Books like Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell

Until the publication of Deborah Solomon's Utopia Parkway, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was thought of as a recluse who made his art almost accidentally during his humdrum life, which he spent looking after his mother and sickly brother. But this "remarkably energetic, lavishly detailed and boldly interpretive biography" (Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune) established Cornell as an artist as serious as the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and conceptual artists who dominated the New York art world in his lifetime. Not only does Solomon show that Cornell's shadow boxes were vastly influential in that world, she also shows that Cornell was a regular figure there, admired by Dali, Rothko, and Rauschenberg. Most of all, she reveals his astonishing inner life, swirling with fantasies about long-dead ballerinas, visions of Paris, and otherworldly desires. "Solomon has narrowed the distance between the life and the art", Arthur C. Danto wrote in Slate",... with a sympathy and generosity one would hardly have dreamt possible".