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Indepth Arts News:
"Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination"
2007-04-28 until 2007-08-19
Peabody Essex Museum
Salem, MA,
USA United States of America
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is the first major
retrospective of the artist's work in more than 26 years. Featuring 180
works, the exhibition is co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the
Smithsonian American Art Museum. It presents new insights into this
fascinating artist, illuminating the richness of the ideas he explored
across all media. Navigating the Imagination includes the artist's finest
box constructions, collages, dossiers, films and graphic designs from
public and private collections -- more than 30 on public view for the
first time. Seven of the collages in the show were donated to the Peabody
Essex Museum by The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Lynda
Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator of the Peabody Essex Museum, and a widely
published scholar on Cornell, is curator of Navigating the Imagination.
"Joseph Cornell was an extraordinary artist whose work will capture the
interest and imagination of all who see it. While self-taught, he was
among the most influential artists of the 20th century and his work is
renowned for fusing art, culture, and history into remarkable
experiences," says Dan Monroe, Executive Director and CEO of the Peabody
Essex Museum.
Cornell's art is often associated with surrealism, an art movement
that reinterpreted the meaning of ordinary objects by rearranging or
presenting them in surprising and unexpected ways. But as Hartigan notes,
"surrealism was just one of the many resources that Cornell called upon as
an artist driven by innate curiosity and creativity rather than by
theories and formal art training. His interpretations of traditions and
ideas were as diverse as celestial navigation, ballet and Renaissance art
and culture." He said his works were based on everyday experiences, "the
beauty of the commonplace."
In the early 1930s, Cornell (1903-1972) created his first collages, boxes
and experimental films. Soon after, he had his first solo exhibition in
New York City, where he continued to show throughout his career. In 1940,
his boxes contained found materials artfully arranged, then collaged and
painted to suggest poetic associations that drew on the arts, humanities
and sciences. In the 1940s and 1950s, he made some of his most memorable
and compelling boxes, including the "Medici", "Aviary", "Hotel" and
"Observatory" series, as well as boxes devoted to stage and screen
personalities. In the 1950s and 1960s Cornell's experimental films and
lyrical collages provided new territory for his ideas and also prefigured
the concept of appropriation "-the use of borrowed elements in the
creation of new works"- favored by many artists since the 1980s. His
impact has been felt by artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert
Rauschenberg, experimental filmmakers Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage,
and poets Octavio Paz and Charles Simic, among many others.
The exhibition is organized thematically to suggest for the first time
Cornell's understanding of the imagination as an "echo chamber" or
„"mirror of the mind." As Hartigan says, "Cornell's ability to reinterpret
traditions and suggest connections between disparate experiences relates
to fundamental concepts of creativity as a path to discovery. It also
contributes to the highly poetic character of his intimate, universally
appealing work." Unlike previous chronological presentations, the
exhibition mingles Cornell's series and media across four decades of his
career to convey the conceptual and formal cohesiveness of his body of
work. This approach emphasizes Cornell's perception of art as a means of
creating and communicating connections and possibilities through
repetition and variation. This is also is the first time that his films
and a greater range of his collages are being shown in the company of the
box constructions for which he is best known.
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is presented in 10 sections.
"Navigating a Career" provides an overview of Cornell‚s evolution as an
artist from 1931 to 1972. "Wonderland" introduces visitors to his studio
environment and working processes. The following sections - "Cabinets of
Curiosity", "Dream Machines", "Nature's Theater", "Geographies of the
Heavens", "Bouquets of Homage", "Crystal Cages" and "Chambers of Time" -
each represent a particular recurring idea or theme explored by the
artist. "Movie Palace", which features a selection of Cornell's collage
films, is based on digital images of the original 16mm films, which are
intended to be projected on a larger scale.
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination travels to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 6, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008). The exhibition is
accompanied by a 48-page catalogue focusing on the artist's singular way
of seeing (April 2007). It includes an essay by curator Lynda Roscoe
Hartigan. A second publication, a fully illustrated book written by
Hartigan, will be published by Yale University Press later in 2007.
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan will give an illustrated presentation on Joseph
Cornell: Navigating the Imagination on May 19th at 2 p.m. For more
information on public programs associated with the exhibition, including
gallery talks, artist demonstrations, workshops, film screenings, and
performances, visit www.pem.org. The exhibition will also be accompanied
by a microsite, "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" at
www.pem.org.
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