December 29, 1972

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 to December 29, 1972) was a reclusive artist who yet received acclaim from his peers. Before his death there was a major retrospective of his career at the Guggenheim and Life magazine did a lengthy article on him in 1967. His work has been categorized as surrealist inspired collage.  Here is a piece of his work:

A Guardian article sketches his  biography.  

Cornell was born on Christmas Eve 1903 in Nyack, a village just up the Hudson from Manhattan. ... In 1910, Cornell’s beloved brother was born. Robert had cerebral palsy, struggled to speak and later used a wheelchair. From the beginning, Joseph considered him his personal responsibility.

The family’s early years were a whirlwind of Christmas parties and trips to the enchanted playgrounds of Coney Island and Times Square. But in 1911, Cornell’s father, an exuberant textile designer and salesman, was diagnosed with leukaemia. When he died a few years later it became unhappily apparent that he’d been living well beyond his means. Confronted by sizable debts, Mrs Cornell sold up and moved the family to New York City, renting a succession of modest houses in working-class Queens.

She wangled her oldest son a place at the prestigious Phillips Academy, but he was unhappy and friendless there and left in 1921 without so much as a diploma to his name. Unable to draw or paint, he had no notion of becoming an artist and that autumn took the first of many grinding jobs as a salesman in Manhattan. He hated the work and often suffered from physical ailments, among them migraines and stomach aches.

What leavened those years was the city itself. Any free time Cornell had was spent luxuriating in what he described as “the teeming life of the metropolis”. He prowled the avenues and lingered in the parks: a gaunt, handsome man with burning blue eyes, leafing through racks of secondhand books and old prints, haunting flea markets, movie houses and museums, pausing sometimes to feast on stacks of doughnuts and prune twists.

The city he favoured was neither glamorous nor exclusive, but democratic: an arcade whose astonishments might equally be found at a Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera or in the lit boulevards of Woolworth’s. He built up a vast private museum from his excursions, toting home treasure in the form of rare books, magazines, postcards, playbills, librettos, records and early films. Stranger things, too: shells and rubber balls, crystal swans, compasses, bobbins and corks.

First, you acquire the materials and then you put them together. Cornell’s career as an artist began when he encountered surrealism in the early 1930s. ...[A work of Max Ernst's] introduced him to the idea that art was not necessarily a matter of applying paint to canvas, but could also be made from real objects.... Inspired, he began to make collages of his own, sitting with scissors and glue at the kitchen table of 37-08 Utopia Parkway, his home from 1929 until his death in 1972. He worked mostly at night, his mother asleep upstairs and Robert dozing in the sitting room, surrounded by model trains.

In this period, Cornell also began to assemble what he called dossiers on his favourite subjects: folders crammed with cuttings and photographs of the ballerinas, opera singers and actresses he worshipped.... Other explorations, which sometimes ran for decades, were meticulously catalogued by way of topic: Advertisements, Butterflies, Clouds, Fairies, Figureheads, Food, Insects, History, Planets. Categorisation mattered to Cornell, though so, too, did intuitive leaps and flights of fancy. “....

By the mid-30s, he’d discovered the two great mediums of his maturity: shadow boxes and films made by re-editing found footage. One of the most striking among the latter was Rose Hobart, which he made by chopping up the B movie East of Borneo and splicing it back together as a series of lingering, blue-tinted glimpses of the actor Rose Hobart, wrapped in a trenchcoat, intercut with enigmatic footage of jungle foliage and swaying palms. According to Deborah Solomon’s biography,...[Utopia Parkway : the life and work of Joseph Cornell, 1997] at the first screening Salvador Dalí was so overcome with jealousy that he knocked over the projector...

Because of his lack of a formal art education and the unusual nature of his domestic situation, Cornell is often depicted as an outsider artist, but he was in the swim of things from the start. His early collages appeared in the groundbreaking Surréalisme show at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan in 1932, alongside Dalí and Duchamp, and his first shadow box, "Untitled (Soap Bubble Set)", was in "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism", a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Other artists were quick to see the value of his inventions (something that continued through the successive waves of surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop art). Despite his shyness, Cornell developed sustaining friendships, though he was never wholly comfortable with the business aspect of art.

In the winter of 1940, he took the bold step of resigning from his job. He set up a studio in the basement and began to concentrate on boxes, a project that would occupy him for the next 15 years. The early versions used readymade cases, but he soon began to build the frames himself, learning by trial and error to make mitre joints and use a power saw. Next, he’d age the box with multiple layers of paint and varnish, sometimes leaving them in the yard or baking them in the oven. Prosaic work that was followed by the poetry of assemblage, of finding the right objects or images to convey the subtle, transient feelings – nostalgia, say, or joy – that Cornell experienced on his voyages through the city and which he logged in his voluminous and ardent diary (itself a collage composed of scribbled notes on napkins, paper bags and ticket stubs)....

Cornell found it agonising to sell ...[his art], frequently changing galleries and dealers so that no one person had too much control over his work. What he preferred was to give them away, especially to women. Cornell adored women. A deeply romantic man, he was cripplingly physically reserved, not helped by a jealous mother who repeatedly told him sex was repulsive.....

Mostly he didn’t make contact, and when he did – presenting a bouquet to a cinema checkout girl; mailing an owl box to Audrey Hepburn – he was often rebuffed or misunderstood. All the same, he built productive friendships with many women artists and writers, among them Lee Miller, Marianne Moore and Susan Sontag,....

The last years [of his life] were the hardest. In 1965, Robert died of pneumonia, and the following year Cornell’s mother also died.....

“Gratitude, acknowledgement & remembrance for something that can so easily get lost”, he wrote in his diary on 27 December 1972, two days before he died of heart failure, inadvertently summing up the abiding genius of his own work. Then, perhaps glancing up at the window, he added his final words: “Sunshine breaking through going on 12 noon” – a last record of his long romance with what he once called the elated world....