Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell – The artist was a prisoner of his shyness his whole life

Joseph Cornell was born on 24 December 1903 in Nyack, New York. Although he and his three siblings were born into a wealthy and respected family, their father’s early death in 1917 caused tense relationships. The mother moved with her children to the New York district of Queens where Joseph Cornell would spend the majority of his life. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, but did not graduate. His extreme shyness towards strangers forced him into isolation most of the time and he lived out his inclination towards art as an autodidact. Due to his introversion, a romantic relationship was out of the question for Cornell, and he cultivated a devoted fascination for unattainable public women including the actress Lauren Bacall. Nevertheless, he preferred to speak to women than to men and would often leave irritated husbands waiting in an adjoining room while he conducted business negotiations with their wives. 

Between family care and artistic blossoming

Joseph Cornell devotedly cared for his younger brother Robert who suffered from infantile cerebral palsy and was severely handicapped as a result. Apart from the three and a half years studying, Cornell lived his whole life with his mother and brother in a small wood house in a working-class district. In the 1920s, he developed a great interest in the books of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of so-called Christian Science; Cornell remained a follower until his death and the teachings and ideas of Baker Eddy had a lasting influence on his understanding of art. He led a passionate but platonic relationship with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama with whom he telephoned daily, exchanging ideas and evaluating each other’s work, whilst the Surrealists, who had fled to New York before the turmoil of war, were also an important contact for Cornell and they communicated regularly. 

Breakthrough with Surrealist picture worlds in small boxes

For a long time during the course of his career, Joseph Cornell did not succeed in making any notable economic profits from his art and had to spend the majority of his life in modest circumstances. He took on part time jobs such as representative for a fabric wholesaler to support his family financially, having to change jobs several times during the Great Depression, at one time working in a garden nursery where he gathered valuable inspiration for his artwork. He designed cover pages and layouts for journals such as Harper’s Bazaar, View, and other renowned magazines. Not least at the suggestion of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, Cornell created his famous constructions, or Boxes, filled according to clearly structured concepts with numerous objects which he had spent hours searching for in New York’s rarity stores. Only once he had presented these in his first solo exhibition in 1949 in the Charles Egan Gallery, could he finally sell his artworks for adequate amounts. Cornell took part in Documenta in Kassel twice and found an admirer and supporter in the painter, author and actor Tony Curtis.

Joseph Cornell died on 29 December 1972 in New York.