Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination

Abstract

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was a self-taught yet highly sophisticated artist who is celebrated for his pioneering achievement in the art of assemblage, often in the form of box constructions. Cornell's lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a highly personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist's work in over twenty-five years. In this volume, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan addresses his evolution and positioning as an American artist who developed a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite all resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. There are seven thematic sections: Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature's Theatre, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time; these sections explore the major recurring ideas that have shaped his work. The book will also include an introduction, a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist's source material, and much more.

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