Utopia Parkway

No artist ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell (1903-72), the self-taught American genius prized for his enchanting and disquieting shadow boxes, an art form all his own. By now, many legends surround Cornell: that of the painfully shy hermit lost in a world of books, silent movies, and long-gone ballerinas; that of the patiently devoted caretaker who would rush home from an afternoon at the Manhattan galleries to minister to his mother and invalid brother; that of the artistic innocent whose creations emerged as happy accidents from his hands. Yet Cornell and his work were cherished by the leading avant-garde figures of his day, and artists who agreed on little else agreed on Cornell's originality. Utopia Parkway - the product of Deborah Solomon's decade of sustained attention to Cornell, and the first serious biography of him - reveals him as a brilliant and relentlessly serious artist whose works are among the monuments of modern art. Admired by successive generations of vanguard artists - the Surrealists of the 1940s, tbe Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s the Pop artists of the 1960s - Cornell cultivated friendships with artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Willem d