A new film series at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), dubbed “Midcentury Masters,” will focus on several prominent postwar architects and designers, including sculptor and furniture designer Henry Bertoia, who is currently being featured in exhibits at the museum, and his contemporaries Buckminster Fuller, Charles & Ray Eames, and Lina Bo Bardi.
The series kicks off on June 16 with Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter. This feature length documentary, narrated by James Franco, traces the lives and careers of the legendary husband-and-wife team and highlights their influence on American art and culture. The 1965 short film Bertoia’s Sculpture will be screened immediately after and will feature a soundtrack composed by Bertoia himself.
On June 23 the museum will screen The World of Buckminster Fuller, a documentary about the eclectic architect and inventor; it features extensive interviews with Fuller himself. The series will continue on June 30 with a double feature about Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. MAD describes the four-minute long The New World of Lina Bo Bardi as “fan fiction” for the architect: it shows images based on her sketches and buildings. Next, Precise Poetry—released on the year of what would have been her 100th birthday—is made up of an extensive collection of interviews with friends and associates of Bo Bardi.
This film series is presented in conjunction with two exhibitions about the work of Harry Bertoia. The Bent, Cast & Forged (running until September 25, 2016) exhibit will show Bertoia’s jewelry, which he began making as a high school student after coming to America from Italy at the age of 15. He returned to the craft when furniture-scale metalworking became prohibitively expensive during World War II. Bertoia went on to design the famous Bertoia Collection for the Knoll furniture company that included the Diamond chair, the success of which allowed him to devote the latter part of his career to sculpture.
Bertoia’s sound sculptures are the subject of the Atmosphere for Enjoyment (also running until September 25, 2016) exhibit, which aims to recreate the experience of hearing his sculptures “played” in the stone barn on the sculptor’s Pennsylvania property. Sound sculptures, as the name suggests, are sculptures that make noise when touched or moved by the wind. Bertoia recorded hundreds of audiotapes of his works, which are collectively known as Sonambient.
More details on all these films can be found here.
