As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn - recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.” “When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the 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. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” - which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes - and his lung cancer.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 established in 1952. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. When she entered her 50s, Celia 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 confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. 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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