Label Text:
Joseph Cornell is best known for his shadow boxes, which he began constructing to suggest the wonders of the universe to a disabled, bed-ridden sibling. Evoking far-off, even otherworldly places, the artist filled these boxes with seemingly commonplace and disparate objects and ephemera, including photographs, newspaper clippings, maps, and toys. This work relates to a group of boxes alluding to the glamorous European locales that Cornell, mostly an armchair traveler, read about in the nineteenth-century travel books he collected. The box is filled with fragments of historical hotel ads, a cracked mirror, and a small Wiffle-type ball. The stamp in the upper-right corner derives from a painting by Flemish artist J. Piels. Resisting easy interpretation, the box invokes the childlike and dreamlike states of being often associated with Surrealism.

Tags:
inscriptions; abstract; patterns

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1976.65

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