Birth
December 24, 1903, Nyack, NY
Death
December 29, 1972, New York City, NY
Country of Origin/Citizenship
United States/ American
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
artist, filmmaker
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Surrealism
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
New York City, 1916-17, 1920-21, 1937-1953
Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 in Nyack, NY, the oldest of four siblings. After his father died of leukemia in 1917, he was sent to boarding school at Phillips Andover Academy, where he suffered from insecurity and extreme shyness. After Andover, he moved to New York and took a job selling textiles for the William Whitman Company. During his ten years as a salesman, he explored his interests in art, literature and opera, and converted to Christian Science after a profound healing experience (Keene). In 1927 he moved in with his mother and youngest brother, Robert (who suffered from cerebral palsy). He would live with them on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, for the rest of his life.
In 1931 Cornell visited the Julien Levy gallery in New York and showed Levy some of his collages, inspired by the work of Surrealist, Max Ernst. Levy exhibited them in 1932. Cornell then began creating his whimsical, enigmatic three-dimensional “boxes.” In the 1930s he also made experimental films, most notably “Rose Hobart.” In 1938 his work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,” and he had a one-man show at the Julien Levy gallery, the first exhibition to win him widespread attention. In 1940 he began designing textiles for the Traphagen Commercial Textile Studio. During this time, he also contributed brief articles on the arts to small periodicals. Cornell became more reclusive in the 1950s, spending most of his time at home on Utopia Parkway among his growing collection of odds and ends (Solomon). After his mother and brother both died in the late 1960s, he suffered from a depression. He died of heart failure in 1972.
Long before they met, Cornell had admired Loy and her art: her painting Moon I, which he viewed in Julien Levy’s gallery in 1933, left an “indelible impression” (Edwards). During Loy’s residence in New York from 1937-1953, the two built a deep and mutually sustaining friendship. The reclusive Cornell never left the New York City area, but Loy provided him with companionship on his journeys through vast imaginative realms. Through many letters and rambling conversations, the Loy and Cornell explored their various mutual interests, including astrology (they were both Capricorns) and Christian Science. Cornell had developed an interest in “the unconscious in Surrealism” but sought to adapt some of its techniques toward “healthy” ends through “white magic” (qtd. in Burke 404). The visually crisp “idiosyncratic brightness” that lies in Cornell’s work is in stark contrast to the “seductively unstable wisps of chaos often seen within Surrealist art” (Caniglia). Loy empathized with Cornell’s aims and affinity for his spiritual vision; she compared viewing his work to entering a church and numbered him “one of the angels” (qtd. in Burke 408).
Loy directly influenced several of Cornell’s major works. He included Man Ray’s portrait of Loy inone of his boxes. Later, she introduced him to Alain-Fournier’s novel The Wanderer, which directly inspired his box Castle. He also included a photograph of Loy in his “private museum” of women who inspired him. As for Loy, she was so moved by Cornell’s exhibit Aviary, in 1949, that she composed a prose piece celebrating the work, calling it “a sublime entertainment…the purest enticement of the abstract into the objective” (qtd. in Burke 418). Cornell, in turn, thanked her for her “winged words” (qtd. in Burke 419). Loy’s later foray into assemblage sculpture would echo Cornell’s approach of elevating humble materials through spiritually resonant juxtapositions.
Related
Works Cited
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.
Caniglia, Julie. “Joseph Cornell and White Magic.” From Walker Art Center blog, https://blogs.walkerart.org/visualarts/2011/03/08/joseph-cornell-and-white-magic/ Retrieved online 11 May 2017.
Edwards, Jason, and Stephanie L. Taylor. Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007.
“Joseph Cornell.” Guggenheim Collection Online: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/joseph-cornell. Retrieved 11 May 2017.
“Joseph Cornell.” In “The Art Story: Modern Art Insight.” Retrieved at https://www.theartstory.org/artist-cornell-joseph.htm#influences_header, 11 May 2017.
Keene, Anne T. “Cornell, Joseph”; https://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-01627.html;
American National Biography Online Jan. 2001 Update. Access Date: Thu May 11 2017 14:43:41 GMT-0400 (EDT)
Solomon, Deborah. Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. Pimlico, 1998.
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