Joseph Cornell (1903-1972)
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Joseph Cornell (1903-1972)

Dovecote

细节
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972)
Dovecote
signed and dated 'Joseph Cornell 1952' (on a paper label affixed to the reverse)
box construction--painted wood
17 x 11¾ x 3 3/8 in. (43.1 x 29.8 x 8.5 cm.)
Executed in 1952.
来源
Stable Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Maremont, Winnetka, acquired from the above
Their sale; Sotheby Park Bernet, Inc., New York, 1 May 1974, lot 39
Pace Gallery, New York
Galerie Daniel Varenne, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1975
出版
N. Laliberte and A. Mogelon, Art in Boxes, New York, 1973.
D. Waldman, Joseph Cornell, New York, 1976, no. 85 (illustrated).
展览
Art Institute of Chicago, 63rd American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, December 1959-January 1960.
Illinois Institute of Technology, Maremont Collection, April 1961, no. 139 (illustrated).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The Art of Assemblage, October-November 1961, no. 52.
Seattle, World's Fair and Waltham, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Art since 1959, U.S.A., April-November 1962.
Washington, D.C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Treasures of 20th Century Art from the Maremont Collection, 1964.
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Joseph Cornell, May-June 1967, p. 38 (illustrated).
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 200 Years of American Sculpture, March-September 1976, pp. 165 and 339 (illustrated).
注意事项
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in the outcome of the sale of certain lots consigned for sale. This will usually be where it has guaranteed to the Seller that whatever the outcome of the auction, the Seller will receive a minimum sale price for the work. This is known as a minimum price guarantee. This is such a lot.

荣誉呈献

Jonathan Laib
Jonathan Laib

拍品专文

"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.