This Famous Art Was Hidden in a Shed for 16 Years

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In a yard full of police tow trucks in North Philadelphia, a massive green sculpture of copper pipe and welded bronze sits outside a vehicle workshop, its extravagant curves forming a startling contrast to the gritty surroundings.

The sculpture is “Free Interpretation of Plant Forms,” completed by the artist and furniture designer Harry Bertoia in 1967 for a prominent position outside the Philadelphia Civic Center, a municipal complex, but which since 2000 has been hidden from public view in a purpose-built shed outside the police workshop.

Now it is poised for a return to outdoor display on the grounds of theWoodmere Art Museum in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood here. It will be repaired, conserved and placed on a site designed to celebrate its connection with the natural world.

The museum, on six acres surrounded by lawns and trees, will highlight the sculpture’s connections to nature, unlike the original site outside the now-demolished Civic Center, whose closing left the sculpture without a public home for more than a decade.

The shed that protected the sculpture from weather and vandals for the past 16 years has been dismantled, and at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, the four-ton artwork will be lifted by crane onto a truck to be driven about 11 miles to its new home in northwest Philadelphia. The nighttime journey of the work — about 14 feet long and 12 feet high — will require a police escort and some street closings.

Mr. Bertoia, perhaps best known for the 1952 diamond-shaped steel-wire chair he designed for Knoll, a furniture company, was initially an artist of the Machine Age, and was influenced by the Futurism of his native Italy, where he was born in 1915, said William Valerio, the museum’s director. (The artist died at 63 in 1978.)

But after Mr. Bertoia moved to Bally, Pa., to work for Knoll in 1950, his art turned toward nature, away from the strong lines of industrial design to the dramatic curves in “Free Interpretation.” “It has an organic energy; it’s alive and moving, and full of the vitality of life,” Mr. Valerio said.

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