Joseph Cornell

Cornell is admired for his box sculptures such as this in which he assembles found objects and images. These “assemblages” combine a formal abstract structure with the fantasy of surrealism, a strategy also used by Aaron Siskind. Cornell and Siskind met in the late 1940s. Siskind photographed Cornell’s work, as he did for many artists, among them de Kooning, Gottlieb, Newman, and Rothko, most often in exchange for art. A Siskind photograph of Cornell’s 1949 exhibition at the Egan Gallery, New York, is on view in the case. In 1974, coming upon some box-like altars at a cemetery in Mérida, Mexico, Siskind began a series of pictures entitled “Remembering Joseph Cornell in Mérida.”