CORNELL, Joseph

An American original, without formal art education, Cornell made small boxes with cutaway fronts—a form closer to reliefs and a theatrical proscenium than sculpture proper in demanding a view from the frontal perpendicular perspective—and meticulously filled these boxes with many objects not usually found together in either art or life. Their imagery includes mementos of the theater and the dance, the world of nature and that of the heavens, writes the historian Matthew Baigell. Cornell's boxes also...