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Lot Essay
Peering out from a hazy shroud of tinted glass, the taciturn youth of Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) confronts the viewer’s gaze. One of the most recognizable and significant creations of Joseph Cornell’s incomparable oeuvre, the present work is an excellent example from the artist’s Medici series, widely considered to be his most significant body of work. At turns enigmatic, erudite, and emotive, Cornell’s shadow boxes fuse high art with popular culture, incorporating striking renaissance visages into a web of contemporary found objects. Appraising the series, the art historian and curator Diane Waldman writes how Cornell’s “Renaissance prince and princess are more flesh and blood, and the Medici boxes are more assured and assertive. The power of his Medici narrative is made more poignant by the inclusion of objects—toy blocks and jacks—that occupy such an important place in Cornell’s own memory” (Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002 p. 69).
In his foundational Renaissance treatise on painting, first published in 1436, Leon Battista Alberti described the pictorial field as “an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen” (L. B. Alberti, De pictura, trans. C. Grayson, London, 1991, p. 54). Joseph Cornell’s peerless accomplishment was to take Alberti’s dictum literally, removing his subjects from their original context as Renaissance portraits and placing them into a three-dimensional environment. Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy), along with its companion piece Untitled (Medici Princess), are the most recognizable and celebrated works in Cornell’s revelatory Medici series. Placing Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy within a shadow box construction amongst numerous found objects, Cornell radically redefined art by his singular ability to transform his imagined wanderings and mental connections into a unique plastic expression. The central figure is a manipulated photostat after the fifteenth-century painter Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Cornell cropped the image and altered its tonality, turning a painted portrait into something resembling a daguerreotype or early sepia photograph. The result expunges the historical distance of the referent, allowing the boy to appear strikingly contemporary. Excising painterly traces from the portrait allowed Cornell to instill a greater sense of archival reality into the work, an attitude further strengthened by his removal of the fictive landscape background seen in Pinturicchio’s original painting. Further versions of the portrait appear repeated in the two side panels of the box, multiplying the potency of the sitter’s gaze. Cornell’s novel photographic manipulations and repetitions, operating in the Dada tradition, would go on to have a profound impact on the careers of Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, who visited Cornell’s studio several times.
Melding the cabinetry of the penny-arcade games Cornell played with in his youth with the tripartite format of an altarpiece, Cornell instills his work with a sense of animation where “time appears suspended and the viewer is confronted by the penetrating gaze of a boy in the cusp of manhood, at once specific and archetypal,” as the curator Sarah Lea writes (“Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy),”) in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2015, p. 144). While inspired by the triptych tradition of altars, shrines, and reliquaries, Cornell was also incorporating astutely contemporary formal structures into works like Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy). Cornell became acquainted with Piet Mondrian after the Dutch artist relocated to New York City, and the tripartite division of his boxes, novel to the Medici series, began soon after. The lower register, where a rectangular glass vitrine encloses two balls among other found objects, further emphasizes the liminal temporality of the main figure, placing him in juxtaposition to objects suggesting the notion of childhood play. Each element in the present work was painstakingly chosen by Cornell after years of consideration, each choice a window into his interior mind, putting his thoughts, memories, and dreams on public display. As Waldman notes, here “the complex play of imagery, sequentially strung out (or spliced) like a series of film clips, with the implication of movement in both time and space, reconstructs the history of the Renaissance prince and juxtaposes the images of his imaginary childhood… with current objects (marbles and jacks), so that the Renaissance child becomes contemporary. Certain objects are brought into the present through color, while others, monochromatic, recede into the past” (Joseph Cornell, New York, 1977, p. 21).
The Medici series was first inspired by Cornell’s frequent visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, where the exhibition Masterpieces of Art brought together hundreds of important Old Master paintings, including Bronzino’s Portrait of Fernando de’ Medici, Perugino’s Portrait of Piero de’ Medici, Raphael’s Guiliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, and other portraits by Pinturicchio and Caravaggio, among others. The many portraits of the famed Medici family on view at the Fair in Flushing, Queens—the same neighborhood where Cornell lived most of his life—clearly inspired his Medici boxes, which first appeared soon after. Focusing on the Florentine family renowned for sponsoring the Renaissance rejuvenation of the arts, Cornell linked himself to the tradition of the ‘Renaissance man,’ self-taught individuals thoroughly conversant in a wide range of disciplines. Cornell, whose passion for poetry, ballet, and opera mingled with his fascination with train timetables, old world hotels, and antique urban maps, saw himself in figures like Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished in the enlightened environment fostered by the Medici. Intriguingly, the series began at a critical time in the artist’s life, with the world consumed in war and his life awash in great uncertainty. Through the war, Cornell was employed as a fabricator in a defense plant, and his work on the series allowed a reprieve from the stress of seeing his beloved Europe engulfed in violence. His work on the boxes permitted his mind to wander far from the wartime production line or the battlefields of Europe and into the idealized cultured paradises of the past, as well as a portal into his own nostalgic remembrance of childhood.
Formally, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) follows the found-object tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, while his precise formal arrangements are related to René Magritte. The box format recalls as well Max Ernst’s three-dimensional collages such as Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Cornell had deep ties to the Surrealists, exhibiting with them at Julien Levy gallery and in the 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, where the then thirty-three-year old artist exhibited two of his early boxes among masterpieces from his heroes, including Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer as well as his contemporaries Giorgio de Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, and Picasso.
While working in close proximity to the Surrealists, Cornell simultaneously engaged with and inspired the small group of New York School painters who would go on to revolutionize American painting with their gestural abstract painting. He maintained a close friendship with Mark Rothko, who likewise expressed skepticism of the artistic establishment and held a firm belief in the spiritual potency of art. Robert Motherwell found Cornell among the most erudite and worldly of his associates, a remarkable feat considering the fact that Cornell was self-educated and rarely traveled beyond his studio in Queens and his downtown Manhattan haunts. “What kind of man is this,” Motherwell later wrote in 1953, “who from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century ‘grand tour’ of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s looks at a certain morning of 1879, and of the cast-iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne?” (quoted in J. Sharp, “The Pierrot Who Never Saw Paris: Joseph Cornell and His Relationship with Europe,” in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, op. cit., pp. 50-52).
Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) succinctly captures the revolutionary impact Joseph Cornell has had on succeeding generations of artists. Straddling Surrealism and the New York School, and yet resolutely his own, Cornell articulated a startlingly original visual language that redefined the expressive potential of assemblage. His ability to transform Renaissance portraiture through photographic manipulation, seriality, and the poetics of the found object introduced new ways of thinking about temporality, authorship, and the nature of the image—methods that would reverberate through the work of Rauschenberg, Warhol, and countless others. But beyond its art‑historical influence, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) distills the central concerns that animated Cornell’s imagination: the permeability of past and present, the fragility of memory, and the longing for a world just out of reach. By situating a fifteenth‑century youth within a luminous, dreamlike chamber of his own invention, Cornell creates a space where nostalgia becomes a form of inquiry and where looking becomes an act of emotional projection. The work stands as both an homage to the Renaissance and a deeply personal meditation on the inner life—an emblem of Cornell’s belief that art could resurrect histories, awaken childhood reveries, and conjure an atmosphere of wonder from the humblest remnants of everyday existence. In its quiet radiance and inexhaustible depth, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) endures not simply as a landmark of the Medici series, but as one of Cornell’s most profound reflections on time, memory, and the imaginative possibilities of the box as a vessel for the human spirit.
In his foundational Renaissance treatise on painting, first published in 1436, Leon Battista Alberti described the pictorial field as “an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen” (L. B. Alberti, De pictura, trans. C. Grayson, London, 1991, p. 54). Joseph Cornell’s peerless accomplishment was to take Alberti’s dictum literally, removing his subjects from their original context as Renaissance portraits and placing them into a three-dimensional environment. Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy), along with its companion piece Untitled (Medici Princess), are the most recognizable and celebrated works in Cornell’s revelatory Medici series. Placing Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy within a shadow box construction amongst numerous found objects, Cornell radically redefined art by his singular ability to transform his imagined wanderings and mental connections into a unique plastic expression. The central figure is a manipulated photostat after the fifteenth-century painter Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Cornell cropped the image and altered its tonality, turning a painted portrait into something resembling a daguerreotype or early sepia photograph. The result expunges the historical distance of the referent, allowing the boy to appear strikingly contemporary. Excising painterly traces from the portrait allowed Cornell to instill a greater sense of archival reality into the work, an attitude further strengthened by his removal of the fictive landscape background seen in Pinturicchio’s original painting. Further versions of the portrait appear repeated in the two side panels of the box, multiplying the potency of the sitter’s gaze. Cornell’s novel photographic manipulations and repetitions, operating in the Dada tradition, would go on to have a profound impact on the careers of Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, who visited Cornell’s studio several times.
Melding the cabinetry of the penny-arcade games Cornell played with in his youth with the tripartite format of an altarpiece, Cornell instills his work with a sense of animation where “time appears suspended and the viewer is confronted by the penetrating gaze of a boy in the cusp of manhood, at once specific and archetypal,” as the curator Sarah Lea writes (“Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy),”) in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2015, p. 144). While inspired by the triptych tradition of altars, shrines, and reliquaries, Cornell was also incorporating astutely contemporary formal structures into works like Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy). Cornell became acquainted with Piet Mondrian after the Dutch artist relocated to New York City, and the tripartite division of his boxes, novel to the Medici series, began soon after. The lower register, where a rectangular glass vitrine encloses two balls among other found objects, further emphasizes the liminal temporality of the main figure, placing him in juxtaposition to objects suggesting the notion of childhood play. Each element in the present work was painstakingly chosen by Cornell after years of consideration, each choice a window into his interior mind, putting his thoughts, memories, and dreams on public display. As Waldman notes, here “the complex play of imagery, sequentially strung out (or spliced) like a series of film clips, with the implication of movement in both time and space, reconstructs the history of the Renaissance prince and juxtaposes the images of his imaginary childhood… with current objects (marbles and jacks), so that the Renaissance child becomes contemporary. Certain objects are brought into the present through color, while others, monochromatic, recede into the past” (Joseph Cornell, New York, 1977, p. 21).
The Medici series was first inspired by Cornell’s frequent visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, where the exhibition Masterpieces of Art brought together hundreds of important Old Master paintings, including Bronzino’s Portrait of Fernando de’ Medici, Perugino’s Portrait of Piero de’ Medici, Raphael’s Guiliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, and other portraits by Pinturicchio and Caravaggio, among others. The many portraits of the famed Medici family on view at the Fair in Flushing, Queens—the same neighborhood where Cornell lived most of his life—clearly inspired his Medici boxes, which first appeared soon after. Focusing on the Florentine family renowned for sponsoring the Renaissance rejuvenation of the arts, Cornell linked himself to the tradition of the ‘Renaissance man,’ self-taught individuals thoroughly conversant in a wide range of disciplines. Cornell, whose passion for poetry, ballet, and opera mingled with his fascination with train timetables, old world hotels, and antique urban maps, saw himself in figures like Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished in the enlightened environment fostered by the Medici. Intriguingly, the series began at a critical time in the artist’s life, with the world consumed in war and his life awash in great uncertainty. Through the war, Cornell was employed as a fabricator in a defense plant, and his work on the series allowed a reprieve from the stress of seeing his beloved Europe engulfed in violence. His work on the boxes permitted his mind to wander far from the wartime production line or the battlefields of Europe and into the idealized cultured paradises of the past, as well as a portal into his own nostalgic remembrance of childhood.
Formally, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) follows the found-object tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, while his precise formal arrangements are related to René Magritte. The box format recalls as well Max Ernst’s three-dimensional collages such as Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Cornell had deep ties to the Surrealists, exhibiting with them at Julien Levy gallery and in the 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, where the then thirty-three-year old artist exhibited two of his early boxes among masterpieces from his heroes, including Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer as well as his contemporaries Giorgio de Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, and Picasso.
While working in close proximity to the Surrealists, Cornell simultaneously engaged with and inspired the small group of New York School painters who would go on to revolutionize American painting with their gestural abstract painting. He maintained a close friendship with Mark Rothko, who likewise expressed skepticism of the artistic establishment and held a firm belief in the spiritual potency of art. Robert Motherwell found Cornell among the most erudite and worldly of his associates, a remarkable feat considering the fact that Cornell was self-educated and rarely traveled beyond his studio in Queens and his downtown Manhattan haunts. “What kind of man is this,” Motherwell later wrote in 1953, “who from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century ‘grand tour’ of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s looks at a certain morning of 1879, and of the cast-iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne?” (quoted in J. Sharp, “The Pierrot Who Never Saw Paris: Joseph Cornell and His Relationship with Europe,” in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, op. cit., pp. 50-52).
Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) succinctly captures the revolutionary impact Joseph Cornell has had on succeeding generations of artists. Straddling Surrealism and the New York School, and yet resolutely his own, Cornell articulated a startlingly original visual language that redefined the expressive potential of assemblage. His ability to transform Renaissance portraiture through photographic manipulation, seriality, and the poetics of the found object introduced new ways of thinking about temporality, authorship, and the nature of the image—methods that would reverberate through the work of Rauschenberg, Warhol, and countless others. But beyond its art‑historical influence, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) distills the central concerns that animated Cornell’s imagination: the permeability of past and present, the fragility of memory, and the longing for a world just out of reach. By situating a fifteenth‑century youth within a luminous, dreamlike chamber of his own invention, Cornell creates a space where nostalgia becomes a form of inquiry and where looking becomes an act of emotional projection. The work stands as both an homage to the Renaissance and a deeply personal meditation on the inner life—an emblem of Cornell’s belief that art could resurrect histories, awaken childhood reveries, and conjure an atmosphere of wonder from the humblest remnants of everyday existence. In its quiet radiance and inexhaustible depth, Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) endures not simply as a landmark of the Medici series, but as one of Cornell’s most profound reflections on time, memory, and the imaginative possibilities of the box as a vessel for the human spirit.