Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 and died in 1972 at the age of 69 years old.  He was an American born artist and is very famous for his sculpture and collage. Some of his most recognizable pieces were his boxes created from objects he found or had, such as pipes, photographs, and old love letters.  The boxes are simple and usually have a glass front. They are interactive and portray an irrational juxtaposition of different objects. He combined constructivism of the boxes along with Surrealism (a European art movement that emphasized dreams and poeticism in the 1920s and 1930s). It seemed that objects that were once beautiful, loved, and precious fascinated him.  The boxes evoke feelings of nostalgia and one who is viewing them can find them recalling a past event, object or moment they once had. Or at least that is how I felt when I saw his exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA a few years back. In a book about Cornell called “Joseph Cornell, Navigating the Imagination,” we find that Cornell’s aim of his artwork was not only to explore art, culture, and science but also to inspire others to voyage into the imagination. Cornell was an artist driven by curiosity and creativity rather than by theories or formal art training. 

[Photos from: http://www.baseballreliquary.org/images/JosephCornell.jpg, http://openreflections.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/joseph-cornell1.jpg, http://www.johnbailly.com/edu/projects/Cornell.Medici.jpg, http://z.about.com/d/arthistory/1/0/j/Z/jcni_13.jpg]