Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination

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 and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections––Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature’s Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time––explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist’s source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

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 and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections––Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature’s Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time––explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist’s source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

The New York Times - Leah Hager Cohen

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan's mammoth catalog Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, accompanies the first retrospective of the artist's work in 26 years, a deliciously bountiful exhibition curated by Hartigan and recently on view in Washington, San Francisco and Salem, Mass. If you missed it, this book really is the next best thing: thorough, lavish, disturbing, beguiling. With its hundreds of sumptuous reproductions, it surpasses even Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay ... Eterniday…Hartigan has done something lovely. She, too, has modeled a response to Cornell's work on his own methods, assembling and inventorying a pastiche of the ideas, innovations, people, philosophies and experiences that most likely influenced the artist. She doesn't navigate his imagination so much as map the explicit tributaries that fed it. And is her map ever detailed.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan is Chief Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. She is the founding curator of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Joseph Cornell Study Center and has published extensively on the artist.