Synopses & Reviews
The "boxes" and collages constructed by Joseph Cornell (1903-72) are among the most intriguing and beguiling works of art made this century. Old toys, photos, magazine illustrations, bits of electrical wiring - anything in fact more usually left to molder in lumber rooms or junkshops - were hoarded by him as the elemental materials he needed for his constructions. The finished works are visually entrancing, but the intensely personal webs of reverie and association that determined their content make these boxes at once both oddly familiar yet ineluctably strange.
Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material - virtually all Cornell's scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries - supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist's family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell's ultimate subject was the mind itself.
Synopsis
Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material-virtually all Cornell's scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries-supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist's family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell's ultimate subject was the mind itself.
Lindsay Blair's well-written and researched illustrated essay opens many boxes in her quest to find out what was in the mind of this secretive artist... Fascinating.-Time Out
About the Author
Lindsay Blair received her doctorate on Joseph Cornell from the University of Essex. She was Associate Producer of 'Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box', a BBC
Omnibus program first shown in 1991.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
1. The Self Observed
2. Origins of Selfhood
3. The Self in Others
4. The Cosmological Search
Conclusion
References
Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations