Joseph Cornell by Derek Martin

Just bought a new biography of Joseph Cornell (Utopia Parkway, by Deborah
Soloman). This is the text of the sleeve notes:

"No artist ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell (1903 -72), the
self-taught American genius prized for his enchanting and disquieting shadow
boxes, an art form all his own. By now, many legends surround Cornell: that
of the painfully shy hermit lost in a world of books, silent movies, and
long-gone ballerinas; that of the patiently devoted caretaker who would rush
home from an afternoon at the Manhattan galleries to minister to his mother
and invalid brother; that of the artistic innocent whose creations emerged
as happy accidents from his hands.

"Yet Cornell and his work were cherished by the leading avant-garde figures
of his day, and artists who agreed on little else agreed on Cornell's
originality. Utopia Parkway...reveals him as a brilliant and relentlessly
serious artist whose works are among the monuments of modern art.

"Cornell - a thin, drawn, diffident specter of a man - was haunted by dreams
and visions, yet the site of his imaginings couldn't have been more
ordinary: a white frame house he shared with his mother and brother on
Utopia Parkway in Queens, on the fringes of New York City. Working in his
cluttered basement workshop, he arranged faded photographs, cutouts of
birds, and assorted other objects in his small shadow boxes, transforming
humble discards into some of the most romantic works ever to exist in three
dimensions.

"Cornell was no recluse, though. Admired by successive generations of
vanguard artists - the surrealists of the 1940s, the Abstract Expressionists
of the 1950s, the Pop artists of the 1960s - Cornell cultivated friendships
with artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, and Andy
Warhol. He had romantically charged encounters with women, including Tamara
Toumanova, Susan Sontag, and Yoko Ono, and unrequited crushes on anonymous
waitresses and shopgirls. All this he recorded compulsively in a diary,
which stands with the boxes themselves as a strange and affecting record of
his extravagent inner life.

" 'Cornell found his epiphanies in the banal - in marbles and metal springs
and other frugal objects,' Solomon observes. 'He found the sublime at the
five and dime.' Like a Cornell box, Utopia Parkway is at once meticulous and
spellbinding. It is a fascinating look at the New York art world in its
heyday, but chiefly it is the definitive biography of one of the great
American artists of this century."

I'm just one chapter into it so far, but it is great so far. Interesting to
note:

- Cornell was of Dutch descent

- His sister studied art privately under Edward Hopper (Henk has cited
Hopper as an influence)

- there were a series of Soap Bubble Boxes, not just one. From the book:

"Cornell constructed his 'real first-born,' as he once called his Untitled
(Soap Bubble Set), the first in a long series of the same name and one of
his most satisfying works. It makes sense that Cornell, who lived in a
bubble, would seize on the theme of soap bubbles for his very first shadow
box. A small vertical work about 16 inches high and painted bright white
inside...the Soap Bubble Set at first might seem to recall the child's
pastime of blowing bubbles, though bubbles, as in seventeenth-century
'Vanitas' still lifes, are also a symbol of the brevity of life.

"These two associations nicely coalesce in Cornell's first Soap Bubble Set,
which might be viewed as a symbolic family portrait. A narrow compartment on
the left contains a shapely wineglass implanted with an egg, perhaps a
symbol of motherhood. To the right a tiny doll's head is displayed on a
pedestal, a stand-in for the artist himself. Four cylindrical blocks are
arranged in a neat row at the top and suggest the orbit of the four children
in the Cornell family. A white clay pipe resting on a shelf evokes the
artist's Dutch ancestors, as well as his dead father.

"The soap bubbles of the work's title exist only by implication, their round
shape suggested by the map of the moon that hovers above the pipe. However
delicately evoked, they remind us of the healing power of daydreams - and
art itself - in the face of death. Cornell's Soap Bubble Set offers up an
immortal family, an assemblage of fragments that gain their identity only in
relation to one another, and whose graceful bonds time can neither separate
nor destroy."

I guess you could easily spend a week or two going through Nits lyrics and
making connections on those themes...

I reccomend the book highly, not just for the Nits connection. I wish the
pictures were in colour though, instead of low-contrast black and white.