The Man Who Made the Boxes

Center: Joseph Cornell House, Utopia Parkway

Auburndale produced an unlikely innovator in the art world in the mid-20^th century: shadow box and collage artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), who over four decades lived in a small frame house on Utopia Parkway south of Crocheron Avenue. Cornell and his family moved to Bayside from Nyack, NY after the death of his father in 1917, and after a few years, moved again to Utopia Parkway.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Cornell made wooden boxes about one to two feet high and filled them with found objects: photos of birds, buttons, corks, newspaper clippings, jars, photographs, toys, theatrical poster fragments and other relics he found in junk shops and flea markets. His art was played out, it seems, from a desire to break away from his Queens life. He would create hommages to places he’d never been, movie stars like Jennifer Jones and Lauren Bacall and 19^th-Century ballerinas, which were a favorite subject. His pieces were named whimsically: one of his first works, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) features a lunar map, a doll’s head, a glass holding an egg, and four small cylinders, two of which picture medieval artwork depicting the planet Saturn…but no pictures of soap bubbles. His box lids were often covered with old maps. His work spanned the art movements of surrealism and abstract expressionism, and his whimsical and melancholy pieces have also been considered a precedent to the pop art of the 1960s. His art films initially aroused the jealousy and ire of Salvador Dali, who nonetheless became a friend.

Though he lived a somewhat solitary life with his mother and brother Robert (who had cerebral palsy), and never married, Cornell was no recluse: he kept up a voluminous correspondence with artistic and literary lights such as Marcel Duchamp, Susan Sontag, Yoko Ono, Marianne Moore, and Tony Curtis. His fame built gradually; he was well-respected in the 1930s, well-known by the 1940s, and celebrated by the 1960s, though he always lived modestly. Several Cornell pieces are on permanent exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art.