Joseph Cornell Overview

Perhaps the most famous of all outsider artists, Joseph Cornell is best known for the shadow box collages he assembled in the basement of the Queens home he shared with his mother and brother. His assemblages usually include dolls, thimbles, engravings,... [more]

Perhaps the most famous of all outsider artists, Joseph Cornell is best known for the shadow box collages he assembled in the basement of the Queens home he shared with his mother and brother. His assemblages usually include dolls, thimbles, engravings, magazine pictures, and pretty much anything he could unearth in the Bowery dime stores and junk shops he regularly scoured for material. Recognized as a kindred spirit by the Surrealists, Cornell shared their dreamlike aesthetic, but his work has none of the shock value that they aimed for. Instead, his fragments of ephemera and mementos create miniature worlds of lyrical and transcendental beauty. Often they evoke a sense of nostalgia, as the pristine artifacts of a bygone era are captured in all their purity behind glass. Victorian dolls, old and withered maps, posters advertising concerts and shows long since past, and archaic scientific instruments populate Cornell's little boxes, as if history has returned in the form of a discretely composed and meticulously assembled dream. Cornell's artistic explorations began at a young age. At 13, he put on a show for his family and charged one pin for admission. A ticket from the show offers clues to the concepts behind his aesthetic: "Combination Ticket Entitles Bearer to 'The Professional Burglar' Relic Museum Candy Show Plays." His sisters recall that the show "centered on a metal safe that contained a chained loaf of bread." The image is exemplary of Cornell's work: the natural beauty of simple things is rendered subtly disturbing by their confinement within claustrophobic spaces. While immediately charming, these assemblages also evoke an evanescent sense of terrifying enclosure, as if the box were a dream from which one could not escape. Cornell's shadow boxes often feature portraits of idealized and inaccessible women. "Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall" (1945) includes a profile of the actress obscured by glass. He also created a box about Audrey Hepburn, which he sent to the actress and she promptly sent back. Apparently Cornell maintained the sensibility of a child throughout his career; the charm of his boxes relies on their playfulness and innocence. Cornell's childishness, far from resulting in careless works, was the source of a fastidious form of art that never crossed over into aesthetic pretense. In this sense, Cornell remained throughout his life an "outsider." [show less]