Boxing the City
Gaby Wood, 31 July 1997
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell
by Deborah Solomon.
Cape, 426 pp., £25, June 1997,0 224 04242 4 Show More
by Deborah Solomon.
Cape, 426 pp., £25, June 1997,
“... He was primarily an archivist, but an archivist of a world that didn’t exist. He was a compulsive collector, a browser, cross-indexer. When he died the basement where he worked was full of cardboard boxes marked with labels like ‘stamps’, ‘maps’, ‘Dürer’, ‘plastic shells’, ‘glasses’, ‘cording’. He left a diary, which he called a ‘repository laboratory, picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key ... ”