?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
JOSEPH CORNELL Box 1.
Small collaged card stock token box with lid, one clear plastic capsule with a toy ring and a pen and ink note, 1963. 80x55x35 mm; 3 1/4x2 1/4x1 1/2 inches (outer dimensions of box). Signed and dated in ink on the note paper and on the underside of the lid.
Provenance: Collection of Romana Javitz (1903-1980), New York; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection, Illinois.
Exhibited: "Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea's Eye: The Picture Collection," New York Public Library, New York, September 24, 2021–May 15, 2022.
Javitz (1903-1980) was curator of The New York Public Library's Picture Collection from 1928-68, where she assembled one of the most historically important and artistically significant collections of 20th-century photographs. Cornell (1903-1972) corresponded with Javitz frequently during the 1940s and 1950s regarding images he sought for his projects, his exhibitions and films, the sales of his art works, and other artistic endeavors.
A native of Nyack, New York, Cornell was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, in a working-class area of Flushing, New York, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists (though he never traveled beyond the New York City area).
