In spite of the widespread fascination with the life and work of American artist Joseph Cornell in both the academy and the gallery, studies of Cornell to date have been circumscribed by a range of critical cliches about the artist being a childlike dreamer, hermetically sealed off from the world, which has prevented his work from being fully understood in all of its complexity and diversity. This book contains more than 50 illustrations of the artist's work - many never before reproduced - and provides 13 ground-breaking new essays on the artist's films, dossiers, pill-boxes, magazine work, correspondence, diary entries and more ephemeral writings from internationally reputed scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.
These exciting, provocative, and unusually interdisciplinary essays emerge from a variety of disciplines, including Art History, Philosophy, English and American Studies, Geography, Visual Culture and Film Studies. In 'opening the box' on Cornell, the artist appears in a range of significant new contexts, alongside European and American Modernists and Surrealists from literature and the visual arts, heavy-weight European and American philosophers, nineteenth-century forebears, and contemporary film-makers.