mall. The city of Southfield then purchased it and began repairs.
The choice to display the work in GM’s Hudson’s Detroit headquarters seemed fitting. On arriving in America from Italy, Bertoia first settled in the city, where he attended the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and then the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills.
Bertoia also had a connection with General Motors. His first public sculpture, a wall divider composed of brazed steel plates, was commissioned for GM’s Eero Saarinen–designed Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, in 1953 and is still on view.
The artist’s daughter, Celia Bertoia, who now runs a foundation devoted to his work, told the Detroit Free Press, “The Harry Bertoia Foundation is really happy to see [the sculpture] out in the public eye again, where everyone can enjoy it.”
