METAL STAR

The Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia entered into the midcentury modern design pantheon with his Diamond Chair. The famous design incorporates a bent wire-mesh grid in the form of a large diamond (with many miniature diamonds formed within the grid) supported on a rod frame. Per meable yet solid-looking, formally complex yet visually simple, “indoor” yet “outdoor,” the Diamond Chair sits at the same hallowed table as the Wassily chair, the Eames lounger, and the Saarinen “Tulip.”

Knoll released the chair in 1952. Then a growing design firm run by Florence Knoll, Bertoia’s former classmate at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and her husband Hans, Knoll invited Bertoia to come East. They were based in New York and Pennsylvania; he was in California, where he had moved in the early 1940s to work with Charles and Ray Eames, also Cranbrook classmates. The open invitation asked Bertoia to design pretty much whatever he wanted. In Pennsylvania, Bertoia initially set up a woodshop, with no metalworking tools. But the artist, who had