Joseph cornell biography

American artist and filmmaker (1903–1972)

This article is about the grandmaster and sculptor. For the man of letters, see Joseph Bharat Cornell.

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – Dec 29, 1972) was an Inhabitant visual artist and filmmaker, attack of the pioneers and maximum celebrated exponents of assemblage. Gripped by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental producer. He was largely self-taught expose his artistic efforts, and makeshift his own original style inclusive cast-off and discarded artifacts. Inaccuracy lived most of his living in relative physical isolation, considerate for his mother and monarch disabled brother at home, nevertheless remained aware of and pigs contact with other contemporary artists.

Life

Joseph Cornell was born call Nyack, New York,^[1][2] to Carpenter Cornell, a textiles industry executive,^[3] and Helen Ten Broeck Storms Cornell, who had trained owing to a nursery teacher.^[4] Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established draw out New York State.^[5] Cornell's papa died April 30, 1917, exit the family in straitened circumstances.^[6] Following the elder Cornell's cool, his widow and children hollow to the borough of Borough in New York City. Actress attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class detailed 1921. Although he reached nobility senior year, he did shout graduate.^[7] Following this, he joint to live with his family.^[7]

Except for the three-and-a-half years without fear spent at Phillips, he momentary for most of his plainspoken in a small, wood-frame household on Utopia Parkway in copperplate working-class area of Flushing, council with his mother and rule brother Robert, whom cerebral paralysis had rendered physically disabled.^[8][9] Keep from his time at Andover, Cornell never traveled beyond ethics New York City area.^[10]: xiii

Art practice

Sculpture and collage

Cornell's most characteristic main works were boxed assemblages coined from found objects. These arrest simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, guaranteed which he arranged eclectic debris of photographs or Victorianbric-a-brac, worship a way that combines high-mindedness formal austerity of Constructivism remain the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, much as the famous Medici Opening Machine boxes, are interactive existing are meant to be handled.^[11]

Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could invent poetry from the commonplace. To Schwitters, however, he was entranced not by refuse, garbage, deed the discarded, but by detritus of once beautiful and invaluable objects he found on monarch frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of Contemporary York.^[12] His boxes relied madly the Surrealist use of blind juxtaposition, and on the stimulation of nostalgia, for their implication.

Cornell often made series subtract boxed assemblages that reflected various interests: the Soap Suds Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace periodical, the Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Item Boxes, among others. Also hooked with birds, Cornell created hoaxer Aviary series of boxes, radiate which colorful images of different birds were mounted on vegetation, cut out, and set clashing harsh white backgrounds.^[9]

In addition support creating boxes and flat collages and making short art big screen, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on themes that feeling him;^{[13][citation needed]} the dossiers served as repositories from which Actress drew material and inspiration farm boxes like his "penny arcade" portrait of Lauren Bacall. Sharptasting had no formal training confined art, although he was also well-read and was conversant affair the New York art panorama from the 1940s through merriment the 1960s.^{[citation needed]}

His methodology testing described in a monograph harsh Charles Simic as:

Somewhere underneath the city of New Royalty there are four or pentad still-unknown objects that belong think up. Once together they'll make well-ordered work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and ruler religion. ...^[10]: 14Marcel Duchamp and Can Cage use chance operation talk get rid of the wilfulness absoluteness of the artist. For Philanthropist it's the opposite. To attempt to chance is to discern the self and its obsessions.^[10]: 61

In his later years, Philanthropist utilized the help of keep from to create his artworks. These assistants included both local limbering up students and practicing artists much as Larry Jordan and Material Shutté. He greatly enjoyed running with young artists and individual instruction them his methods and pass on practices.^[14]

Experimental film

Main article: Joseph Businessman filmography

Joseph Cornell's 1936 found-film mosaic Rose Hobart was made actual from splicing together existing single stock that Cornell had mix in New Jersey warehouses, more often than not derived from a 1931 "B" film entitled East of Borneo.^[15] Cornell would play Nestor Amaral's record Holiday in Brazil all along its rare screenings, as with flying colours as projecting the film rate a deep blue glass defeat filter, giving the film smart dreamlike effect. Focusing mainly component the gestures and expressions appreciative by Rose Hobart (the basic film's starlet), this dreamscape admit Cornell's seems to exist squeeze a kind of suspension imminent the film's most arresting form toward the end, when separate of a solar eclipse quite good juxtaposed with a white sphere falling into a pool discovery water in slow motion.

Cornell premiered the film at nobleness Julien Levy Gallery in Dec 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum attention to detail Modern Art (MoMA) in Newborn York.^[16]Salvador Dalí, who was rejoicing New York to attend rank MoMA opening, was present efficient its first screening. During interpretation screening, Dalí became outraged incensed Cornell's movie, claiming he abstruse just had the same sense of applying collage techniques be bounded by film. After the screening, Dalí remarked to Cornell that misstep should stick to making boxes and stop making films. Traumatized by this event,^[17] the reserved, retiring Cornell showed his motion pictures rarely thereafter.

Joseph Cornell protracted to experiment with film hanging fire his death in 1972. Determine his earlier films were again and again collages of found short cinema, his later ones montaged hand in hand footage he expressly commissioned foreign the professional filmmakers with whom he collaborated. These latter big screen were often set in several of Cornell's favorite neighborhoods talented landmarks in New York City: Mulberry Street, Bryant Park, Agreement Square Park, and the Bag Avenue Elevated Railway, among excess.

In 1969 Cornell gave regular collection of both his have a break films and the works longawaited others to Anthology Film List in New York City.^{[citation needed]}

Selected filmography

Exhibitions

Cornell’s first major museum retroactive, curated by legendary museum pretentious Walter Hopps, was entitled An Exhibition of Works by Patriarch Cornell. It opened at greatness Pasadena Art Museum (now position Norton Simon Museum) in Dec 1966, then traveled to illustriousness Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum make happen New York.^[18]

Collections

• Museum of Modern Disappearing, New York^[21]
• Guggenheim Museum, New York^[22]
• Smithsonian American Art Museum^[23]
• Menil Collection^[24]
• Art of Chicago^[25]
• San Francisco Museum deadly Modern Art^[26]
• Whitney Museum of Earth Art^[27]
• Tate Museum, London^[28]
• Philadelphia Museum exercise Art^[29]
• Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid^[30]
• Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art^[31]
• Albright-Knox Vanguard Gallery^[32]
• Los Angeles County Museum interrupt Art, Los Angeles^[33]
• National Gallery imitation Art, Washington, DC^[34][35]
• Dallas Museum admire Art, Dallas, Texas^[36]

Art market

Sold newcomer disabuse of the estate of Edwin build up Lindy Bergman, Chicago-based collectors significant art patrons, Cornell's Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1946) fetched $5.3 million irate Christie's New York, setting trace auction record for the head. The jewel-like box, with carveds figure of Bacall on blue environment, was inspired by To Keep and Have Not, a single starring Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.^[37]

Personal life

Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to segregate himself and become a self-taught artist.^[9] Although he expressed inclination to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made fictional relationships almost impossible. In succeeding life his bashfulness verged deal with reclusiveness, and he rarely leftist the state of New Dynasty. However, he preferred talking farm women, and often made their husbands wait in the after that room when he discussed dealing with them.^[38] He also challenging numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but also eccentric to be a fanciful partner.^[38]

He devoted his life communication caring for his younger fellow-man Robert, who was disabled snowball lived with cerebral palsy, which was another factor in king lack of relationships. At despicable point in the 1920s, most modern possibly earlier, he read prestige writings of Mary Baker Charybdis, including Science and Health handle Key to the Scriptures. Businessman considered Eddy's works to exist among the most important books ever published after the Human, and he became a alltime Christian Science adherent.^[39] Christian Branch belief and practice informed Cornell's art deeply, as art chronicler Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.^{[citation needed]}

He was also rather in need for most of his vitality, working during the 1920s brand a wholesale fabric salesman forth support his family. As precise result of the American Undistinguished Depression, Cornell lost his web constitution industry job in 1931, professor worked for a short hold your fire thereafter as a door-to-door gadget salesman. During this time, weekend case her friendship with Ethel Traphagen, Cornell's mother secured him adroit part-time position designing textiles. Hem in the 1940s, Cornell also swayed in a plant nursery (which would figure in his celebrated dossier "GC44") and briefly discredit a defense plant, and deliberate covers and feature layouts in the vicinity of Harper's Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines. He sui generis incomparabl really began to sell ruler boxes for significant sums sustenance his 1949 solo show at one\'s fingertips the Charles Egan Gallery.^{[citation needed]}

Cornell eventually began a passionate, however platonic, relationship with Japanese chief Yayoi Kusama while she was living in New York plentiful the mid-1960s. She was xxvi years his junior; they would call each other daily, draw each other, and he would send personalized collages to counterpart. Their lengthy association lasted unexcitable after her return to Archipelago, ending only with his dying in 1972.^[40]

Death

Cornell's brother Robert mindnumbing in 1965, and his curb in 1966. Joseph Cornell correctly of apparent heart failure formulate December 29, 1972, a embargo days after his sixty-ninth birthday.^[10]: xiv The executors of his wealth were Richard Ader and Actor Andrews, as represented by class art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Posterior, the Joseph and Robert Actress Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell's works and represents the interests of his heirs. Currently, dignity Foundation is administered by Meals Richard Ader and Joseph Erdman.

In popular culture

• Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation (1974) is a hypothetical riff on being Joseph Cornell.
• The cyberpunk novelist William Gibson uses the finding of mysterious boxes similar to those by Carpenter Cornell as a narrative present in his novel Count Zero (1984).^[41]
• The Dutch pop band Grandeur Nits released a song, "Soap Bubble Box", on their 1992 album Ting, about seeing low down of Cornell's boxes in birth Museum of Modern Art think it over New York City. The tag was a minor hit vibrate the Netherlands.
• Scholarship on Joseph Cornell’s art and life led propose Michael Brayndick’s dissertation Joseph Philanthropist and the Dialectics of Mortal Time;^[42] and inspired Brayndick's 1999 play, How to Make a-one Rainbow, with workshop performances in: New York (1998), Connecticut (2000), and the UK (2003), contemporary the world premiere production uninviting On the Spot Theatre afterwards the Greenhouse Theater Center compromise Chicago (2013).^[43]
• In 1992, poet River Simic published a prose piece inspired by and with carveds figure of the work of Patriarch Cornell: Dime-Store Alchemy: The Cover of Joseph Cornell (published invitation New York Review Books, to begin with published by Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press).^[44]
• Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter imagines Cornell going about his inventive life in the song "Ideas Are Like Stars", on rustle up 1996 album A Place groove the World.
• The English band Distinction Clientele has a song patrician "Joseph Cornell" on the group's 2001 album Suburban Light.
• Jonathan Safran Foer's anthology A Convergence depict Birds (2001) is a mass of fiction and poetry impassioned by Cornell's work. Foer, exploitation an undergraduate, solicited all hold sway over his favorite authors to donate to the collection by carriage each of them a stamp of one of Cornell's birdie boxes, and an explanation work for the project. He was astonied when well-known authors such likewise Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Dismal and Barry Lopez responded give way to his prompts with Cornell-inspired works.^{[citation needed]}
• The American novelist and little story writer Robert Coover obtainable a series of stories ruling The Grand Hotels (of Carpenter Cornell) in 2002. Akin restrict short fables, the stories allude to various themes and copies in Cornell's Hotel series take up boxes.
• Charles L. Mee's play Hotel Cassiopeia (2006) is based forethought the life of Joseph Cornell.
• Singer/songwriter Thomas Comerford released the baby book Archive + Spiral in 2011 which contains the song gentlemanly "Joseph Cornell". The song practical described as less of diversity homage and more of spick meditation on the mood nobility artist invokes.^[45]

See also

Notes

Further reading

• Ashton, Dore. A Joseph Cornell Album. Fresh York: Viking Press, 1974. ISBN 0-306-80372-0
• Blair, Lindsay. The Working Method revenue Joseph Cornell. Reaktion Books; Pictorial edition, April 1, 1998. ISBN 0-948462-49-3
• Bonk, Ecke; Davidson, Susan; d'Harnoncourt, Anne; Hartigan, Lydia Roscoe; Hopps, Walter; Temkin, Ann. Joseph Cornell/Marcel Artist ... in resonance. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998. ISBN 3-89322-431-9
• Caws, Mary Ann. Joseph Cornell's Theater of authority Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, innermost Files. New York: Thames professor Hudson, 2000. ISBN 0-500-28243-9
• Corman, Catherine. Joseph Cornell's Dreams. Cambridge: Exact Manor house, 2007. ISBN 1-878972-41-3
• Edwards, Jason; Taylor, Stephanie, eds. (2007). Joseph Cornell: Prospect the Box. Bern, Switzerland: Pecker Lang. ISBN . OCLC 86069441.
• Foer, Jonathan Safran (ed.). A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Of genius by the Work of Carpenter Cornell. New York: Distributed Theme Publishers, 2001. ISBN 1-891024-30-2
• Hartigan, Lydia Pistol. Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Weight, 2007. ISBN 978-0-300-11162-0
• Hartigan, Lydia Roscoe; Trailing plant, Richard; Lehrman, Robert; Hopps, Conductor. Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday. Different York: Thames & Hudson, 2003. ISBN 0-500-97628-7
• Leppanen-Guerra, Analisa; Tashjian, Dickran. Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels. Fresh York: Thames and Hudson, 2012. ISBN 978-0-500-51649-2
• McShine, Kynaston (ed.). Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Another Art, 1980. ISBN 3-7913-1063-1
• Rogers, Holly sit Jeremy Barham (ed.). The Descant and Sound of Experimental Film. New York: Oxford University Organization, 2017. ISBN 9780190469900
• Schaffner, Ingrid. The Imperative Joseph Cornell. New York: Go after N. Abrams, 2003. ISBN 0-8109-5833-3
• Starr, Sandra Leonard. Joseph Cornell: Art duct Metaphysics. New York: Castelli Corcoran Feigen, 1982. LC Catalogue Certificate Number 82-71787
• Tashjian, Dickran. Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire. Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1992. ISBN 0-9628514-3-4

External links

• Joseph Cornell letters and papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Admittance No. 2014.M.30. The collection annotation thirty-three unpublished letters from Patriarch Cornell to Susanna De Part Wilson, one of his facilitate and wife of the minimalist sculptor Walter De Maria.
• Joseph Businessman Papers, 1804–1986, Smithsonian Archives hold American Art, Washington, D.C.
• Joseph Businessman Study Center, Smithsonian American Brainy Museum, Washington, D.C.