Mr. Cornell’s Dream Boxes by Jeanette Winter (review)

American artist Joseph Cornell had a strong affinity for kids and created particularly kid-friendly art, so he’s an understandable subject for this picture-book introduction. In second-person narration addressed to a hypothetical child, Winter describes that child’s view of Cornell’s life and art (“You might have seen Mr. Cornell through that window, working in the dim light”), exploring Cornell’s memory-driven creation of glass-fronted boxes of found objects reassembled into compelling and idiosyncratic scenes. The book quietly evokes Cornell’s unflashy life in his unflashy Queens house, focusing on accessible details such as his love of sweets and his inviting local children to his exhibitions. That’s not event enough to carry the chronicle on its own, however, and the book is less successful at conveying Cornell’s actual art, which here seems more like shadowbox craft than surrealist and detailed assemblages. Creamy matte pages and vignettes, in Winter’s familiar organically ungeometric, flatly textured digital figures, make the theorized child audience and Cornell himself appealing and approachable, but it’s difficult to parse or appreciate the particulars of his work. A concluding trio of muddy photographs don’t help much, focusing as they do on the kids attending Cornell’s exhibition rather than what they’re seeing there. Fortunately, the internet is rich with Cornell images in still shots and video, so this title might partner with an online exploration of the artist’s work; a subsequent art project is practically inevitable. A brief author’s note is appended, and a selected bibliography appears on the copyright page.