The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Gift
on view from January 21 - March 13

In 2002 The Contemporary Museum received a major gift of fifteen works by the idiosyncratic American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) from The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Best known as an American surrealist with a penchant for constructing "miniature theaters" in glass-fronted boxes, Cornell's work is informed by a bricoleur's proclivity for invention and an archivist's zeal for collecting and sorting objects and printed matter from bygone eras. Unlike his European surrealist counterparts, Cornell refused to dwell in the darker depths of the subconscious where often violent and psychosexual inner dramas are played out, choosing instead to draw upon evocations of childhood, charming daydreams, and imaginary journey's far from the day-to-day reality in Flushing, Long Island where he lived and from which he rarely strayed. Works in the exhibition span the last seventeen years of Cornell's life and explore themes that run throughout his oeuvre from the 19th-century Italian ballerina Fanny Cerrito to the American actress Jeanne Eagels. Cornell was fascinated by the theater, opera, the movies, and ballet - portals to imaginary realms where fantasy, drama, comedy, and romance provide an escape from the cold, dull, and at times, cruel facts of reality. Thus his work is peopled by actresses and ballerinas, princes and princesses, artists and clowns. Make-believe journeys to distant times and places are represented in Cornell's boxes by windows, doors, and other portals that offer metaphorical passage to other realms, while miniature rooms in hotels with such dreamy names as "Hotel de l'Etoile" and "Grand Hotel de l'Univers" suggest places of rest between destinations.

Cornell's invented narratives and evocations of the past, transport us to unfamiliar worlds where commonplace odds and ends such as postage stamps, rubber balls, spools, and magazine clippings are employed in the service of fantasy to create a highly personal mythology that is ultimately hermetic, but nonetheless compelling. Comprising eleven collages and three notable constructions from the 1950s and 60s, along with a drawing by Joseph Cornell's younger brother Robert, the Cornell gift will be shown along with five important works from the Shidler Family Collection. In addition to the exhibition of his boxes and collages, Cornell's passion for cinema and filmmaking will be the focus of a program of his films presented in the museum's video space courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Voyager Foundation, Washington, D.C. Comprised of four films from the 1950s - Nymphlight, Angel, A Legend for Fountains (all 1957), and The Aviary (1954) - along with five earlier films from the 1930s including the pioneering Rose Hobart (1936), Cornell's films provide a fascinating window onto his private world and are important in our understanding of the cross-fertilization between film, collage, and assemblage that occurred in Cornell's work.