Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
The Image Hunter
By Charles Simic
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams
by Diane Waldman
Abrams, 152 pp., $45.00
When Diane Waldman selected the pieces for the 1967 exhibition of Joseph Cornell's work at the Guggenheim Museum five years before his death, and wrote for the catalog what was one of the first extensive critical articles on the artist, he was practically unknown. Even the far more wide-ranging retrospective exhibition at MOMA in 1980 and the fine essays and more than three hundred illustrations in the catalog did not make his name much more familiar to the wider public. There was a reason for that. Avant-garde movements, one supposedly more radical than the other, came and went in the years in question, trumpeting other names and competing for attention. If the works themselves and the aesthetic claims made for them were often laughable, it did not seem to matter since they sold for astonishing sums of money.
Review, 3162 words
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