Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was an obsessive collector. He gathered seashells, children’s toys, clay pipes, coins, watch faces, and a miscellany of other objects and images and filed them away in the basement of the house in Flushing, Queens, where he lived with his mother and brother. Frequenting New York’s bookstores, libraries, galleries, and museums, he also studied scientific diagrams, ancient myths, and children’s fairytales. It was in 1931 at the Julien Levy Gallery, an important venue for Surrealist artists, that Cornell encountered collages by Max Ernst, with their improbable pastiches of found imagery. Inspired, Cornell used the raw materials he collected to create the collages and shadow boxes for which he is best known. His boxed assemblages are simultaneously shrines and dioramas—sites for the celebration and examination of the unknown and the fantastical.

Celestial Navigation contains a blue speckled ball suspended on metal rods above a set of four antique cordial glasses. The four blue marbles in this work can be distributed inside the glasses in various configurations, suggesting the constant movement of the universe. In this arrangement, all four marbles sit inside the glass farthest to the right, like a cluster of planets or stars in a constellation. The fractured plaster head of a boy floats against a backdrop of the night sky like a figurehead on the bow of a ship. He seems to be staring intently at the marbles in the glass, perhaps in contemplation. Cornell had been an avid stargazer since childhood, and astronomy, constellation charts, and celestial navigation—which guided sailors since ancient times in their travels— provided fodder for a number of his elegiac shadow-box works.