Kunsthistorisches Museum to Display Joseph Cornell's WANDERLUST, 10/19

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust" follows the Lucian Freud exhibition in 2013, and continues the series of retrospective surveys of modern masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. While Freud's work encouraged visitors to look again at paintings in the museum's Picture Gallery, the objects of the American artist Joseph Cornell will focus our attention on its magnificent Kunstkammer (Chamber of Art and Wonders).

Known as one of the greatest collectors of the twentieth century, Cornell created his own, private cabinet of curiosities every bit as fascinating and remarkable as those collected by the kings and emperors of Renaissance Europe. During the exhibition, a single vitrine of objects by Cornell will be placed within the museum's Kunstkammer in order to underline and explore this affinity. Through his works - poetic assemblages made of the objects that he found in antiquarian bookshops, flea markets, dime stores and washed up on beaches - Cornell sought to understand the workings of the universe, and the minds of its greatest protagonists from the fields of science, literature, travel, ballet, theatre, music, cinema and art.

Tracing the full arc of the artist's remarkable life and career over more than forty years, the exhibition will show more than 80 works. It will be the first survey of Joseph Cornell's work ever to be presented in Austria, and the first major exhibition in Europe for more than thirty years.

Monday, October 19, 2015 at 10 a.m. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Sabine Haag, Director-General of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Jasper Sharp, curator of the exhibition