Tuesday 1 September 2015

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy


Cathy Lomax takes her Cornell with a side order of Stezaker and Bracewell.

Still from Angel (Joseph Cornell and  Rudy Burckhardt, 1953)

I find Joseph Cornell’s fan-like obsessions with film and ballet stars and his collecting and ordering of found objects fascinating and inspiring. I haven’t seen much of his work in the flesh, so a retrospective at the Royal Academy was an exciting prospect. Before going in to see the exhibition I listened to an ‘in conversation’ between the writer Michael Bracewell, a Cornell dissenter who finds his work ‘morbid and dotty’ and the artist John Stezaker, a Cornell admirer.