Artist, born in Nyack, New York, USA. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, MA (191721), worked for his father's textile company, and after his father's death moved to Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York City, where he spent the rest of his life. Something of a recluse, he collected ephemera, books, and objects. Often regarded as a Surrealist, he was influenced by Max Ernst's La Femme 100 Tetes, a collage-novel (1929). His work, described as assemblage, consisted of small boxes for walls or tables, as in Homage to the Romantic Ballet (1942). Multiple Cubes (19468), led to such series of works as Eclipse (c.19602) and Clay Pipe (c.1962). He is considered the master of miniature worlds that represent magic reincarnations of the past.
Joseph Cornell, (born Nyack, New York December 24, 1903 – died December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.
Sculpture and collage
His most characteristic art work were boxed assemblages created from found objects. Many were created as presents for little girls, or for the young actresses and ballerinas whom Cornell adored from a distance.
Like Kurt Schwitters Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; 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.
Cornell also created flat collages, made short art films, and kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on themes that interested him. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely widely read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.
Cornell was heavily influenced by American Transcendentalists such as Emily Dickinson, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Mallarme, and Gerard de Nerval, and great dancers of the 19th century ballet such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito. (Cornell's Christian Science belief that death, matter, time, and mortal mind are illusions allowed him to maintain friendships with these dancers, and others, regarded by the rest of society as long-dead.) Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell's art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.
Experimental film
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 of 193] during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the screening, Dali became incensed and overturned the projector, claiming that Cornell had 'stolen the idea from his subconscious'. Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Cornell rarely showed it again.
Personal information
Joseph Cornell, as noted, was wary of strangers.
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. 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 1940's, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper's Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines.
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