Children's Stories and "Child-Time" in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde

Leppanen-Guerra (history of art and architecture, DePaul U.) studies Joseph Cornell, a curious avant-garde artist usually known for his box-constructions, and his life-long interest with children, their stories and experience of time. The themes of his work are rarely as decidedly political as other artists of the time, but she situates Cornell among other avant-garde artists in their desire to formulate an alternative to mechanistic, utilitarian bourgeois society. Each chapter, full of spectacular b&w photographs, is grounded in a particular child's story: ABCs and the child's initiation to language; dreams and disruptions of logical sequence in Cornell's ballet scenario from Hans Christian Anderson; Cornell's counterpart to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's philosopher-explorer, The Little Prince; fluidity of space and time in child wandering in Alice and Wonderland, Andre Breton's Nadja and Cornell's Monseieur Phot; more play with surface and depth in Cornell's homage to Through the Looking Glass, Untitled (Journal d'Agriculture Pratique); Cornell's engagement with Beauty and the Beast in the context of over-coming the monstrousness of WWII; and finally an exploration of immortality and eternity in Cornell's diorama version of Sleeping Beauty. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Analisa Leppanen-Guerra teaches in the History of Art & Architecture Department at DePaul University, Chicago, USA. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture.