Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (New York Review Books Classics)

In Dime-Store Alchemy Charles Simic, one of contemporary America’s most idiosyncratic, engaging, and skillful poets, reflects on the art of the homegrown American surrealist Joseph Cornell. In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells of Cornell’s life in Utopia Parkway, Queens and of how he loved to wander the streets of New York hunting for overlooked and unexpected odds and ends. He illuminates the hermetic mysteries of Cornell’s beautiful boxes, now in major museums throughout the world—works in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art. Simic also sees Cornell’s work as exemplifying a distinctively American aesthetic, freed of slavish dependency on tradition, open to the world, improvisatory, at once homemade and universal, modest and teasing and profound. Full of unexpected riches, Dime-Store Alchemy is both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist by one of his peers, a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure again and again.