MTU Library Catalogue

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Joseph Cornell : navigating the imagination / Lynda Roscoe Hartigan.

By: Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe.
Contributor(s): Peabody Essex Museum | Smithsonian American Art Museum | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: Salem, Mass. : New Haven, Conn. ; London : Peabody Essex Museum ; in association with Yale University Press, 2007Description: 391 p. : chiefly ill. (chiefly col.) ; 30 cm.ISBN: 9780300111620.Subject(s): Cornell, Joseph -- Exhibitions | Assemblage (Art) -- ExhibitionsDDC classification: 709.2 COR
Contents:
When does an artist become an artist? -- Navigating a career -- Cabinets of curiosity -- Dream machines -- Nature's theater -- Geographies of the heavens -- Bouquets of homage -- Crystal cages -- Chambers of time.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
General lending MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending 709.2 COR (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Checked out 06/10/2026 00055701
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist's source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

Accompanies the exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from Nov. 17, 2006, through Feb. 19, 2007; the Peabody Essex Museum from April 28, 2007, through Aug. 19, 2007; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from Oct. 6, 2007, through Jan. 6, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 377-384) and index.

When does an artist become an artist? -- Navigating a career -- Cabinets of curiosity -- Dream machines -- Nature's theater -- Geographies of the heavens -- Bouquets of homage -- Crystal cages -- Chambers of time.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This exhibition catalog accompanies the first major retrospective of Joseph Cornell in over 26 years. Drawing from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and the Joseph Cornell Study Center, Hartigan's essays trace the evolution of Cornell's artwork without overly romanticizing the "artist of longing" or the lonely recluse, as many Cornell biographies have done. Rather, Hartigan (Peabody Essex Museum) focuses on Cornell the self-taught artist, the autodidact whose experience with art, most notably surrealist, was through gallery visits and voracious consumption of surrealist literature, and as a modest collector of fine art photography. This volume gives particular attention to Cornell's early years, the 1930s-40s, when he began experimenting with his trademark box collages that by 1936 landed him in the Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition. Between Hartigan's essays and the catalog's stunning reproductions, one sees how Cornell's personal life and proclivities toward the romantic but spooky, and wondrous but weird, were right in step with the surrealist imagination. Yet at the same time his art was distinctly his own--dreamy, funny, strange multimedia assemblages manufactured with a precise eye and steady hand. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. H. B. Bennett Yale University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan is Chief Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. She is the founding curator of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art's Joseph Cornell Study Center and has published extensively on the artist.