Login
Not a CAA member?
Read about the benefits.
April 22, 2008
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination Exh. cat. Salem, Washington, DC, and New Haven: Peabody Essex Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2007. 392 pp.; 183 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300111620)

Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, November 17, 2006–February 19, 2007; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, April 28–August 19, 2007; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008

Thumbnail

 
CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2008.37

Large
Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Cockatoo with Watch Faces) (1949). Box construction with inoperative music box. The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection. Photo by Michael Tropea. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York.

Sign In or become a member to see the full review

I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing...