Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, just arrived in theaters. It's an adaptation of the September 11-themed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.
But before Foer became a novelist, he was an aspiring sculptor. As a college freshman, he was introduced to the work of Joseph Cornell, the assemblage artist best known for his fantastical collaged boxes. “I felt like this work was meant for me," Foer told Studio 360 in 2006. "The effect those boxes had on me was a feeling that I wanted to perpetuate.”
Although he ultimately settled on writing fiction, Foer remembers, “feeling that way about art, it’s like a muscle and once you know how to use it, you can use it more and it gets stronger. I didn’t know what it was like to love a work of art until Joseph Cornell came along.”
(Originally aired: November 10, 2006)
>> Is there a work of art that changed your life? Tell us in a comment below — or by e-mail.
Slideshow: Joseph Cornell's boxes
Klong
Artist: FrostAlbum: MelodicsLabel: Shadow RecordsPurchase: AmazonGuests:
Jonathan Safran Foer
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Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen is a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC Radio, and is funded in part by Ken and Lucy Lehman and the National Endowment for the Arts. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our Science and Creativity series is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Comments [4]
Two works made me become a professional artist - not saying they are the best works in the world but at the moment hit the spot!
1) the short from Woody Allen's film, NY Stories where Nick Nolte plays a stereotypical abstract expressionist. Art about art, actually. And it sounds so silly but true!
2) Soutine's paintings literally saved my life I think when I was struggling as a college student.
Rene Magritte's "Castle on the Pyraness". Later Joseph Cornell and Betye Saar. These images pointed me towards mixed media work and surrealism. I later met and was acquainted with Ms Saar, which was a big event in my life. She is a grand woman, highly intelligent and creative.
I read The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant in 2005 and knew then that I wanted to see Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. I did see it in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 2006, and now I try to paint every now and then.
Without question, the work that changed my life, was/is Picasso's Guernica. The painting is as relevant and powerful as ever.
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