Except for the 3 and a half years he spent at Phillips, Cornell lived for most of his existence in a tiny house on Utopia Parkway with his mother as well as his sick brother.
He ended up being wary of strangers.
This drove Cornell to segregate himself and become a self-taught painter.
He grew to become a highly regarded painter towards the end of his career, yet remained away from the limelight.
His most quality art works have been boxed assemblages crafted from discovered objects.
These include simple containers, usually glass-fronted, wherein he arranged astonishing gallery of images or Victorian bric-à-brac, in a manner that fuses the formal austerity of Constructivism together with the lively illusion of Surrealism.
Most of his boxes happen to be interactive and are meant to be handled.
Cornell can produce poetry from the commonplace.
Cornell was interested in pieces of once lovely as well as valuable items he found on the bookshops and thrift shops of New York.
His boxes depended around the Surrealist manner of irrational juxtaposition, as well as on the evocation of nostalgia.
Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists such as Max Ernst and René Magrittet.
Cornell's popularity as the foremost American "Surrealist" made it possible for Cornell to befriend numerous associates of the Surrealist movement when they settled in the usa during World War II.
Later on he was claimed to be a herald of pop art and installation art.
He often created boxed assemblages in series which reflected his various passions.
In addition to making boxes and flat collages as well as doing short art films, Cornell also maintained a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on subjects which fascinated him; the dossiers worked as repositories from which Cornell drew materials and motivation for boxes like his "penny arcade" portrait of Lauren Bacall.
Cornell had no formal training in art, although he was well read and has been conversant with the New York art scene.
A splendid survey of thirty-five boxes and collages by the lead poet of the ordinary object, Joseph Cornell, is a fantastic indulgence.
This incredibly elusive artist, whose work is seldom spotted in-depth on the West Coast, adroitly combined a surrealist visual together with a Renaissance philosophy to make a compelling body of work which has maintained its capacity to astound and excite.
A devotee of ballet, literature, film, music, art history as well as the natural sciences, Cornell's wide ranging intellect appreciated all of the stimulating facets of society and nature.
He has been an inveterate enthusiast who amassed a marvelous assemblage of items and printed material which stretched from limited editions to outdated postcards that he effortlessly incorporated into his boxes and collages.
Cornell developed a finely tuned inner world in his boxes.
Even the simplest works has a great refinement of form.
Cornell makes use of natural geometry and colors to cohesively combine these components.
In 1969, this collage artist gave a collection of both his own motion pictures and the works of others to Anthology Film Archives located in New York City.
Cornell's fragmentary dream realm is magnificently visited in an excellent display which convincingly proposes that his contribution to the art of assemblage and collage was tremendous.
All these works suggest a lost realm of elegance and culture at this time forever frozen in time.
As the major American precursor of contemporary collage and assemblage, Cornell's works offer a welter of fragile, jewel-like photos connected by dreams and poetic association.
His sophisticated touch grew out of a passion for ordinary objects' natural charm as well as history.