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Lot Essay
"When we have a beautiful Dovecote box, it is just gridded out little spaces and little white cubes or little marbles there-as formal and classic as a Mondrian, in its white way. Cornell's most abstract works, the pure white grid structure and all the little cubes therein-would literally be three-dimensional Minimalist works eventually. He covered that as well."
Walter Hobbs
"For Cornell, the dove was a spiritual carrier. His Dovecotes are habitats for these spiritual carriers. In lieu of doves, little round spheres move about in their habitat. These are some of Cornell's most spiritual works."
Walter Hobbs
Once housed in the exceptional collection of famed Chicago art collector, Arnold H. Maremont, Joseph Cornell's Dovecote is a classic example of the artist's series of the same title. A hard poetic syntax clarified by sense and geometry, Cornell's Dovecotes clad with mathematical wit and youthful playfulness, rescue the viewer from the emotional absence of nostalgia. Developed during the middle ages, dovecotes or colombiers were used as compartmented, often raised houses or boxes for the domestic pigeons kept by knights as a sign of prestige. Accommodating the pigeon's preference for nesting in protected holes or alcoves, the dovecotes took on a gridded format with dark recessed pigeonholes. Encountering heavily whitewashed colonial versions of dovecotes during his youthful travels throughout New England, Cornell became intrigued by the history and meaning of the word, and delighted in discovering that dovecote could be defined as a settled or harmonious group or organization, and that the Latin term for dovecote-columbarium-refers as well to a structure of vaults lined with recesses for funerary urns.
A classic succession of four columns and five rows, each horizontal register employs a series of hidden corridors through which one or more doves (balls) move. As the box is tilted, the doves briefly glimpse the viewer as they scuttle past a sequence of opened windows. A faultless poeticism, Dovecote often builds in a brief temporal delay as the watcher examines each register-as if a came with no particular objective. "Perhaps the definition of a box could be as a kind of forgotten game," Cornell suggests, "a philosophical toy of the Victorian era, with poetic or magical moving parts, achieving even slight measure of this poetry or magic... that golden age of the toy alone should justify the box's existence" (J. Cornell, quoted in D. Ades, Joseph Cornell, exh. cat., New York, 1980, p. 29). A window into the immensely personal and enchanting world of the idiosyncratic artist, Cornell's assemblages allow the viewer to retreat into the world of our imaginations.
Walter Hobbs
"For Cornell, the dove was a spiritual carrier. His Dovecotes are habitats for these spiritual carriers. In lieu of doves, little round spheres move about in their habitat. These are some of Cornell's most spiritual works."
Walter Hobbs
Once housed in the exceptional collection of famed Chicago art collector, Arnold H. Maremont, Joseph Cornell's Dovecote is a classic example of the artist's series of the same title. A hard poetic syntax clarified by sense and geometry, Cornell's Dovecotes clad with mathematical wit and youthful playfulness, rescue the viewer from the emotional absence of nostalgia. Developed during the middle ages, dovecotes or colombiers were used as compartmented, often raised houses or boxes for the domestic pigeons kept by knights as a sign of prestige. Accommodating the pigeon's preference for nesting in protected holes or alcoves, the dovecotes took on a gridded format with dark recessed pigeonholes. Encountering heavily whitewashed colonial versions of dovecotes during his youthful travels throughout New England, Cornell became intrigued by the history and meaning of the word, and delighted in discovering that dovecote could be defined as a settled or harmonious group or organization, and that the Latin term for dovecote-columbarium-refers as well to a structure of vaults lined with recesses for funerary urns.
A classic succession of four columns and five rows, each horizontal register employs a series of hidden corridors through which one or more doves (balls) move. As the box is tilted, the doves briefly glimpse the viewer as they scuttle past a sequence of opened windows. A faultless poeticism, Dovecote often builds in a brief temporal delay as the watcher examines each register-as if a came with no particular objective. "Perhaps the definition of a box could be as a kind of forgotten game," Cornell suggests, "a philosophical toy of the Victorian era, with poetic or magical moving parts, achieving even slight measure of this poetry or magic... that golden age of the toy alone should justify the box's existence" (J. Cornell, quoted in D. Ades, Joseph Cornell, exh. cat., New York, 1980, p. 29). A window into the immensely personal and enchanting world of the idiosyncratic artist, Cornell's assemblages allow the viewer to retreat into the world of our imaginations.