Museé des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. October 18, 2013 – February 10, 2014
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, VA, Spring 2014
This international loan exhibition focuses on the work of Joseph Cornell, the American pioneer of collage, montage, and assemblage art, in the decades of the 1930s and the 1940s. These years span both Cornell’s emergence and maturation as an artist and the heyday of surrealism in the United States. Surrealism activated Cornell’s signature working method: collage and the related procedures of montage, assemblage, and collage. It was to surrealism that Cornell owed his basic conception of the visual image as the product of poetic juxtaposition. The exhibition will explore the diversity of Cornell’s artistic practices and formats. Juxtapositions with key works by other artists—Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Mina Loy, René Magritte, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, among others—will elucidate his activity in the context of surrealism. Joseph Cornell and Surrealism is co-curated by Sylvie Ramond, Director at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and Matthew Affron, Curator of Modern Art at the Fralin Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. A substantial catalogue featuring new scholarship by European and American specialists will accompany the exhibition. This exhibition is made possible in part through generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and from the Annenberg Foundation/GRoW Annenberg.