Weekend, June 4-5, 2022 – ANOTHER QUEENS RESIDENT, CORNELL IS FAMOUS FOR HIS CONSTRUCTIONS
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, JUNE 4-5, 2022
THE 693rd EDITION
Joseph Cornell:
Navigating the Imagination
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Marine Fantasy with Tamara Toumanova), ca. 1940
A premier assemblagist who elevated the box to a major art form, Joseph Cornell also was an accomplished collagist and filmmaker, and one of America’s most innovative artists. When his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. John A. Benton, donated a collection of his works and related documentary material in 1978, the NMAA [now the Smithsonian American Art Museum] established the Joseph Cornell Study Center.
Born on Christmas Eve, 1903, Joseph Cornell was raised in an affluent, closeknit family in Nyack, New York. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a science major between 1917 and 1921, but did not graduate. While working as a textile salesman in New York between 1921 and 1931, Cornell began exploring the city and its cultural resources, and converted to Christian Science, thereafter a major influence on his life and work. In 1929, his family moved to Flushing, New York, where he lived until his death on December 29, 1972.
His art has been described as romantic, poetic, lyrical and surrealistic. Self-taught but amazingly sophisticated, he created his first collages, box constructions and experimental films in the 1930s. By 1940, his boxes contained found materials artfully arranged, then collaged and painted to suggest poetic associations inspired by the arts, humanities and sciences.
He believed aesthetic theories were foreign to the origin of his art but said his works were based on everyday experiences, “the beauty of the commonplace.” An insatiable collector, he acquired thousands of examples of printed and three-dimensional ephemera — searching the libraries, museums, theaters, book shops and antique fairs in New York and relying on his contacts across the United States and in Europe. With these objects, he created magical relationships by seamlessly combining disparate images.
Cornell was an imaginative and private man who, mingling fantasy and reality, produced works outstanding not only for their originality and craftsmanship but for their complexity and diversity.
- Joseph Cornell, Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet, 1949-1953, wooden cutout, paper, spring, and found objects in a glass-fronted wood box, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Donald Windham, 2003.69
- In Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet, a bird is perched in its white-walled cage; a coiled spring from a watch is its lone companion. Mementos fill the drawer beneath the cage: a pink plastic charm of an Indian drawing a bow, a paper candy box, French music sheets, and other ephemera. Joseph Cornell gave this box to Donald Windham as a token of thanks for writing the forward in his 1949 exhibition catalogue The Aviaries. The show debuted Cornell’s new bird themed boxes, which were inspired by looking into the windows of a pet store.
Cornell’s extensive collection of contemporary periodicals and antique books served as source material for his artwork. The lesser lemon-crested cockatoo in the shadow box is from the nineteenth-century book Parrots in Captivity by W. T. Greene. Cornell had several copies of the book from which he cut out images of birds to glue to wooden supports, some of which were left waiting for future, unbuilt boxes. Although many feature the same bird, no two works are alike.
Joseph Cornell, Americana: Natural Philosophy (What Makes the Weather?), ca. 1959, masonite, paper, paint, colored pencil, graphite, and ink, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Robert Lehrman in honor of Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, 1991.90, © 1959, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation
Americana: Natural Philosophy (What Makes the Weather?) is one variant in a series of collages featuring the young boy in John Singleton Copley’s 1771 painting, Daniel Crommelin Verplanck. Joseph Cornell takes the boy out of his home environment and transposes him into a Western landscape, with the natural wonders of the American frontier just over his shoulder. Cornell considered Copley to be one of the first “American artists who worked out their own style of seeing.” While paying homage to a great artist of the past, Cornell brings weight to the collage by juxtaposing Copley’s boy and the glowing landscape with cutouts from children’s books that illustrate scientific phenomena like rainbows and circumpolar constellations. The collage is a merger of Cornell’s fantasy and reality, and a contemporary response to the technological advancements and exciting discoveries of the Space Age.
Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1949-1950, glasses, pipes, printed paper, and other media in a glass-fronted wood box, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, 1999.91
Soap Bubble Set offers a theatrical glimpse into the cosmos. Situated on Earth, the viewer observes the mountains and valleys of the moon, first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The glasses, holding specimens of land and sea, embody the gravitational pull of the earth, perhaps in relation to the lunar influence on tides. The freely moving sphere rolls between the opposing forces while cutouts of shells, stars, and other references to the natural world float above. Following Edwin Hubble’s confirmation of the rapidly expanding universe in 1929, the metaphor of a swelling soap bubble proliferated in the popular press. For Cornell, who had a long-standing interest in astronomy and stayed abreast of breaking news, this metaphor would have resonated with his own memories of blowing bubbles with clay pipes as a child and the wonder of their creation. Cornell’s series of Soap Bubble Sets, sometimes called planetariums, is a decade-long rumination on the great astronomers of the past and the contemporary discoveries and innovations in space technology.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Oriental painting of bird with cherry blossoms), 1964, collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.49
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (unidentified 17th century Dutch portrait of a young blond girl in a green dress), n.d., collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.189
Joseph Cornell, Untitled, mixed media: wood: stained, paper, paint, decal…, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1985.64.51
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (astrological sign for Pisces), 1970, collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.282
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (female in three-quarter pose wearing beaded earrings), n.d., collage, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, 1991.155.131
THE SMITHSONIAN HAS 731 ARTWORKS BY CORNELL.
MOST ARE AVAILABLE ON ITS’ WEBSITE:
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/joseph-cornell-995
WEEKEND PHOTO
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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
FREEDOMLAND, FORMER AMUSEMENT PARK IN THE BRONX, NOW THE SITE OF CO-OP CITY. ED LITCHER GOT IT!!
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Edited by Deborah Dorff
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SOURCES
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CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
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