Joseph Cornell

Before the concept of the outsider artist was fully codified, Joseph Cornell was an early progenitor of the concept. Cornell spent most of his life in the house where he grew up, in Flushing, Queens, caring for his mother and for his younger brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy. While working a variety of day jobs to support the family, Cornell began creating evocative, surreal assemblages out of found objects carefully juxtaposed under glass. His experimental film shorts brought similar principles to life. Cornell's first and most famous film, "Rose Hobart" (1936) was created by combining scenes from an unknown documentary about a solar eclipse with segments from a print of the low-budget jungle adventure "East of Borneo" (1931), which starred the actress Rose Hobart. Cornell cut out nearly every frame of the film that did not feature the lovely Hobart, and screened the film through a piece of blue glass to give it an otherworldly tint. (Later prints of the film were given a rose-colored tint instead of the original blue.) According to art world legend, during the film's premiere at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan, an outraged Salvador Dali knocked over the projector mid-screening, jealous that Cornell had produced this strangely haunting and poetic film before he had done it himself. Cornell made several other collage films in the late 1930s and early '40s, but always considered filmmaking secondary to his sculptural assemblages. When he returned to filmmaking in the 1950s, Cornell began working with images shot by himself or at his behest by rising young experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan, which Cornell would then edit together in his genially surreal fashion. Because he made these films mostly for himself and rarely showed them during his lifetime, it's often unclear how the artist meant for the films to be screened, although a total of 25 short films aside from "Rose Hobart" are considered complete, finished works. As Cornell's assemblages became better known starting in the 1960s, museum exhibitions of his work often began to include screenings of Cornell's films, particularly "Rose Hobart" and a trio of collage shorts collectively known as "The Children's Trilogy" (assembled c. 1940, completed 1969). Joseph Cornell died December 29, 1972 in his longtime family home.