InDime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic refects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned. In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells the story of Cornell’s life and illuminates the hermetic mysteries of his extraordinary boxes–objects in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art. Simic sees Cornell’s work as exemplifying a distinctively American aesthetic, open to the world, improvisatory, at once homemade and universal, modest and teasing and profound. Full of unexpected riches,Dime-Store Alchemyis both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist by one of his peers–a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure again and again.

“The American Surrealist sculptor who evoked enchanting, metaphysical worlds by magical combinations of found objects in small boxes . . . a wonderful introduction to the artist’s world.” —Wall Street Journal Originally published to celebrate the centennial of Joseph Cornell’s birth, this book provides a multidimensional perspective on the pioneering modern artist. Lavishly illustrated with more than seventy-five boxes and collages, as well as images of the fascinating source material that the artist collected to create his exquisitely crafted worlds, it communicates to the reader the sense of surprise and delight that one experiences on viewing the actual boxes with their toys, stuffed birds, maps, clay pipes, marbles, shells, and other paraphernalia of daily life. The book’s essays bring together the expertise of Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, former director of the Joseph Cornell Study Center; the compelling commentary of Walter Hopps, art dealer, museum curator and director, and the artist’s personal friend; the wide-ranging scholarship of Richard Vine; and the sensitivity of Robert Lehrman, a leading Cornell collector whose firsthand experience lends this publication its distinctive intimacy. Among the topics explored are the role of dualities in the artistic process, the dominant themes of Cornell’s oeuvre, and the importance of his Christian Science faith.

In this volume she probes Cornell's elusive imagery in his earliest Surrealist-inspired collages of the 1930s, his masterful box constructions of the 1940s and 1950s, his experimental films, and his final collages in his last years."--BOOK JACKET.

Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of the work of a quintessential American artist, Joseph Cornell, this volume presents his life and work, including an analysis of his relationship to twentieth-century art, particularly to Surrealism.

The first retrospective of the work of Joseph Cornell in the past 20 years reflects a personal exploration of art and culture that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination.