Untitled (Medici Boy)

Joseph Cornell spent more than forty years creating mystifyingly poetic works of art that engaged his lifelong preoccupation with science and imagination, knowledge and wonder. Possessing a penchant for art history, Cornell had a particular affinity for the Medici family as evidenced by his frequent use of their Renaissance-era portraits, which he had encountered first hand at the 1939 World’s Fair. Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy, from the collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, in particular captivated the artist. An avid collector of memorabilia and ephemera, Cornell possessed countless reproductions of Pinturicchio’s painting, although only a few of them made their way into his art. The most notable example is visible within Medici Slot Machine, 1943, which sold at Christie’s in 2014 for $7.78 million, a world record for the artist. Both Medici Slot Machine and Untitled (Medici Boy) utilize a reproduction of Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy, and it has been postulated that Cornell was drawn to these Renaissance youths by his own perception of the rarified early years of his childhood in Nyack, where his mother and father were both important figures. That Cornell encapsulated these youthful portraits in vitrine-like boxes, recalling architectural niches as well the slot machines used by children in arcades, and scoring the physical images so as to appear as if they are looking out a window, echoes his desire to permanently capture the innocence and intangibility of childhood.

The present lot comes from the estate of Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, one of the best known acting couples of both stage and screen. Anne maintained a close friendship with Cornell in the last years of his life, first visiting him at his home at 3708 Utopia Parkway in 1969 with her two friends, writer Leila Hadley and fellow actress Betsy von Furstenberg. For Cornell, who had recently lost both his mother and brother, whom the artist had lived with in Queens, visits such as those from Anne Jackson were crucial in helping him assuage his loneliness. To illustrate the closeness of their friendship, Cornell gifted Anne with Untitled (Medici Boy) in 1971, a year before his death, and it remained in her collection for over 40 years. The present lot is not only an illustrative example of one of the most renowned series in Cornell’s oeuvre, but an incredibly personal and intimate symbol of a relationship between two great artists.