Inside the Joseph Cornell show

The exhibition Joseph Cornell and Surrealism in New Yorkfocuses on the work of Cornell, the American pioneer of collage, montage, and assemblage art, in the decades of the 1930s and the 1950s. These years span both Cornell’s emergence and maturation as an artist and the heyday of surrealism in the United States. Surrealism launched Cornell as an exhibiting artist. It was also the cultural milieu that shaped and molded him through the first half of his career. The exhibition presents key works by Cornell as well as images by other major artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, to evoke that surrealist environment in New York and to trace Cornell’s course through it. This is the first exhibition focusing on Cornell to be hosted by a French museum since the touring exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York visited the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1981.