Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was an avant-garde American artist and sculptor, noteable for his pioneering and much-imitated assemblage boxes. Despite being born into a middle-class merchant family, Cornell was thrown into poverty following the death of his father in 1917. Cornell went, along with his mother and his disabled brother Robert, to live in a small wooden house in Flushing, New York, where he remained for his entire life, never travelling beyond the New York City area. A chronically shy social misfit, Cornell preferred to live in isolation caring for his brother, and became a self-taught artist, creating elaborate constructions with found objects when he was not working to support his family. He worked variously as a textile and appliance salesman, and in a plant nursery before finding his way to the magazine publishing... Show more

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