Post-War & Contemporary

Provenance:

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY.

Private Collection, Switzerland, acquired from the above in 2006.

Joseph Cornell’s ‘shadow boxes’ are containers for found objects, collages, and assemblages of other small items that together invoke a sense of curiosity, wonder, and the promise of entertainment. They rely on a number of influences, high among them Cornell’s childhood recollections of penny slot machines, though Cornell objected when critics dismissed his art as mere amusement.

The self-taught and highly religious Cornell is often described as reclusive, yet in fact he worked closely with galleries and counted among his friends many artist contemporaries, including Marcel Duchamp, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning and Roberto Matta, among others. He was invited by Director Alfred H. Barr to participate in the ground-breaking show Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936-37, which effectively popularised Surrealism in America. Cornell associated closely with the Surrealists during the 1930s, sharing their interest in assemblage as well as in the importance of chance, but he sought to distance himself from the psychosexual element of the movement. Equally, while the 1960s Pop Movement championed Cornell’s use of everyday objects, Cornell never produced ‘kitsch’ art in the same vein as did Lichtenstein or Warhol.

Cornell collected objects for his ‘shadow boxes’ while wandering the streets and trawling the junk shops of his native New York City, before bringing his discoveries back to his studio in Utopia Parkway, Queens. In 1941 he transformed his cellar into a studio which he referred to as his laboratory, calling to mind the relationship between art and science which is often referenced in his work. Cornell sorted, categorised and organised his materials, preserving them until he found a use for them. The ‘shadow boxes’ are heir to a tradition that dates back to the wunderkammer (Cabinet of curiosities), originally popularised in 16^th century Europe – a pulling-together of diverse influences and inspirations into a single artwork (fig. 1). Although he was not the first artist to use collage and assemblage, he was among the earliest to rely completely on assemblages of found objects in his work.

Scholars struggle to date Cornell’s oeuvre with accuracy. Sometimes he put works down only to take them up and complete them months or even years later. This intermittent practice, coupled with the fact that Cornell stopped regularly dating his finished works in the 1940s, has challenged his biographers to place them in chronology. Untitled (Compartmented Dovecote) is believed to have been created in 1958, based in part on its construction: Cornell moved away from crowded shadow boxes toward more spare assemblages in the early 1950s.