Harry Bertschmann

Untitled, from the Subway Series.

1979

Harry Bertschmann trained at the Basel School of Design (the Kunstgewerbeschule) in Switzerland. His teachers were Armin Hofmann, Walter Bodmer, Emil Ruder, Theo Eble, Donald Burn, and others. He apprenticed at Fritz Buehler’s Atelier in Basel working closely with Buehler and Walter Bosshart with an emphasis in graphic design techniques, concept aesthetics, and painting. During the 1950s he lived in Cleveland and was given 10 solo exhibitions at Case Western Reserve University. After winning First Prize at the May Show the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of his large abstract canvases was accepted to the prestigious Carnegie International of 1957. He enjoyed many solo exhibitions at the Howard Wise Gallery in Cleveland, including one when the gallery moved to New York in 1960. Despite this early success he focused upon his career in a graphic design and created numerous iconic package designs and logos still widely in use today. In 1997 a retrospective exhibition given by the Gewerbeverband Basel-Stadt Gallery honored 140 of his graphic design works. Bertschmann continued to paint every day and his canvases have been privately purchased by a number of museums, including the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at UNC, and Case Western Reserve University. Corporate collections owning his paintings include Investcorp, Pfizer, Standard Chartered, Homburger, the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Collection, and ABSA Securities Collection. In 2018 the Fashion Institute of Technology honored him with the President’s Award of Lifetime Achievement.