Joseph Cornell

(American, 1903–1972)

Joseph Cornell was an American artist best remembered for his Surrealist assemblage works housed in shallow wooden boxes. Cornell produced works which incorporated found objects arranged in narrative dioramas, featuring Victorian-era dolls, photographs, bottles, and other small trinkets. These inventive tableaux are characterized by their dream-like imagery and interest in childhood memories, as evidenced in his piece Untitled (The Hotel Eden) (1945), which displays an image of a tropical parrot housed in a white wooden box. “Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime,” he once explained. Born on December 24, 1903 in Nyack, NY, he studied at a private school in Andover, MA, and became a practitioner of Christian Science in his early 20s. Though Cornell never received a formal education in art or attended college, he was well read and often went to galleries and museums in New York. While wandering through small shops in Manhattan he began acquiring materials with which he later made his first boxes. An admirer of the film East of Borneo (1931), Cornell recut the film, making it shorter and projecting it at a slower speed through a blue glass, the avant-garde work is titled Rose Hobart (1936), after the name of the film’s lead actress. Though Cornell was in a milieu of artists that included Marcel Duchamp and Carolee Schneemann, and often exhibited during his lifetime, he struggled financially while caring for his younger brother, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Cornell died in Queens, NY on December 29, 1972 at the age of 69. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.