Born in 1903 in Nyack, New York, Joseph Cornell was the oldest of four children, two girls and two boys. Robert, the youngest child, was crippled by cerebral palsy. Helen, his mother, assigned the care of Robert to Joseph. Joe, his father, was a salesman who died when Joseph was 14. At that point the family moved from the small Hudson river town just north of Manhattan to New York City itself, settling in Queens, in a house on Utopia Parkway.
By the age of 18, Joseph Cornell was working as a fabric salesman for a textile firm. He was also roaming through museums and rummaging through used bookstores. He collected all kinds of images and bric-a-brac, everything from old engravings, to mirrors, to compasses and maps, to movie publicity stills, to thimbles and seashells, to feathers and twigs. At night he would sort his found objects and assemble them into groups. He had no training as an artist, and no skill with a brush or pencil. But in his basement studio, with his mother and brother on the floors above, Cornell constructed three-dimensional poems, using objects instead of words:
The Palace of Sleeping. An engraving of a palace, framed with crystal-encrusted trees and blue glass. A silent, sparkling, fairy tale place.
In 1931 Cornell saw an exhibition of surrealist art at the Julian Levy Gallery. Surrealism, with its dreamlike imagery and unexpected juxtapositions, clearly influenced Cornell’s work. But while surrealists tried to shock viewers by combining illogical and unrelated things, Cornell looked for poetic connections and meanings between his disparate objects. Although his earliest works were collages, by 1936 Cornell had mastered the shadow boxes for which he is best known. These wood frame boxes with glass fronts are all fairly small; viewers have an impression akin to reading someone’s journal. The boxes seem introspective, reflective, private:
Untitled, 1955. A box of cubbyholes, bright with toys and white paint.
Despite his ascetic life with his mother and brother, Cornell participated actively in the New York City art scene. He created Surrealist films that Salvador Dali envied. Marcel Duchamp was his friend and collaborator. By the 1950s he began to make collages again, and his shadowboxes became brighter and less cluttered. His mother and brother died in the mid 1960s, but he continued to live and work in the house on Utopia Parkway. Joseph Cornell died there in 1972, and his will established a foundation for charitable grants from the sales of his art.
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