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Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order

The "boxes" and collages constructed by Joseph Cornell (1903–72) are among the most intriguing and beguiling works of art made this century. Old toys, photos, magazine illustrations, bits of electrical wiring – anything in fact more usually left to molder in lumber rooms or junkshops – were hoarded by him as the elemental materials he needed for his constructions. The finished works are visually entrancing, but the intensely personal webs of reverie and association that determined their content make these boxes at once both oddly familiar yet ineluctably strange.

Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material – virtually all Cornell’s scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries – supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist’s family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell’s ultimate subject was the mind itself.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


224 pages | © 1998

Essays in Art and Culture

Art: Art--Biography, Art--General Studies


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
1. The Self Observed
2. Origins of Selfhood
3. The Self in Others
4. The Cosmological Search
Conclusion
References
Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations

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