Deborah Solomon’s definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America’s most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued twenty years later with updated and extensively revised text Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound—the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent—but never before has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions.

"This book uncovers a largely overlooked strand of American modernism in Cornell's work that engaged with current issues through the metaphysical aspects of vernacular objects and experiences"--

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.

Now in Paperback In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

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.

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.