Cornell, Joseph: Master of Dreams

Recent books on Cornell have brought new attention to the artist and increased his popularity, introducing his art to new audiences. These recent books, however, only deal with specific areas of Cornell's oeuvre or are not illustrated. This book by Diane Waldman covers Cornell's entire career- and it will be sought out by old and new fans of his work. Out of the fantasies that enriched a private, often reclusive life, Joseph Cornell created, in his famed shadow boxes and collages, a "poetic theater of memory" in which fables of the unconscious were played out by characters as varied as a Medici princess, a blue swan, and a supporting company of angels, parrots, and ballerinas. Using the same seemingly commonplace materials that compose the classic fairy tale and our daily lives- thimbles, eggshells, mirrors, and maps among them- Cornell beckons us into a world at once distantly magical and tantalizingly, nostalgically "home."
Uniquely Cornell's, yet very much our own, this private universe of objects and images, vivid with half-remembered fantasies, reminds us ultimately of the strangeness of the familiar, the odd familiarity of the strange, the final mysteriousness of the world we thought we knew. Diane Waldman probes Cornell's elusive imagery and traces the development from his earliest Surrealist-inspired collages of the 1930s, through the masterful constructions of the 1940s and 1950s, and the artist's lifelong experimentation with film, to his return to collage in the years before his death in 1972.