Magical visions | Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination

brilliant | Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination | Lynda Roscoe Hartigan

books:


	• Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Yale University Press, 2007 - 392 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Joseph Cornell greatness

This is a great book on the artist. Loads of great photos, good documentation, a very nice large size book. This is the best Cornell book I have seen for anyone just interested in the imagery and general artist info.

Magical visions

This catalogs and comments on the wonderful display of Cornell's work, on tour at the time of this writing. I had known Cornell's work only by reputation (and a certain amount of urba myth) before seeing that display. It stunned me; I've never had such a strong response to any other collection, ever. Although Cornell worked in several formats, his "shadow boxes" earned his reputation. Each one is a world in itself, filled with mystery and meaning.

This dense book presents photos of the works in that tour, along with extensive commentary and biographical notes. The collection's boxes appear, of course, along with Cornell's work in two other categories: collage, and works that I'll call "albums." I admit that collage, even when exceptionally well done, generally doesn't move me. Collage elements enhance his boxes but do not, to my taste, stand well on their own. I found the albums tantalizing, though. Each one collected "natural" images from the popular media, collage, and Cornell's surrealist writings, all loose, in some kind of storage case. They were meant to create a unique experience for each viewer, changing in sequence, organization, and juxtaposition each time the pages' order changed. Displays under glass preserved the artworks, but blocked the museum-goer from experiencing the albums as they were meant to be experienced. I envy the preparators and curators who got the direct experience of this art in preparing the display.

Unfortunately, this book's photographic representation of the albums also blocks the experience that Cornell intended - but I'd rather have the fixed depiction than none at all. The fixed and 2D representation of the dynamic and 3D boxes gives the same sense: a pale shadow of the boxes' magical presence. This book does as well as can be hoped, but no book can replicate the subtle optics and shifting perspectives of the original objects.

I've only sampled this book's profuse text. If you can't see the originals, the commentary helps bring them to life. Notes on Cornell's career, times, and friendships also cast informative light on the works and how they arose. The gorgeous photos are so distracting, though, that I keep wandering away from the text. If you've seen the show, this will remind you of what you saw (there was so much), and deepen your appreciation of it. If you haven't, it will make you wish you did.

-- wiredweird

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brilliant

I ordered this book for my husband's birthday and he was estatic. By far it is the best book we own. The many visuals are breathtaking. The text takes you into a wonderful journey. Highly recommended

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The Publisher's compass may have been iffy, but....

Better late than never, & well worth the wait. Beautiful reproductions, some of which I'd never seen before, illustrate all facets of Cornell's brilliant, quirky career. This was supposed to have been the catalog for the retrospective that began it's rounds last year (I believe) but did not appear until long after it had left the Smithsonian. There are other books out there, but this one is the best I've seen thus far. If you are a fan, an assemblage or collage artist, this is the new bible chronicling the life of the artist with whom those techniques have become synonymous.

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Joseph Cornell (1903?1972) was a self-taught yet highly sophisticated artist who is celebrated for his pioneering achievement in collage, assemblage, and film. Cornell?s lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist?s work in twenty-six years.

In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell?s evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections??Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature?s Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time??explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist?s source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

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