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©
The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ VEGAP
Joseph Cornell

Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4

ca. 1953 - 1954
Construction and collage.
50 x 30 x 11.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
491
(
1976.77
)
ROOM 48
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
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Discover some of the secrets and details invaluable to the human eye in this work.

Joseph Cornell’s deep admiration for the oeuvre of Juan Gris may have been the cause of his shift away from Surrealism and gradual espousal of the Cubist language. The influence of the Cubist painter’s crystalline compositions and use of collage began to be visible in the mid 1950s. Cornell, who was more of a poet than a visual artist, in addition to collecting all kinds of artefacts from which to construct his works, worked intensely on small scrapbooks containing notes or cuttings on themes that interested him. His fascination for Gris spurred him to compile a scrapbook devoted specially to the painter, in which he collected cuttings on the latter’s work, mixed with notes of his own, that provided him with a basis for some of his own constructions.

Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4, dated around 1953–54, belongs to a set of boxes executed as a tribute to the Spanish artist, in which the central motif is a peculiar image of a cockatoo that has been cut out and glued to a wooden support and is surrounded by a few Cubist motifs and media. In the present work, Cornell has added to the cockatoo the silhouette of its shadow cut out of black paper; it may be inspired by the shadow of the human figure in Juan Gris’s painting Man in a Café, of 1914, which was first shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1953 and is mentioned in the artist’s notes.

A chronicle of “the cycles of Venus” in the background collage made from cuttings from a yellowed newspaper of 1878, which also covers the back of the box, reflects Cornell’s interest in astronomy. He included various constructions alluding to the constellations in the exhibition of his work at the Stable Gallery in 1955.

Although it is not always easy to decipher the obscure symbology of a scholarly, labyrinthine mind like Cornell’s, it is difficult not to relate this bird confined to a glass case to the reclusion of Cornell himself, a rara avis on the American art scene.

Paloma Alarcó

20th Centurys. XX - Neodadaísmo en NorteaméricaConstructionConstruction and collage
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Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4. Joseph Cornell
Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4
Joseph Cornell

©

The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ VEGAP

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Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4. Joseph Cornell
Juan Gris Cockatoo No. 4
Joseph Cornell

©

The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ VEGAP

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