Joseph Cornell was one of the most original and extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century. Born in 1903, he lived almost all his life with his mother and badly handicapped brother in a house on Utopia Parkway, Queens, New York. A recluse, with no formal artistic training, Cornell had an obsessive fear of female sexuality (he died a virgin) but fantasized about ballerinas and film stars, preferably long dead. These fantasies were expressed in his remarkable 'shadow boxes', the constructions on which his artistic reputation rests. Admired by the Surrealists, then the Abstract Expressionists and finally by the pop artists, Cornell remained a unique figure, both as an artist and a human being.

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Solomon, Deborah

FSG.

"Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school―here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all.
 Who was this man who served as our unofficial "artist in chief" and bolstered our country's national identity? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking façade lay a surprisingly complex figure―a lonely painter who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy. He wound up in treatment with the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. In fact, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. "What's interesting is how Rockwell's personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy," writes Solomon. "His work mirrors his own temperament―his sense of humor, his fear of depths―and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from eighteenth-century portraits."
 Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between Rockwell's despairing personality and his genius for reflecting America's brightest hopes. "The thrill of his work," she writes, "is that he was able to use a commercial form [that of magazine illustration] to thrash out his private obsessions." In American Mirror, Solomon trains her perceptive eye not only on Rockwell and his art but on the development of visual journalism as it evolved from illustration in the 1920s to photography in the 1930s to television in the 1950s. She offers vivid cameos of the many famous Americans whom Rockwell counted as friends, including President Dwight Eisenhower, the folk artist Grandma Moses, the rock musician Al Kooper, and the generation of now-forgotten painters who ushered in the Golden Age of illustration, especially J. C. Leyendecker, the reclusive legend who created the Arrow Collar Man.
 Although derided by critics in his lifetime as a mere illustrator whose work could not compete with that of the Abstract Expressionists and other modern art movements, Rockwell has since attracted a passionate following in the art world. His faith in the power of storytelling puts his work in sync with the current art scene. American Mirror brilliantly explains why he deserves to be remembered as an American master of the first rank.

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

Humor & Entertainment

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A portrait of American artist Joseph Cornell considers his unusual personality and reclusive lifestyle while examining his relationships with such contemporaries as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Susan Sontag.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Profiles the secret small life of the classification-defying American artist whose collages and shadowboxes have been labeled surreal, abstract expressionistic, and pop art

Noonday Pr

Remainder mark on the bottom edge.

Jackson Pollock: A Biography

Simon&Schuster

Joseph Cornell was one of the most original and extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century. Born in 1903, he lived almost all his life with his mother and badly handicapped brother in a house on Utopia Parkway, Queens, New York. A recluse, with no formal artistic training, Cornell had an obsessive fear of female sexuality (he died a virgin) but fantasized about ballerinas and film stars, preferably long dead. These fantasies were expressed in his remarkable 'shadow boxes', the constructions on which his artistic reputation rests. Admired by the Surrealists, then the Abstract Expressionists and finally by the pop artists, Cornell remained a unique figure, both as an artist and a human being.

Utopia Parkway: Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Biographies & Memoirs

Pimlico

With more than 140 of her best images reproduced in stunning tritone, including many never published before and others not seen since they appeared in the pages of the legendary Harper's Bazaar of the 1950s, Lillian Bassman: Women offers a retrospective view of an extraordinary career in photography. At 91 and still hard at work, Bassman is a beloved figure in the pantheon of fashion photographers. Her signature style, once described by Richard Avedon as making "visible that heart-breaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things," offered a sensuous and intimate vision of modern women. Says Judith Thurman, "Bassman's women--perennially soulful,elusively chic--have the poignance of an endangered species." Well-known art writer and journalist Deborah Solomon contributes an introduction. An illustrated chronology gives a cinematic overview of a remarkable life.

Lillian Bassman: Women

Graphic Design

Harry N. Abrams

Deborah Solomon's biography sets Jackson Pollock in his time and portrays him as a shy, often withdrawn person, full of insecurities and self-doubts, and frequently unable to express himself about his art or its meaning. Solomon interviewed two hundred people who knew Pollock and his work and she has drawn extensively on Pollock's own writings and other personal papers. She examines the artist's relationships with his family; his wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner; art patron Peggy Guggenheim; the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and many more.

Cooper Square Press

No artist ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his disquieting shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Legends about Cornell abound--as the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent--but never before Utopia Parkway has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions. Cornell was haunted by dreams and visions, yet the site of his imaginings couldn't have been more ordinary: a small house he shared with his mother and invalid brother in Queens, New York. In its cluttered basement, he spent his nights arranging photographs, cut-outs and other humble disjecta into some of the most romantic works to exist in three dimensions. Cornell was no recluse, however: admired by successive generations of vanguard artists, he formed friendships with figures as diverse as Duchamp, de Kooning, and Warhol and had romantically charged encounters with Susan Sontag and Yoko Ono--not to mention unrequited crushes on countless shop girls and waitresses. All this he recorded compulsively in a diary that, along with his shadow boxes, forms one of the oddest and most affecting records ever made of a life. It is from such documents, and from a decade of sustained attention to Cornell, that Deborah Solomon has fashioned the definitive biography of one of America's most powerful and unusual modern artists.

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (ArtWorks)

MFA Publications

The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England (New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture)

Literature & Fiction

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Solomon, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Solomon, Deborah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Solomon, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Jackson Pollock: A Biography

Utopia Parkway: Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Lillian Bassman: Women

Jackson Pollock: A Biography

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (ArtWorks)

The Poem and the Garden in Early Modern England (New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture)