From Booklist
Cornell's exquisite boxes, intimate constructions filled with found objects and collaged images, merit repeated visits just as poems call out to be read again and again, and each new Cornell book discloses something fresh and illuminating about this most magnetic and lyrical of artists. Waldman, an art historian, author, and former curator and deputy director of the Guggenheim Museum, knew Cornell and was the first to study his unique art. Now, nearly four decades later, she brings a wealth of long-brewing insights to this gorgeous volume, which boasts not only Waldman's lucid and expert commentary on Cornell's intriguing influences but also some of the finest color reproductions of his work ever published. Waldman discusses Cornell's fascination with games, Victorian imagery, ballet, movies, all things French, the young Medicis, constellations, hotels, and birds and cites the many poets and artists he revered, Dickinson and Vermeer among them. Ultimately, the profound enchantment of Cornell's poetic boxes can be attributed to their reflection of his "deeply reverential attitude toward the universe as a mirror of mysterious truths." Donna Seaman
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New York Times Book Review
"Waldman...interprets with a light hand the imagery of his boxes..."
Book Description
Out of the fantasies that enriched an often reclusive life, the enigmatic American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) created a world of enchantment with his famed shadow boxes and collages. Using common objects such as cordial glasses, marbles, and mirrors, Cornell beckons us into a realm vivid with half-remembered dreams, at once magical and tantalizingly, nostalgically "home." His work reminds us of the strangeness of the familiar, the odd familiarity of the strange, and the final mysteriousness of the world we thought we knew. The respected art historian Diane Waldman probes the elusive imagery that marks Cornell's work. Interviews with Cornell and his family and access to the artist's letters and papers inform her text. With Cornell's popularity soaring, this richly illustrated book—one of the few to cover his entire career—will be essential reading.
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Out of the fantasies that enriched a private, often reclusive life, Joseph Cornell created a "poetic theater of memory." His box constructions and collages feature such characters as a Medici princess, birds, ballerinas, and movie stars. Using the seemingly commonplace materials that he collected in five-and-dime stores and other shops in New York City - cordial glasses, mirrors, marbles, and maps among them - along with clippings from books and magazines, childhood games, and Victorian illustrations, Cornell beckons us into a world at once distantly magical and tantalizingly, nostalgically "home."" Diane Waldman first met Cornell in 1963, when she was writing her master of fine arts' thesis on the subject of his art, and their friendship continued until his death. Over the years, Waldman has written often about Cornell, adding to the analysis of his art her own personal knowledge gained from interviews with the artist and his family as well as Cornell's letters and papers. In this volume she probes Cornell's elusive imagery in his earliest Surrealist-inspired collages of the 1930s, his masterful box constructions of the 1940s and 1950s, his experimental films, and his final collages in his last years.
Art & Photography
Book Info
