The works in this exhibition are gifts to the Huntington from the
Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joseph Cornell created some of the most enigmatic and poetic American art of the 20th century. One of the first American artists to embrace Surrealism he befriended and was directly influenced by Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. In 1931, he began creating Surrealist collages that used disconcerting juxtapositions to stimulate the viewer's subconscious.

In 1936, Cornell started producing his signature box constructions. These shallow, wooden framed boxes fronted by glass are deeply personal, using symbols to catalogue Cornell's interests and obsessions, but also explore themes of longing, memory, time, and nostalgia. In 1955, he resumed making collages out of the photographs, engravings, newspapers, and books that he collected throughout his life, believing that the medium offered greater freedom of expression than assemblage. His collages share motifs with his boxes, often using symbols from art, literature, and astronomy.

The collages on view in this exhibition are from the 1960s, a decade in which Cornell experienced profound loss. Shy and retiring, he had lived most of his life with his brother Robert and their mother in a house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. In 1965, Robert died of complications from cerebral palsy, and his mother passed away the following year, leaving Cornell alone. Joyce Hunter, a waitress Cornell obsessed over, had been murdered just two months before Robert's death. The three deaths contributed to Cornell feeling increasingly disconnected from regular time, a phenomenon he described in his voluminous diaries with the term "eterniday."

Even as Cornell faced personal crisis, his work had an impact on the direction of American art. His use of quotidian objects from consumer culture influenced Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist. He counted many Abstract Expressionists as admirers, including Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Cornell's work in the 1960s also demonstrates that, late in his career, he engaged with recent developments in American art. Several of the collages in this exhibition feature drips and dabs of pigment resembling the gestural style of Abstract Expressionism. He participated in exhibitions at New York galleries and had major retrospectives at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1966 and the Guggenheim in 1967, confirming his status as one of America's most innovative artists.

Kevin M. Murphy,
Bradford and Christine Mishler Curatorial Fellow
in American Art