Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages
3/7/1997 - 5/4/1997

Joseph Cornell's art is among the most enigmatic and mysterious ever produced in America. His unique creations are brought together in the exhibition Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages.

Preserved in Cornell's boxes are items as divergent as drinking glasses and a cork ball; a clay pipe and a diagram of the orbits of earth and the moon; images of a Medici princess, each accompanied by a wooden sphere; and a translucent marble in a cascade of blue sand. Cornell fuses his work with poetic intensity, and a private and enigmatic sentiment, which together affect the viewer as if these very objects formed a recording of a burst of Cornell's sense of joy or wonder or love or sadness.

Though now highly sought after by Museums and private collections, Cornell's signature boxes, which he began to make in the 1930s were not originally conceived as being for such a wide audience. Rather, they were made as gifts for individuals sometimes living, sometimes dead, often people the artist had never met, but who in some way had touched his life.