Untitled (Butterfly Habitat)

For approximately thirty years, Joseph Cornell worked in relative obscurity in the basement of his home in Queens, New York, creating a multitude of wondrous miniature worlds within his boxed constructions. Poetic mélanges of found objects and materials, his deeply personal and elusive work (which also includes many collages on paper) combines the enthusiasms of his childhood—butterflies, marbles, seashells, sky charts, stamps—with adult fascinations such as ballerinas, empty cages, and movie stars. Cornell’s boxes often prompt a dizzying series of associations; in Untitled (Butterfly Habitat), these include Christmas decorations, collector’s cabinets for specimens, microscopes, natural history displays, sailor’s boxes, and windows. Some of these references are contradictory, reinforcing the work’s ambiguity. Ideas linked to flight, voyages, and the exotic are countered by the rigid and symmetrical organization of the display. The butterflies are not, however, pinned as they would be on a specimen board. Each pane of paint-spattered glass encloses a small compartment with white wood walls in which a cutout of a paper butterfly is suspended with string, allowing for some movement as the box is handled.

Credit: Lindy and Edwin Bergman Joseph Cornell Collection