Joseph Cornell
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Joseph Cornell, (Born in Nyack, New York December 24, 1903 – died December 29, 1972) was an American sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant garde and experimental filmmaker who lived in New York City for most of his life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, with his mother and his crippled brother, Robert, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy.
Sculpture and collage
He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive 'boxes'. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted, created collages, and made films.
Cornell was heavily influenced by American Transcendentalists (Dickenson), Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes dedicated to them), the French Symbolists (Mallarme, Gerard de Nerval) and greats of the 19th century ballet (like Marie Taglioni).
Experimental Film
Joseph Cornell's 1936 found film montage, Rose Hobart, was made entirely from splicing together existing film stock that Cornell had found in New Jersey warehouses, mostly derived from a 1931 'B' film entitled East of Borneo. Cornell would play Nestor Amaral's record, 'Holiday in Brazil' during its rare screenings, as well as projecting the film through a deep blue glass or filter, giving the film a dreamlike effect. Focusing mainly on the gestures and expressions made by Rose Hobart (the original film's starlet), this dreamscape of Cornell's seems to exist in a kind of suspension until the film's most arresting sequence toward the end, when footage of a solar eclipse is juxtaposed with a white ball falling into a pool of water in slow motion.
Cornell premiered the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in December of 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Salvador Dali, who was in New York to attend the MoMA opening, was present at its first screening. During the screening, Dali became incensed and overturned the projector, claiming that Cornell had stolen the idea from his 'subconscious'. Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Cornell rarely showed it again.
Filmography includes:
- Rose Hobart (1936)
- Cotillion (c. 1940)
- The Aviary (1955)
- Gnir Rednow (1956) (made with Stan Brakhage)
- Mulberry Street (1957)
- Boys' Games (1957)
- Centuries of June (1955)
- Nymphlight (1957)
- Flushing Meadow (c. 1965)
- A Legend for Fountains (1970)
- Bookstalls (???)
- By Night with Torch and Spear (???).
External links
- Joseph Cornell at WebMuseum (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/)
- Joseph Cornell at Artchive (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/ftptoc/cornell_ext.html)
- Joseph Cornell at Artcyclopedia (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/cornell_joseph.html)de:Joseph Cornell