A look at collecting, collections & Joseph Cornell
December 24, 1903December 29, 1972
Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910). Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell’s father died in 1917, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Following the elder Cornell’s death, his wife 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 did not graduate. Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wooden-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 challenged. Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to isolate himself and become a self-taught artist. Although he expressed attraction to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. In later life his bashfulness verged toward reclusiveness, and he rarely left the state of New York. However, he preferred talking with women, and often made their husbands wait in the next room when he discussed business with them. He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner. His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party serving soft drinks and cake. He devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, an invalid suffering from cerebral palsy. This was another factor in his lack of relationships. At some point in the 1920s, or possibly earlier, he read the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. Her works, including Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Cornell considered to be among the most important books ever published after the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent. He was also rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family. As a result of the American Great Depression, Cornell lost his textile industry job in 1931, and worked for a short time thereafter as a door-to-door appliance salesman. During this time, through her friendship with
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Ethel Traphagen, Cornell’s mother secured him a part-time position designing textiles. In the 1940s, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery (which would figure in his famous dossier “GC44”)
and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper’s Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines. He only really began to sell his boxes for significant sums after his 1949 solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery. He produced fewer box assemblages in the 1950s and 1960s, as his family responsibilities increased and claimed more of his time. He hired a series of young assistants, including both students and established artists, to help him organize material, make artwork, and run errands. At this time, Cornell concentrated on making collages, and collaborated with filmmakers like Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan to make films that were evocative of moving collages. Cornell’s brother Robert died in 1965, and his mother in 1966. Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on 29 December 1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday. The executors of his estate were Richard Ader and Wayne Andrews, as represented by the art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Later the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell’s works and represents the interests of his heirs.
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Joseph Cornell continued to experiment with film until his death in 1972. While his earlier films were often collages of found short films, his later ones montaged together footage he expressly commissioned from the professional filmmakers with whom he collaborated. These latter films were often set in some of Cornell’s favorite neighborhoods and landmarks in New York City: Mulberry Street, Bryant Park, Union Square Park, and the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, among others. In 1969 Cornell gave a collection of both his own films and the works of others to Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
Cornell often made series of boxed assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Object Boxes, among others. Also captivated with birds, Cornell created an Aviary series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were mounted on wood, cut out, & set against harsh white backgrounds.In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary “dossiers” on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his “penny arcade” portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.
Joseph Cornell’s process of collecting was about keeping things he bought, found, and liked. Cornell collected source material for his work, which became artistic creations about his inner thoughts, desires, and imagination. Most days Cornell scavenged for relics in New York junk shops and flea markets. He sorted his purchases into categories and filed them in boxes along with his own mementos, creating his art boxes from this archive. People who visited his home said it felt very much like stepping right into his art. Inspiration for his boxes came in the form of women with whom Cornell had fallen in love, exotic places, imagined adventures Cornell never took, and childhood memories. Cornell was also interested in ballet, music, and art. He collected his inner thoughts, feelings, and fantasies in a diary.
Cornell was heavily influenced by the American Transcendentalists, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Gérard de Nerval, and great dancers of the 19th century ballet such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito.Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell’s art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.Joseph Cornell’s 1936 found-film montage Rose Hobart was made entirely from splicing together existing film stock that Cornell had found in New Jersey warehouses, mostly derived from a 1931 ‘B’ film entitled East of Borneo. Cornell would play Nestor Amaral’s record, ‘Holiday in Brazil’ during its rare screenings, as well as projecting the film through a deep blue glass or filter, giving the film a dreamlike effect. Focusing mainly on the gestures and expressions made by Rose Hobart (the original film’s starlet), this dreamscape of Cornell’s seems to exist in a kind of suspension until the film’s most arresting sequence toward the end, when footage of a solar eclipse is juxtaposed with a white ball falling into a pool of water in slow motion. Cornell premiered the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Salvador Dalí, who was in New York to attend the MoMA opening, was present at its first screening. During the screening, Dali became outraged at Cornell’s movie, claiming he had just had the same idea of applying collage techniques to film. After the screening, Dali remarked to Cornell that he should stick to making boxes and to stop making films. Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Cornell showed his films rarely thereafter.
These are simple boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-àbrac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled. Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York.[8] His boxes relied on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal. Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte, he disavowed the Surrealists’ “black magic,” claiming that he only wished to make white magic with his art. Cornell’s fame as the leading American “Surrealist” allowed him to befriend several members of the Surrealist movement when they settled in the USA during the Second World War. Later he was claimed as a herald of pop art and installation art.
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Jill & Simon are lovers of unusual salt and pepper shakers. Commonly found snooping around local car boots, they love finding a new set to add to their collection. They have around 70 different sets so far, and are aiming to get into the 100’s.
Childhood memories, fun, investment, fandom, achievementare some of the common reasons people start a collection.
People enjoy arranging, assorting and colour matching their collections. Size order and symmetry is important also in the eyes of the collector.
Fruit labelling has been going on for over a century, and many people collect a variety of different types of fruit labels. There are the fruit crate labels, fruit wrapper labels, and of course, those small stickers on individual fruit.
Popular collections include plates, stamps coins, animal ornaments and cards but there are also some other unsual obsessions, such as below- an example of a water gun collection.
ALL SCIENCE IS EITHER PHYSICS OR STAMP COLLECTING ERNEST RUTHERFORD
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Collecting is usually an unconscious decision. It hits home when you realize you have ten cobalt blue bottles found over the years or when you get five elephants for Christmas “to go with the elephant collection”. (Those two or three sitting on a table that makes others think you’re into elephants.)But sometimes collecting is a conscious decision. It might be when you want something to remember vacation trips, want to decorate your house with a personal touch or decide to look for fun stuff when shopping. In either case, even though you should always collect with your heart, you can still collect smart!
1. What is a Collectible? The word collectible means different things to different people. Ask a non-collector what a collectible is and they might mention little figurines that are specifically marketed as collectibles, Beanie Babies or perhaps stamps and coins, usually a specific thing. Ask a collector and you’ll get an in-depth answer on the feelings that are evoked, the investment made or the quest to find their stuff. Although collectors hope their collections will increase in value, that’s usually not the reason they started collecting. Both answers are right. The word collectible means something different to everyone who ponders the question. Ask a non-collector what a collectible is and they will probably mention little figurines that are specifically marketed as collectibles or, more likely, they will mention Beanie Babies! Sometimes the non-collector will mention stamps, coins or even rocks and sea shells. It’s always a particular thing.Ask a collector and you’ll get an in-depth answer on the feelings that are evoked, perhaps the investment made or the quest to find their stuff. Although collectors always hope their collections will increase in value, that’s not why they started their collection. My thoughts have always been if it’s sold as a collectible, it’s not. At a recently gathering of authors and experts on antiques and collectibles, I asked the question “What is your definition of a collectible?” Rarely did anyone have a quick or glib answer but, after a few moments of thought, would come through with their definition.
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A PIECE OF A PERSON’S PERSONAL HISTORY THAT HOLDS A SPECIAL PLACE IN THEIR HEART. DEAN JUTILLA.
Often it is a vacation that will kick-start a collection. Sticking that matchbook into your pocket, picking up a few postcards or even sav ing the unusual airsickness bag on your vacation are all signs of a collectors soul. Other times it’s as simple as seeing something that you grew up with, the dishes from the family kitchen, the cookie jar on the counter or the toys you played with. Soon after, that one doll or dish has grown to a closet full of goodies. Everyone feels their collection is unusual in some aspect or another, but the links listed on this page are the truly unusual. All the collectors listed obviously have a passion for their collection, be it Banana Labels, Toilet Paper or Calculators. Sit back and enjoy a trip to these virtual museums and personal collector sites.
SOMETHING YOU CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF. YOU GOTTA HAVE MORE. BRENT FELGNER How did you start your collection? Sometimes finding your passion is as easy as looking around and saving the item that has always fascinated you. Collecting does not have to be an expensive hobby, it can even be free. Some of the collectors listed below just took the time to save commonplace (but usually not collected) items or spent the cost of postage when trading items with others of the same mind. Whether you collect by vocation or avocation -- collections bring passion, fun and interest to our lives. A doctor might look for medical antiquities, fishermen search for old lures, there are computer engineers intrigued by the Commodore 64 and avid bakers looking for the old pottery cookie jars. But many collectors have no rhyme or reason as to why they love their collectible -- but a visit to their site, makes it very apparent that they have found their passion! What makes “us” love the strange item and want more of them? Who knows, but collecting is certainly ingrained in our personality. Woe to the family that has a mixture of avid collectors and, just as avid, non-collectors -- it can make life very interesting.
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