December 24, 1903

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 to December 29, 1972) was an artist. He is little known today but two New York Times reviews give us a reasons to remember Cornell. Unlike other artists practising assemblage, he was fascinated not by trash so much, as pieces of formerly beautiful things. He found much of what he used in his artistic constructions in book or thrift stores.

The first quote is from an art show review in 2006, written by by Ben Genocchio
(July 2, 2006) with most of the cliches edited out.

From 1929 until his death in 1972, Joseph Cornell spent much of his time at home in Queens, caring for his sick mother and invalid brother. [his brother died in 1965, his mother in 1966] He had no life to speak of, no friends and very little in the way of physical relationships....What he did have was his art, box assemblages made at night in the basement. ....

At age 25, Cornell became a Christian Scientist and remained one for life. ....He...had contact with art world figures and was sufficiently well regarded in those circles that in 1936 he was included in an exhibition of Dada and Surrealist art at the Museum of Modern Art.
.....
Cornell was a compulsive collector, hoarding bus tickets, maps, prints, magazines, marbles, trinkets, plastic flowers and other bric-a-brac for his work.... He loved discarded objects and fragments of once beautiful things that had fallen into disrepair, using them to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and concentrated reverie.
....
Take for instance ''Grand Hotel -- Hotel Taglioni'' (1954), one of the more captivating but baffling assemblages. Here, affixed to the cracked, faded interior of an empty white box, are a decal of a cat's head, a packaging label from a Viennese bakery in Brussels and a Czech stamp of a rabbit...

Below we quote from a review of an art book recently released, Joseph Cornell's Manual Of Marvels. The reason this excerpt is included  is the glimpse it gives of the fate of Joseph Cornell's things after his death.

[The subject]is a new boxed-set based on a little-known work by the artist, “Untitled Book Object: Journal d’Agriculture Pratique et Journal de l’Agriculture.”

In the early 1930s, as he wandered through the secondhand bookstores and antique shops in Lower Manhattan scavenging for materials, Cornell stumbled upon a French agricultural yearbook from 1911. He took it home and went to work, altering and remaking the pages.

The fragile volume, discovered in Cornell’s basement studio by the curator Walter Hopps after the artist’s death, languished at the Smithsonian for more than 20 years before wending its way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kept under glass, it was almost impossible to examine beyond the single spread on display. Now, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum, 60 pages have been reproduced in an abridged facsimile edition and packaged together with a collection of essays compiled by the project’s editors, Analisa Leppanen-Guerra and Dickran Tashjian. An interactive CD of the entire work — all 844 pages — with pop-up footnotes explaining in even more detail the references, materials and Cornell’s methods, completes the set.