Forgotten for Decades in a Dusty Mall Basement, a Long-Lost Harry Bertoia Sculpture Is Back on Display...The untitled 26-foot-tall piece now hangs in the seven-story atrium of General Motors’ new global headquarters, in Detroit
The dramatic 26-foot-tall piece, created in 1970, now hangs in the seven-story atrium of General Motors' new global headquarters, in Detroit, according to an announcement from the company.
The untitled artwork consists of two groups of rigid steel wires suspended vertically one above the other. The strawlike rods are coated in melted brass, bronze and metal alloys, a technique Bertoia often used to amplify the "organic associations" of his sculptures, according to the Harry Bertoia Foundation.
The piece was originally commissioned by the J.L. Hudson Company for the Genesee Valley Mall, in Flint, Michigan. It hung in the mall's open court until 1980, when the facility closed for renovations. The piece was then transferred to the Northland Mall, in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, but it was never displayed there. Instead, it ended up in storage and forgotten about for decades.
When the Northland Mall closed in 2015, the city of Southfield paid $2.4 million for the shuttered facility. City officials didn't realize that the Bertoia sculpture was hiding in the basement, so they were in for a big surprise when it was identified in 2017 by Terri Stearn, an independent art appraiser, and Jeffrey Lygon, who was a member of the Southfield Arts Commission at the time.
"We had hard hats on, it was dirty, there was no electricity down there; we had flashlights," Stearn tells the Detroit Free Press' Duante Beddingfield. "I'm looking at this thing with [Lygon], and it's corroded in dust. You can't even knock the dust off; it's been there for decades. And I look at Jeff, and we both go, 'Bertoia!' at the same time. It was so exciting. We screamed, we were so excited-like kids in a candy store."
Incredible as the discovery was, the sculpture itself was in rough shape. "It was all bent up, and it was filthy," Celia Bertoia, the artist's daughter and the director of the Harry Bertoia Foundation, tells the Detroit News' Summer Ballentine. "Just covered with grit and cobwebs and mouse turds and whatever else."
The city held on to the battered piece and tried to find a buyer. But then, in April 2024, General Motors announced that it planned to relocate its headquarters to Hudson's Detroit, a downtown development located on the site of the former J.L. Hudson Company Department Store-the same company that had commissioned the Bertoia sculpture.
Beyond that historical link, GM also had ties to Bertoia. In 1953, the company had commissioned the artist to create Untitled Wall Screen, a 36-foot-long, 10-foot-tall piece made of hundreds of vertical rectangular steel plates coated in molten brass and bronze. The work, which was Bertoia's first public sculpture installation, makes up the entire western-facing wall of the Cadillac House at Vanderbilt, located at the General Motors Global Technical Center campus, in Warren, Michigan. The campus itself was designed by architect Eero Saarinen, who had been one of Bertoia's peers at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Bertoia, an Italian immigrant who moved to Detroit in 1930 at age 15, also loved to work with metal, a material that's prevalent in automotive design and manufacturing. And the artist cared deeply about the interplay between metal and light, something GM's designers think about when developing new vehicle models.
"There are all these connections between the sculpture and Hudson and General Motors and Detroit," Christo Datini, GM's design archive and special collections manager, tells the Detroit News.
Quick fact: What else is Bertoia known for?
The artist is famous for designing the Diamond Chair, a sculpturesque piece of furniture with a diamond-shaped steel frame.
GM purchased the piece from the city for $1 million. Workers then spent more than a year cleaning and restoring the piece to its former, sparkling glory.
Installing the masterpiece, however, was no easy feat. Construction crews had to create a 15-foot-wide, 75-foot-tall opening in the side of the building, then carefully insert the sculpture in two pieces using cranes. It now hangs several floors above the ground, illuminated by sunlight that pours in through the glass ceiling.
Throughout his lifetime, Bertoia, who died of lung cancer in 1978 at age 63, created installations for libraries, banks, airports, malls and other public spaces. "He wanted his work to be seen," Marin R. Sullivan, an art historian and the author of Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury, told Bloomberg's Alexandra Lange in 2022. "He wanted his work to live in all senses of the word."
GM will officially relocate its headquarters to Hudson's Detroit the week of January 12, per the Detroit News. Soon, the company plans to offer tours of the facility, giving members of the public the chance to see the Bertoia sculpture.
Bertoia wanted this piece-and others-to be open to interpretation. But to the artist's daughter, the hanging sculpture is reminiscent of "something you'd find out in the universe."
"My father was a very spiritual man, and he really was connected to the universe and to otherworldly realities," she tells the Detroit News. "When he came up with the ideas for various sculptures, especially one like this, he was really thinking in much larger terms than just our little planet Earth here."
