He died of uremia in 1927, at the age of 40.Ĭornell always worked in series, and his Juan Gris boxes, of which there are more than a dozen, would consume him intermittently from 1953 into the ’60s. By the 1950s, Picasso was an international celebrity posing bare-chested for photographers at his villa in Cannes, but Gris didn’t live long enough to garner worldly perks. A Spaniard who settled in Paris, Gris was the overshadowed, tag-along third in the Cubist triumvirate that featured Picasso and Braque. Much about Gris’s life appealed to the part of Cornell that valorized the marginal. As the writer Susan Sontag, a friend of his, once observed, “Cornell seemed to be a person who lived in his head rather than in his body.” He no doubt felt a temperamental affinity with Gris’s idiosyncratic version of Cubism, which was more cerebral than Picasso’s, more measured, less an evocation of omnivorous appetite than of calm and patient craftsmanship. The man lacks the sharpness, the physical thereness, of the objects around him.Ĭornell, too, was a shadow of a man who read voraciously and disappeared into his books. The wood grain seems to be of a higher order of reality than either the collaged-on snippets of newspaper or the human figure who is represented. It could almost pass for a plank of real wood. Most striking is the fastidiously painted surface of the tabletop. Chancing upon “The Man at the Café” in a group show at the Janis Gallery, Cornell was riveted by this image of “a man reading a newspaper at a cafe table covered almost completely by his reading material,” as he noted later in his journals. They did not inhabit the same city or even the same continent.īut Gris came to inhabit Cornell’s thoughts in the fall of 1953, a time when you could still make the rounds of the Manhattan galleries in the space of an afternoon. Juan Gris’s “The Man at the Café,” of 1914, a painting adorned with scraps of glued-on newsprint, might seem like a surprising fascination for Cornell, who was neither a painter nor a Cubist. It occupies just one gallery, bringing together a dozen boxes by Cornell and a Cubist masterwork that he cited as their direct inspiration. “ Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell’s Homage to Juan Gris,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a small, hyper-specialized, stunning exhibition that seeks to track the fluttery ways of artistic inspiration. Working in his cramped cellar, he arranged five-and-dime objects into richly poetic tableaus that prove that sometimes it’s better to think inside the box. He spent his adulthood in Flushing, Queens, in an ordinary wood-frame house that he shared with his mother and younger brother. His own life was less glamorous than theirs. He openly dedicated his works to other artists, preferably dead or distant ones who originated in different centuries and countries. Joseph Cornell, the homebody artist known for his glass-fronted shadow boxes, made no secret of his infatuations.
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