FILTER RESULTS
The Admiral's Game
ca. 195020th Century
12 x 18 x 4 in. (30.5 x 45.7 x 10.2 cm)
Joseph Cornell (New York, NY, 1903 - 1972, Flushing, NY)
Object Type:
Sculpture
Medium and Support:
Mixed media
Credit Line:
Maurice R. and Maxine B. Forman Fund
Accession Number:
1998.77
Media
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Director Emeritus Grant Holcomb speaks about this object.
Transcript
Here is an example of a magical world of one of the pioneering figures of American modernism. The world of Joseph Cornell, a man reclusive and inquisitive, enigmatic and romantic, literary and poetic. How apt it seems that he was born on Christmas Eve and lived on a street named Utopia Parkway.
A compulsive collector and, as one poet called him, “a connoisseur of ephemera,” Cornell frequented New York’s second-hand stores where he acquired ordinary, commonplace materials that he would use in his mysterious and unique shadow boxes.
His long-standing interest in astronomy and celestial navigation is seen in The Admiral’s Game, a box construction from his 1950s series “Night Voyages.” The title alone refers to the ocean, as do the evocative objects within the box: driftwood, white-washed cork balls and a yellow block wrapped as if for sending on a journey.
The deep blue inner wall evokes the night sky, while the crackled white paint suggests the constellations that so fascinated the artist. The central radiating disc and the round spheres within the box are other celestial symbols. Ordinary, even banal, objects become striking metaphors in this contemplation of cosmic vastness and the unknown.
This may be an “Admiral’s Game,” but it is also a visual poet’s journey.