“Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.†- Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was never trained as an artist, yet he had an eye for the way objects and images fit together. He never learned to paint or draw. Instead, Cornell built small wooden boxes by hand that he filled with collages and objects that he collected over years of treasure hunting in second-hand stores. Cornell worked alone and almost never traveled outside New York City.
If all of that makes him sound like some idiosyncratic outsider or folk artist, he was not. Cornell was one of the most imaginative American artists of the 20th century. The mysterious little worlds he created in his boxes influenced everyone from pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to contemporary installation artists.
THE RECLUSE Joseph Cornell was born in a suburb of New York City in 1903, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He lived a hermetic existence in a small one-family house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens and for most of his life shared this home, which was also his studio, with his mother and his disabled brother Robert. Self-taught as an artist and filmmaker, Cornell began to exhibit his collages and objects in New York in 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery.
AMERICAN SURREALIST Cornell was inspired by the Surrealist Movement and in turn was admired and visited by many of the leading European Surrealist artists. Cornell was particularly inspired by Max Ernst’s juxtapositions of incongruous images. André Breton included Cornell in Surrealist exhibitions although Cornell never embraced the darker or erotic aspects of the movement, maintaining an innocent delight in manifestations of ordinary objects and popular culture that predated Pop Art by two decades.
BOXES Cornell made small wooden boxes that are simple, glass-fronted, presentations in which surprising collections of commonplace and exotic things are placed like performers in a theatrical stage. The boxes combine the formal austerity of Constructivist sculpture with the fantasy and irrationality of Surrealism. His work is evocative and poetic, provoking nostalgia for an imagined past. Cornell’s materials included faded photographs and images of often obscure ballerinas and movie stars, astronomical maps, emblems of voyages, birds and objects such as marbles, corks, and aperitif glasses, and small colored balls. Cornell collected his materials on journeys into Manhattan where he frequented junk stores, flea markets, and souvenir shops on 42nd Street.
His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party serving soda pop and cake.
Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films.
