22 Facts About Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.

Joseph Cornell was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts.

Joseph Cornell lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a textiles industry executive, and Helen Ten Broeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a nursery teacher.

Joseph Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921.

Joseph Cornell's boxes relied on the Surrealist use of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal.

Joseph Cornell often made series of boxed assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Object Boxes, among others.

Also captivated with birds, Joseph Cornell created an Aviary series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were mounted on wood, cut out, and set against harsh white backgrounds.

Joseph Cornell had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well-read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

Joseph Cornell's methodology is described in a monograph by Charles Simic as:.

Joseph Cornell greatly enjoyed working with young artists and teaching them his methods and art practices.

Joseph Cornell premiered the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Joseph Cornell showed his films rarely thereafter.

Joseph Cornell continued to experiment with film until his death in 1972.

In 1969 Joseph Cornell gave a collection of both his own films and the works of others to Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Joseph Cornell had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.

Joseph Cornell devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, who was disabled and lived with cerebral palsy, which was another factor in his lack of relationships.

Joseph Cornell considered Eddy's works to be among the most important books ever published after the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent.

Joseph Cornell was rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family.

Joseph Cornell eventually began a passionate, but platonic, relationship with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama while she was living in New York in the mid-1960s.

Joseph Cornell was twenty-six years his junior; they would call each other daily, sketch each other, and he would send personalized collages to her.

Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on December 29,1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.