JOSEPH CORNELLUntitled (“Medici Princess”)Assemblage, c.1948Previous Cornell posts:Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren BacallToward the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson) “Cornell and Dickinson are both in the end unknowable. They live within the riddle, as Dickinson would say. Their biographies explain nothing. They are without precedent, eccentric, original, and thoroughly American. If her poems are like his boxes, a place where secrets are kept, his boxes are like her poems, the place of unlikely things coming together. They both worry about their soul’s salvation. Voyagers and explorers of their own solitudes, they make them vast, make them cosmic. They are religious artists in a world in which old metaphysics and aesthetic ideas were eclipsed.” Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (NYRB, 1992)
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JOSEPH CORNELL
Untitled (“Medici Princess”)
Assemblage, c.1948

Previous Cornell posts:
Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall
Toward the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson)


“Cornell and Dickinson are both in the end unknowable. They live within the riddle, as Dickinson would say. Their biographies explain nothing. They are without precedent, eccentric, original, and thoroughly American. If her poems are like his boxes, a place where secrets are kept, his boxes are like her poems, the place of unlikely things coming together. They both worry about their soul’s salvation. Voyagers and explorers of their own solitudes, they make them vast, make them cosmic. They are religious artists in a world in which old metaphysics and aesthetic ideas were eclipsed.”

Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (NYRB, 1992)