Indian Jewelry Making Book

This book is incredibly difficult for me to assess in any objective light; it is the accompanying catalog to the Joseph Cornell retrospect which I saw in Boston last summer - perhaps the single most important museum exhibition in shaping my current thoughts on art. As a document of that experience, and a reference/catalog of Cornell's work, this book is invaluable.

As far as I'm concerned, the book has only one failing - seemingly minor, but unfortunate nonetheless: virtually all of Cornell's pieces on view in the catalog were shot against a white background. The images in Hardigan's earlier book, Shadowplay/Eterniday, were shot against black, and it does wonders in terms of preserving the mystery of Cornell's work (already so harder to capture in the reduction to two dimensions) - the boxes and collages glow like little jewels against the blackness. The white backgrounds are even more strange when set against the exhibition itself, which was deliberately dimly lit for exactly the reasons noted above. In the end, though, I'm simply grateful to have an artifact of an exhibition for which the personal importance cannot be overstated.