Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and film-maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a textiles industry executive, and Helen Ten Broeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a nursery teacher. Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell's father died April 30, 1917, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Following the elder Cornell's death, his widow and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921. Although he reached the senior year, he did not graduate. Following this, he returned to live with his family.

Except for the three-and-a-half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wood-frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically disabled. Aside from his time at Andover, Cornell never traveled beyond the New York City area.: xiii

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024