Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell - Couverture rigide

Solomon, Deborah

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0374180121 ISBN 13 : 9780374180126

Editeur : Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997

Synopsis

quarter-bound in blue cloth, blue papered sides, dust jacket, 426 pp

A propos du livre

Extrait

On a typical afternoon, Joseph Cornell might stop in at his local Bickford's restaurant for a cup of tea and a slice of cherry pie. One can see him now, a thin, wraithlike man at his own table, bent over a book while enjoying his snack. He reads intently, absorbed in a biography of Chopin or Goethe or some other formidable figure, pausing only to scribble a note on his paper napkin or to gaze with birdlike keenness at a waitress. Cornell was a great reader of biographies; his library included dozens of books on poets, musicians, and scientists, among others, and they attest at least partly to the difficulty he had in sustaining friendships. He fared better with the deceased. He loved to immerse himself in the lives of the illustrious dead, with whom his identification was intense, and who became his most valued coffee-shop companions as they sprang to life inside his bony box of a head.

One suspects it never occurred to Cornell that one day he himself would become the subject of a biography and that someone, somewhere, would perhaps sit down at a table in a coffee-shop and open a book about him. The idea would have struck him as ludicrous, for his life was less a story than a strange situation. For most of his years, he resided with his mother and handicapped brother in their small frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Cornell was no bohemian, just a gaunt man in drab clothes whose days were spent mainly in his basement workshop, where he arranged marbles, metal rings, and other frugally poetic objects in small shadow boxes—and transported five-and-dime reality into his own brand of unreality, which to him was as real as the objects in his boxes.

Revue de presse

“Deborah Solomon’s admirable biography illuminates the life of the man without diminishing the mystery of his art.” —New York Magazine

“A principal virtue of this biography . . . is that it challenges in a very authoritative way the received idea of Cornell as merely the timorous recluse, the marginal artist of Utopia Parkway.”
—James R. Mellow, New York Times Book Review

"As perfectly composed, richly nuanced and quietly surprising as one of Cornell's boxes." —Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune

"Deborah Solomon's clear-eyed and sympathetic narrative does for [Cornell's] life what he, as an artist, did for his penny world...It is a book about Cornell I would not dare to have hoped for in our mean and deconstructionist age." —Arthur C. Danto, Art Critic, The Nation

“Fascinating reading . . . Skillfully weaving together fact, anecdote, and conjecture, Solomon brings Cornell’s place in the art world and his legacy to artists of the younger generation into sharp focus.” —Allison Kemmerer, Boston Book Review

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Date d'édition: 1997
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0374180121
• ISBN 13: 9780374180126
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 426
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible