The box object we present is a variant belonging to the most well-known and consistent series of Joseph Cornell's work, the "Soap Bubble Set" series, often associated with surrealism, like the rest of his work. A reserved character who rarely left his home on Utopia Parkway in New York, he escaped through his imagination. He was passionate about science, which he studied, and European culture. Self-taught and yet surprisingly sophisticated, Joseph Cornell was among the artists who broke the codes of art by mixing techniques and abolishing the distinctions between fine arts and popular arts. Through the use of found materials, he defined a new space for the creation of modern sculpture. His influence had a significant impact on a whole new generation of artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, but also on experimental filmmakers and writers like Rudy Burckhardt and Octavio Paz.
Cornell pulls the strings of human behavior by evoking two emotionally powerful subjects, children's games and collecting. No monetary reasoning enters his thinking: useless objects become priceless fetishes. His indescribably charming boxes are true nostalgic cabinets of curiosity, poetic glorifications of small objects, exploring a romantic irony that is nonetheless very down-to-earth.
He introduces the notion of elapsed, corrosive time through objects whose wear is evident. He refers here to the past through emptied shells, and postage stamps, the embodiment of a fixed date. The box space is thus also a conservation space, with Cornell enclosing the memory itself; here childhood memories are enclosed, but without clearly revealing his intention. He thus proposes an emotional space in which the observer can make relevant associations for themselves and project their own memories based on what the objects evoke for them. The glass marbles are an obvious example, but other objects in the box evoke this more subtly. Who, as a child, hasn't gazed at the stars with eyes full of wonder?
The book that most influenced Cornell is the children's scientific popularization book written by C. V. Boys, Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them. The author encourages children to conduct experiments to create soap bubbles of different shapes, oval, cylindrical, using all sorts of materials, metal rings, wine glasses, lanterns, candles, wires. He praises science by highlighting its often forgotten aspects of beauty and magic.
Another scientific popularization work that also impacted Cornell's work is Camille Flammarion's Astronomie populaire, illustrating astronomical discoveries with celestial maps and engraved figures. From his first box in 1936, these have been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Cornell. He thus establishes a plastic technique where a map of the moon serves as the background to a box in which he places various objects that echo this illustration, such as planets, stars, and constellations on the stamps glued to the cylinder, wood, and shells representing the earth in opposition to the moon.
"It is an art that is both subjective and mathematical: meticulous like an architect's drawing, but with a precision in execution and detail, nourished by time and carried out with the complicity of the Sun, the Moon, the Wind, and the Stars. [...]
Only he knows how to penetrate the infinite sphere of a soap bubble, without disturbing it and without getting lost or losing sight of his goal.
In truth, his objects are much more than 'toys' for grown-ups, they are philosophical toys, composed of both real space and the purest dream..."
Howard Hussey, New York City, 1980
