Home > ArtoftheDay Weekly > #396 - from 9 July 2015 to 9 September 2015 > Cornell, the man with the boxes
Art Of The Day Weekly
#396 - from 9 July 2015 to 9 September 2015
Joseph Cornell, Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, 1943, box construction, 39,4x28,3x10,8 cm. Nathan Emory Coffin Collection, Des Moines Art Center. Photo Rich Sanders © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Found.
Cornell, the man with the boxes
LONDON – Without ever moving from Times Square, he closed the world up in his little characteristic boxes. A New Yorker who never moves, a friend of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell collected with greediness newspaper clipping and chromes of European paintings, stuffed African birds and coins from America, bottles, dolls and tops from elsewhere. They helped him recreate a strange cosmopolitan, enigmatic and poetic world. Proof that evasion does not always rhyme with movement and that one can make beautiful trips without moving. Something to meditate on at the time of wide summer migrations!
• Joseph Cornell, Wanderlust at the Royal Academy of Arts, from 4 July to 27 September 2015.