Phases de la Lune

Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes in which he assembled small objects in enigmatic juxtapositions. His creations are evidence of his interest in Surrealism and the relationships between art and play, making and feeling, fragility and timelessness, and the familiar and the fantastical.

In this work, the box's interior is lined with pages from books: Francis Bacon's De Augmentis Scientiarum (The Advancement of Learning), Spanish legal writings, French astronomical charts, and parts of a German atlas showing the coast of China's Shantung peninsula. Two cutouts from a 1956 Golden Guide to stars that illustrate tide formation provide the earliest possible date for the work. On the back wall is affixed a smiling sun, taken from the lid of an "Il Sole"-brand antipasto can, above a French chart of the phases of the moon with a further smaller, smiling sun. Inside the box is a tray of cordial glasses containing marbles-possibly meant to represent the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter (with its moons, as there are two marbles in the fifth glass), and Saturn-as well as metal rods, a circle with a chain, and a large white ball. The work is similar to numerous other boxes in which Cornell used small glasses, marbles, larger balls, and astronomical imagery. Although his works seem to always defy description, a text he wrote in 1948 for an exhibition of his work at Copley Galleries, in Beverly Hills, sheds some light on the thought processes involved in the artist's works:

Shadow boxes become poetic theatres or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element's of a childhood pastime. The fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets-a connotation of moon and tides-the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea foam and billowy cloud crystallized in a pipe of fancy.

The box was said by Donald Droll (from whom the AMAM acquired it) to have been given by the artist to Ohio painter Fairfield Porter in appreciation for an article Porter wrote in Art and Literature #8 (spring 1966) on Cornell's work; Cornell later stated that it was the "only decent" article that had been published on his work.

The AMAM also possesses another box by Cornell, Sand Fountain (1954-57), as well as a drawing, Collage Entre Chien et Loup (1953).