‘Joseph Cornell: Navigating The Imagination’

Washington, D.C.

:Few major artists have led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), the self-taught American genius who developed his own art form — enchanting, sometimes disturbing shadow boxes filled with symbolic objects. A gaunt, reticent man who lived most of his life with his domineering mother and handicapped brother in an ordinary house in Queens, N.Y., Cornell arranged cutouts from publications, street detritus and dime store objects to project his dreams and visions in boxes and collages of enduring fascination.

Although withdrawn and diffident, Cornell was no recluse. While little known to the general public in his lifetime, his work was admired by successive generations of Surrealists of the 1940s, Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, and Pop artists of the 1960s. He cultivated friendships with artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, James Rosenquist, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol.

Cornell had romantically charged, but unrequited, encounters with famous women, including ballerina Tamara Toumanova and writer Susan Sontag, as well as anonymous waitresses and shop girls. He made box and collage portraits of beautiful actresses.

Plagued by uncertainty about his work and reluctant to sell pieces, he nonetheless participated in a number of museum and gallery exhibitions. But the meaning and significance of his work was rarely recognized during his lifetime.

More than three decades after his death, the rare beauty of Cornell's art, the messages they seek to convey and the influence of his work on other artists is more fully appreciated. He has become something of a cult figure, his boxes and collages closely studied for their unusual contents and often enigmatic meanings.

In these contexts, "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," co-organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the Peabody Essex Museum, and showcasing almost 200 of the artist's boxes, collages, graphic designs, dossiers, objects and films, is welcome indeed. Drawn from public and private collections, they are augmented by material from SAAM's Joseph Cornell Study Center and the artist's papers from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.

The first Cornell retrospective in a quarter century is curated by Linda Roscoe Hartigan, former SAAM chief curator and now chief curator at the Peabody Essex. SAAM officials accurately envision the exhibition as "a major step in expanding the critical and public appreciation of…[Cornell] as an American art master."

"Joseph Cornell" is on view at SAAM through February 19, and then travels to the Peabody Essex in Salem, Mass., (April 28–August 19) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 6–January 6, 2008).