Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination
by: Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 391 pages. Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was a self-taught yet highly sophisticated artist who is celebrated for his pioneering achievement in collage, assemblage, and film. Cornell's lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist's work in twenty-six years. In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell's evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art. Clean copy.