“Pictorially Yours”: The Correspondence of Joseph Cornell and Romana Javitz

 I am honored to announce that the electronic edition of the Archives of American Art Journal’s Spring 2025 issue containing “Pictorially Yours”: The Correspondence of Joseph Cornell and Romana Javitz, is now at the University of Chicago Press.


https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/735900


Written by myself and Diana Kamin, the essay explores the influence of visionary librarian Romana Javitz on the work of artist Joseph Cornell.


Javitz was superintendent of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, a comprehensive image repository used by working artists and designers, from 1928 to 1968. Cornell, who is most well-known for his surrealist box constructions and collages, was a long-time user of the Picture Collection and a close confidant and admirer of Javitz.


The essay draws on correspondence from the Cornell papers at the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Cornell Study Center, and the privately held Javitz estate, as well as interviews I recorded with Bernarda Shahn, Sol Libsohn, and Howard Hussey.


Through the epistolary relationship captured by the archive, we highlight the shared sensibilities of Javitz and Cornell to reframe the concept of the artistic muse and explore how the professional practice of working with images in midcentury New York shaped Cornell’s artistic practice.


Here is an excerpt from the essay:

"Whereas the muse inspires in isolation, creating a closed circuit of artistic production, the medium bridges past and present, connecting the artist with networks of cultural production and distributed authorship. These figures are found across artistic and technical fields, “between the folds of history,” doing the “quiet labor of building forums, cultivating relationships, bridging social gaps, and doing the writerly and technical translating” that creates new audiences, in the words of computer historian Laine Nooney. The role that mediums such as Javitz played for artists like Cornell was so obvious to the artists themselves that it was taken for granted, and is rarely explored by those who interpret their art."


Check it out! 😄 





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