With affection and critical respect, a celebrated art historian has gathered an unprecedented wealth of material about the shy but immensely influential artist who lived on incongruously named Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York.

Cornell (1903-1972), the American assemblage artist, was a quirky but passionate collector of bric-a-brac who used trinkets, scraps of paper, paint, and lots of glue to arrange imaginative worlds inside glass-fronted wooden boxes and frames. 60 illustrations.

Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of the work of a quintessential American artist, Joseph Cornell, this volume presents his life and work, including an analysis of his relationship to twentieth-century art, particularly to Surrealism.

Between 1953 and 1966, New York assemblage artist Joseph Cornell created more than twenty works in homage to Juan Gris, specifically inspired by the Cubist’s collage masterpiece, The Man at the Café(1914). Cornell’s Gris boxes have as their centerpiece the image of a bird, the great white-crested cockatoo, whose delightful and erudite connections to the Cubist’s oeuvre and to Cornell’s own hobbies, love of music, and distinctive approach to modern art are comprehensively documented here for the first time.

The first retrospective of the work of Joseph Cornell in the past 20 years reflects a personal exploration of art and culture that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination.

Edited and Introduction by Catherine Corman.