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Lot Essay
Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime. Joseph Cornell
Six dancers are the precious subjects of Joseph Cornell’s Zizi Jeanmaire Lobster Ballet - the title role accompanied by five of Cornell’s extraordinary red lobsters. This shadowbox, a prime example of Cornell’s most celebrated and signature medium, exemplifies the artist’s persistent fascination with the world around him. Ephemera: magazine cutouts, found objects, postcards – are transformed from commonplace to personal within the compositional confines of the artist’s displays. Cornell’s lobster boxes are exceedingly rare, he made only four works featuring this motif – this is the only example to also feature Zizi.
Renee “Zizi” Jeanmaire, the eponymous principal dancer, came into Cornell’s like around the time of the box’s execution. The two met when Zizi performed in New York with Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit. In celebration of the ballet company’s arrival in New York, Alexander Iolas, the director of Hugo Gallery, organized an exhibition that featured décor from Les Ballets de Paris alongside Cornell’s interpretations of Romantic ballet. Upon introduction to Jeanmaire, Cornell took her as a muse, composing several works in her honor in the years following.
A product of this infatuation, Untitled (Zizi Jeanmaire Lobster Ballet) pays homage to the ballerina, who performs alongside a corps de ballet of red plastic lobsters in mesh tutus. “Cornell’s approach to his subject was without ridicule,” writes art historian Diane Waldman. “He delighted the whimsy of lobsters wearing tutus…” (D. Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002, p. 64). A reference to ‘The Lobster Quadrille,’ a song from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the dancing shellfish serve as a reminder of Cornell’s genuine investment in worldbuilding and imagination in art-making. Jeanmaire becomes the Alice of Cornell’s shadowbox, experiencing a parallel miniaturization as she moves from real to imagined stage. By rearranging these once-discarded objects and treating them with compositional care, Cornell builds a microcosmic world where storybook fantasy and external reality are both upheld as fine art.
Although self-taught and often considered isolated from larger New York cultural circles, Cornell’s shadowboxes evidence his attunement to 20th century artistic movements. In their appropriation of found objects and media clippings, they recall Dadaist montage. When seen as imagined worlds of interiority and wonder, Cornell’s boxes find resonance with the Surrealist interest in art as a vehicle for unconscious expression. So, while Cornell’s interior reflections are revolutionary for their investment in the fantastical, the shadowboxes also situate themselves within art historical tradition – of found object, of montage, and of unconscious release.
Ostensibly ordinary found objects become cherished within the compositional confines of Cornell’s modern curiosity cabinets. Through rich juxtaposition and imagination, Cornell simultaneously points to the outside world and his own interiority, inviting the viewer to reflect upon each. “Cornell was a master appropriator, using the images of artists he admired as his way of engaging them in a meaningful dialogue. He altered found objects in a desire to enhance their identity…These images could be used over and over again, but each represented a different thought process and a different set of emotions. Each box relates to the others—they are complete in and of themselves, but indispensable to one another” (D. Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002, p. 139).
Six dancers are the precious subjects of Joseph Cornell’s Zizi Jeanmaire Lobster Ballet - the title role accompanied by five of Cornell’s extraordinary red lobsters. This shadowbox, a prime example of Cornell’s most celebrated and signature medium, exemplifies the artist’s persistent fascination with the world around him. Ephemera: magazine cutouts, found objects, postcards – are transformed from commonplace to personal within the compositional confines of the artist’s displays. Cornell’s lobster boxes are exceedingly rare, he made only four works featuring this motif – this is the only example to also feature Zizi.
Renee “Zizi” Jeanmaire, the eponymous principal dancer, came into Cornell’s like around the time of the box’s execution. The two met when Zizi performed in New York with Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit. In celebration of the ballet company’s arrival in New York, Alexander Iolas, the director of Hugo Gallery, organized an exhibition that featured décor from Les Ballets de Paris alongside Cornell’s interpretations of Romantic ballet. Upon introduction to Jeanmaire, Cornell took her as a muse, composing several works in her honor in the years following.
A product of this infatuation, Untitled (Zizi Jeanmaire Lobster Ballet) pays homage to the ballerina, who performs alongside a corps de ballet of red plastic lobsters in mesh tutus. “Cornell’s approach to his subject was without ridicule,” writes art historian Diane Waldman. “He delighted the whimsy of lobsters wearing tutus…” (D. Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002, p. 64). A reference to ‘The Lobster Quadrille,’ a song from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the dancing shellfish serve as a reminder of Cornell’s genuine investment in worldbuilding and imagination in art-making. Jeanmaire becomes the Alice of Cornell’s shadowbox, experiencing a parallel miniaturization as she moves from real to imagined stage. By rearranging these once-discarded objects and treating them with compositional care, Cornell builds a microcosmic world where storybook fantasy and external reality are both upheld as fine art.
Although self-taught and often considered isolated from larger New York cultural circles, Cornell’s shadowboxes evidence his attunement to 20th century artistic movements. In their appropriation of found objects and media clippings, they recall Dadaist montage. When seen as imagined worlds of interiority and wonder, Cornell’s boxes find resonance with the Surrealist interest in art as a vehicle for unconscious expression. So, while Cornell’s interior reflections are revolutionary for their investment in the fantastical, the shadowboxes also situate themselves within art historical tradition – of found object, of montage, and of unconscious release.
Ostensibly ordinary found objects become cherished within the compositional confines of Cornell’s modern curiosity cabinets. Through rich juxtaposition and imagination, Cornell simultaneously points to the outside world and his own interiority, inviting the viewer to reflect upon each. “Cornell was a master appropriator, using the images of artists he admired as his way of engaging them in a meaningful dialogue. He altered found objects in a desire to enhance their identity…These images could be used over and over again, but each represented a different thought process and a different set of emotions. Each box relates to the others—they are complete in and of themselves, but indispensable to one another” (D. Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002, p. 139).