Joseph Cornell

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Joseph Cornell

(born Dec. 24, 1903, Nyack, N.Y., U.S. — died Dec. 29, 1972, New York, N.Y.) U.S. assemblage artist. He had no formal artistic training. In the 1930s and '40s he was associated with the Surrealists in New York City (see Surrealism). He was an originator of the assemblage; his most distinctive works were "boxes," usually with glass fronts, containing objects and pieces of collage arranged in elegant but enigmatic compositions. Recurrent motifs include astronomy, music, birds, seashells, glamour photographs, and souvenirs of travel. His appeal rested on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on nostalgia.

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Art Encyclopedia: Joseph Cornell

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(b Nyack, NY, 24 Dec 1903; d Flushing, NY, 29 Dec 1972). American sculptor, film maker and writer. He studied from 1917 to 1921 at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA. After leaving the Academy he took a job as a textile salesman for the William Whitman Company in New York, which he retained until 1931. During this time his interest in the arts developed greatly. Through art reviews and exhibitions he became acquainted with late 19th-century and contemporary art; he particularly admired the work of Odilon Redon. He also saw the exhibitions of American art organized by Alfred Stieglitz and became interested in Japanese art, especially that of Ando Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. Following a 'healing experience' in 1925 he became a convert to Christian Science.

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Biography: Joseph Cornell

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Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was an American artist best known for his small collage boxes as well as for his experimental films.

Joseph Cornell was born on December 24, 1903, in Nyack, New York, to parents descended from old Dutch families, his maternal grandfather being the wealthy and prominent Commodore William Voorhis. After his father's death in 1917 Cornell, along with his mother, two sisters, and an invalid brother, was faced with a financial set-back that forced them to leave Nyack and move to Flushing, Queens, where he lived until his death in 1972. Educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Cornell worked at a variety of jobs such as selling refrigerators door-to-door, designing textiles, and working in the garment industry to help support his family. He never married or travelled, living most of his life in a white frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Cornell was an active Christian Scientist all of his adult life.

It is speculated that Cornell first made his toy-like artworks to amuse his brother who was confined to a wheelchair and cared for by Cornell. He filled them with all sorts of ephemera, of which he was an avid collector. Cornell was known to haunt old book and print shops and junk stores during his daily trips to Manhattan, and he had extensive collections of old photographs, recordings, movies, opera librettos, souvenirs, and other memorabilia. He was enamoured of all forms of theater and was well read in literature and poetry.

A very private man, it is thought that he first began making boxes in which he collaged images and objects from his various collections in the early 1930s. The boxes, often containing words, were each based on themes developed by the relationships between collage elements. These connections were sometimes direct but more often allusive, giving the boxes a poetic quality. Cornell did many boxes that were homages to ballerinas, opera singers, and film stars he revered and sometimes corresponded with. The boxes were nostalgic worlds filled with people and places that Cornell admired from a distance. One such box entitled A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach contains a ballet corps of red plastic fish set against a background of shelf-paper which turns the box into a stage with paper doily curtains and menacing stagesets of toy silverware. The scale and nature of Cornell's boxes did not change much, but in the 1950s he began to make two-dimensional collages without the framework of the boxcontainer.

While considered something of a recluse, Cornell did make contacts with the small art circles in New York in the 1930s. He visited Alfred Stieglitz's pioneering gallery "291," and he became friendly with the dealer Julian Levy where he first showed his collages in 1932. Through Levy, Cornell met many of the European Surrealists who were in New York during the war, and he often showed with them. His work had superficial similarities to theirs, especially in his use of association between seemingly unrelated elements, but in general he criticized them as a group and was not one of their inner circle. His closest friends were the photographer Lee Miller, the artist Marcel Duchamp, and the painter Pavel Tchelitchew.

Cornell also made short, experimental films from the 1930s into the 1950s, an interest that sprung no doubt from his love for the cinema and from the film showings he frequently organized from his collection. In his films Cornell experimented with sequencing where he cut and juxtaposed images to depict a narrative in ways that had never been tried before. He used a collage effect similar to his boxes which film critics contend foreshadowed effects later adapted by commercial cinema. The most noted of these films was Rose Hobart, made in 1936. Cornell wrote scenarios and directed his films, allowing others to photograph them. Photographer Rudy Burckhardt and filmmaker Stan Brakhage worked with Cornell when they were young. Cornell also wrote and edited for the Surrealist magazine View and for Dance Index.

Cornell is often associated with the Surrealists and is footnoted in every history of the movement. But his work is essentially different. Less based on psychoanalytic theories, Cornell's boxes evoke conscious memories rather than unconscious ones. His admiration for the "ineffable beauty and pathos of the commonplace," gleaned from one of his diaries, is at odds with the Surrealist fascination with the bizarre, the shocking, and the inexplicable. Cornell's sensibility was of gentle nostalgia, a difference in temperament from the exaggerated drama of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, or Andre Breton. At one point Cornell remarked that he thought Surrealizm as an idea had "healthier possibilities" than he saw expressed by the Surrealist artists.

As an artist, Cornell was a loner with only peripheral attachments to larger art currents of his time. Within the sophistication that overtook New York during World War II when many European artists were in exile, Cornell was something of a Yankee anomaly, connected yet separate, interested but skeptical. Like many American artists he chose isolation rather than the cafe society camaraderie to which most European artists were accustomed. Yet his spiritual ties were with their sense of history and memory. When a new American-based abstraction grew in part out of these war-time contacts, Cornell was not a part of it, continuing to refine the obsessions of his early work.

Life

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910). Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell's father died in 1917, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Following the elder Cornell's death, his wife and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921, although he did not graduate. Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a wooden frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically challenged.^[2]^[3]

Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to isolate himself and become a self-taught artist. ^[3] Although he expressed attraction to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. In later life his bashfulness verged toward reclusiveness, and he rarely left the state of New York. However, he preferred talking with women, and often made their husbands wait in the next room when he discussed business with them.^[4] He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.^[5]

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 soft drinks and cake.

He devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, an invalid suffering from cerebral palsy. This was another factor in his lack of relationships. At some point in the 1920s, or possibly earlier, he read the works of Mary Baker Eddy. He would consider her work to be the most important book to him outside the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent.^[6] He was also rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family. As a result of the American Great Depression, Cornell lost his textile industry job in 1931, and worked for a short time thereafter as a door-to-door appliance salesman. During this time, through her friendship with Ethel Traphagen, Cornell's mother secured him a part-time position designing textiles. In the 1940s, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery (which would figure in his famous dossier "GC44") and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper's Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines. He only really began to sell his boxes for significant sums after his 1948 solo show.

Cornell became a highly regarded artist towards the end of his career, yet remained out of the spotlight. He produced fewer box assemblages in the 1950s and 1960s, as his family responsibilities increased and claimed more of his time. He hired a series of young assistants, including both students and established artists, to help him organize material, make artwork, and run errands. At this time, Cornell concentrated on making collages, and collaborated with filmmakers like Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan to make films that were evocative of moving collages.

Cornell's brother Robert died in 1965, and his mother in 1966. Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on 29 December 1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday. The executors of his estate were Richard Ader and Wayne Andrews, as represented by the art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Later the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell's works and represents the interests of his heirs.

Sculpture and collage

Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled. ^[7]

Joseph Cornell Cassiopeia 1, assemblage

Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell 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 he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York.^[8] His boxes relied on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal. Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte, he disavowed the Surrealists' "black magic," claiming that he only wished to make white magic with his art. Cornell's fame as the leading American "Surrealist" allowed him to befriend several members of the Surrealist movement when they settled in the USA during the Second World War. Later he was claimed as a herald of pop art and installation art.

In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his "penny arcade" portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

Cornell was heavily influenced by American Transcendentalists, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Gerard de Nerval, and great dancers of the 19th century ballet such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito.

Also captivated with birds, Cornell created the “Aviaries” in the mid-1940s to the ’50s, and involved cutouts of colorful images of various birds set against harsh white backgrounds. ^[3]

Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell's art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.

Chronology

1903: Joseph Cornell born, Nyack, New York, to Joseph I. Cornell, a textile manufacturer of fine textiles and Helen Ten Broek Storms. Both parents were descendants of Dutch families.

1905: Cornell's sister, Elizabeth born.

1906: Cornell's sister, Helen born.

1910: Cornell's brother, Robert born.

1917: Cornell's father dies of leukemia, leaving vast debts. The family moves to rented accommodation. Joseph enters the Phillips Academy.

1921: Cornell works in a textile mill and then selling woolen goods, which he does until 1931.

1925: Cornell is cured of a serious illness affecting his stomach. He enters into the Christian Science faith, joining a church in Great Neck, New York.

1929: Robert, Joseph and their mother move to a house on 3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, Queens.

1931: Cornell gives up his job selling woolen goods and starts selling refrigerators. He shows Julien Levy his collages.

1932: Cornell has his first one man show at the Julien Levy Gallery.

1936: Cornell makes his first 'collage' film, Rose Hobart.

1938: Cornell's work is included in a major exhibition at the MoMA, New York.

1940: Cornell starts to occasionally design for Dance Index, House and Gardens, Vogue, and other magazines.

1943: Throughout World War II, Cornell works at a defense plant.

1961: The Art of Assemblage at the MoMA includes some of Cornell's work. ^[9] He starts to hire helpers to research his work.

1964: Joyce Hunter (a girl Cornell idolized) steals one of Cornell's boxes, he does not prosecute. later that year she is murdered near Times Square.

1965: Cornell's brother, Robert dies. Cornell arranges a memorial exhibition.

1966: Cornell's mother dies.

1968: Cornell suffers long bouts of depression.

1972: December 29, Cornell dies of heart failure.

Experimental film

Joseph Cornell Untitled (Dieppe) c. 1958, Museum of Modern Art, (New York City).

Joseph Cornell's 1936 found-film montage Rose Hobart was made entirely from splicing together existing film stock that Cornell had found in New Jersey warehouses, mostly derived from a 1931 'B' film entitled East of Borneo. Cornell would play Nestor Amaral's record, 'Holiday in Brazil' during its rare screenings, as well as projecting the film through a deep blue glass or filter, giving the film a dreamlike effect. Focusing mainly on the gestures and expressions made by Rose Hobart (the original film's starlet), this dreamscape of Cornell's seems to exist in a kind of suspension until the film's most arresting sequence toward the end, when footage of a solar eclipse is juxtaposed with a white ball falling into a pool of water in slow motion.

Cornell premiered the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York^[10]. Salvador Dalí, who was in New York to attend the MoMA opening, was present at its first screening. During the screening, Dali became outraged at Cornell's movie, claiming he had just had the same idea of applying collage techniques to film. After the screening, Dali remarked to Cornell that he should stick to making boxes and to stop making films. Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Cornell showed his films rarely thereafter.

Joseph Cornell continued to experiment with film until his death in 1972. While his earlier films were often collages of found short films, his later ones montaged together footage he expressly commissioned from the professional filmmakers with whom he collaborated. These latter films were often set in some of Cornell's favorite neighborhoods and landmarks in New York City: Mulberry Street, Bryant Park, Union Square Park, and the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, among others.

In 1969 Cornell gave a collection of both his own films and the works of others to Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Filmography

Rose Hobart (1936)
Children's Party (c. 1940)
Cotillion (c. 1940)
The Midnight Party (c. 1940)
The Aviary (1955)
Gnir Rednow (1956) (made with Stan Brakhage)
Mulberry Street (1957)
Boys' Games (1957)
Centuries of June (1955) (made with Stan Brakhage)
Nymphlight (1957)
Flushing Meadows (c. 1965)
A Legend for Fountains (1957-1965)
Bookstalls (???)
By Night with Torch and Spear (1979).

Cultural references

Tracing the creator of what appear to be Cornell boxes is a major plot element of William Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.

The Dutch pop band The Nits released a song, "Soap Bubble Box", on their 1992 album Ting, about seeing some of Cornell's boxes in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The song was a minor hit in the Netherlands.

Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter imagines Cornell going about his creative life in the song "Ideas are like stars", found on her 1996 album A Place in the World.

Cornell's Aviaries are prominently referred to in Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife.

The novel Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! by James Chapman uses Cornell's boxes as a prominent image throughout its story, and includes two epigraphs from Cornell.

The English band The Clientele has a song titled "Joseph Cornell" on the group's debut album "Suburban Light", released in 2001.

Jonathan Safran Foer's A Convergence of Birds is a collection of fiction and poetry inspired by Cornell's work.

Notes

^ Garreau, Joel (2007-09-06). "Through the Looking Glass". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090502582_pf.html. Retrieved 2007-10-30.
^ Cotter, Holland. "Poetic Theaters, Romantic Fevers", The New York Times, July 13, 2007. Accessed October 8, 2007. "But they meant the world to this intensely shy artist, who lived on sweets, worshiped forgotten divas and made portable shrines to them — his version of spiritual art — in the basement of the small house he shared with his mother and disabled brother in Flushing, Queens."
^ ^a ^b ^c Danielle O'Steen (February 14, 2007), Artist Dossier: Joseph Cornell, ART+AUCTION, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24307/artist-dossier-joseph-cornell/, retrieved 2008-04-22
^ Waldman, Diane. Joseph Cornell, Master of Dreams 2002.
^ ibid.
^ Guggenheim Collection - Artist - Cornell - Space Object Box: "Little Bear, etc." motif
^ Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1997).
^ "Joseph Cornell" at Web Museum, Paris.
^ William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, Doubleday (1962)
^ Frye, Brian "Film and & Video: Joseph Cornell", November 2001

References

Mary Ann Caws, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000) ISBN 0-500-28243-9
Catherine Corman, Joseph Cornell's Dreams (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2007) ISBN1-878-97241-3
Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) ISBN 0-374-52571-4
Sandra Leonard Starr, Joseph Cornell: Art and Metaphysics (New York: Castelli Corcoran Feigen, 1982) LC Catalogue Card Number 82-71787
Lindsay Blair, The Working Method of Joseph Cornell Reaktion Books; illustrated edition edition (April 1, 1998) ISBN 0948462493

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Joseph Cornell

Born	December 24, 1903(1903-12-24) Nyack, New York
Died	December 29, 1972 (aged 69) New York City, New York
Nationality	American
Field	assemblage, experimental film, sculpture
Influenced by	Transcendentalists, Symbolists, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gerard de Nerval, Marie Taglioni
Influenced	William Gibson^[1], Chris Ware