Untitled (Sun Box)

Although spare in appearance, this box brings together several familiar themes in Cornell‘s work: birds (associated with the ring), travel, cosmology, and popular imagery. The startling, grotesquely grinning paper sun suggests children’s entertainment, perhaps even a cardboard theater. The contrast between this yellow sun and the white cork balls, which by association become moons, is echoed in the white and yellow dots of paint, meticulously formed into circles, for all their apparently random splattering. The formal and the metaphorical are beautifully balanced here, as so often in Cornell’s work. — Entry, Dawn Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, p. 82-83.