Image Not Available

Cornell, Joseph

American, 1903 - 1972

BiographyJoseph Cornell was a self-taught visual artist and filmmaker, primarily known for his contribution to assemblage and collage. Influenced by the Surrealist use of juxtaposition, he arranged found objects in wooden shadow boxes to create dream-like narrative dioramas he described as “poetic theater.” He was particularly interested in nostalgia, often featuring dolls, photographs, and trinkets that evoke childhood memories. His films were made with the same constructivist spirit as his shadow boxes and collages as he experimented with splicing together existing film stock.

After briefly attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1917 to 1921, Joseph Cornell returned to and never traveled beyond New York. He worked various jobs in textiles, sales, and design to support his mother and disabled brother, whom he lived with and cared for. Although he was famously shy and reclusive, he was well liked by other artists who frequented New York City, maintaining friendships with artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneeman, and Yayoi Kusama. He was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism in 1936. Cornell continued to create and exhibit his shadow boxes throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, following the deaths of his mother and brother, Cornell stopped producing shadow boxes and returned solely to two-dimensional collages, one of which, La Petite Fumeuse du Chocolat, is held in the Museum of Contemporary Photography collection.

Joseph Cornell has had major retrospectives at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1970); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015); and others. His work is held in the permanent collections of many institutions, including Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; and Tate Museum, London.