Press & Reviews, Selected Excerpts

The Bates College Museum of Art selected works by Thomas Cornell that capture his intellectual interests and the broad techniques and media he used over 43 of his 50 years as an artist. These notes on the Bates collection, which includes five drawings, twelve prints, and two paintings, reflect its history, how he went about the work, and what it meant to him. While Cornell was an Amherst College senior …

—Thoughts on Bates College Museum of Art Collection, Christa Cornell, March 2022

Since his death at 75 in 2012, Thomas Cornell has not had the kind of retrospective attention he deserves as a brilliant printmaker and painter. In his lifetime, his prints and oils brought him critical acclaim. He also taught several generations of students in his 50-year tenure at Bowdoin College. A Vision Accomplished: Thomas Cornell provides an excellent sampling, starting with a selection of prints from the 1960s. In Michelangelo …

—Carl Little, Review in Art New England, January/February 2021; Exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum, University of Maine, Bangor Maine

Before his death last December Thomas Cornell had completed fifty years as a faculty member in the Bowdoin College Art Department. He arrived at Bowdoin in 1962 with a reputation based on his prodigious skill as a printmaker. His earliest series of etchings of monkeys, executed for a book of selections from Thomas Huxley’s History of the Manlike Apes, had already been singled out for purchase by William Lieberman, then …

—Martica Sawin, Essay for Gallery Exhibition, August 2013

These prints are postcards from the edge — like artifacts from expeditions into the unmappable id or broken shards of our collective memories. What makes this work so instantly compelling is the sheer brilliance of Cornell’s technique. His drawing is apt, and his mastery of print techniques seems preternatural…Cornell was a sophisticated printmaker and a deep thinker drawn to the explosively subversive potential of human nature. “The Priority of Nature” …

—Daniel Kany, Maine Sunday Telegram, September 15, 2013

Thomas Cornell’s (ambitions) are mythic… Like the greatest interpreter of this subject, Poussin, Cornell adumbrates a personal vision, updating the actors and the setting, and going for the spirit (not the letter) of classicism.

—George M. Tapley, Jr., Arts Magazine, February 1983

Cornell aspires to a type of history painting rooted in classical tradition and yet applicable to contemporary life. Such an ambition defies recent art history. Hence the problem Cornell faces: to breathe life into tradition so that it will speak to the needs of the present.

—Alan Wallach, Arts Magazine, February 1980

What works best for Cornell, I think, is the paradox of his refined, natural, classic (never neoclassic) style coupled with primal, sometimes orgiastic subject matter… This exhibit is a wonderful opportunity to view work by a key figurative artist who is rarely seen on the west coast.

—Ruth Weisberg, Artweek, December 8, 1979

…Cornell’s version of the Maine eco-aesthetic is stylistically unique. Where the majority of artists in Maine respond to the power of this place with realistic representations, romantic impressions, and lyrical abstractions of land and sea, Cornell addresses the Maine experience in an antique, even archly didactic manner. His purely perceptual paintings are more easily approachable than those generated by dogma, but his application of classical figuration to contemporary convictions is …

—Edgar Allen Beem, Maine Times,
November 3, 1989

Cornell is our preeminent portraitist… This (1992 Self Portrait) is a wonderfully accomplished work in both style and subjectiveness…it goes beyond most other works in the show, indeed, beyond most other portraits that we find in Maine. The Cornell work joins consideration with becoming self-esteem. It is a mixture that is the goal of public portraits, but only seldom achieved. The 1992 is so excellent and profound that it is …

—Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram, May 29, 1994

His self-assigned task, then, has been to mediate between direct experience and the synthetic artistic ideal. The resultant paintings have a bi-polar anchorage in these two antitheses so that they are animated by an on-going dialogue between the quotidian and the timeless…It is in this series of dichotomies that the post-modernity, that is, up-to-the-minute contemporaneity, of Cornell’s work manifests itself…Cornell’s work is a radical today as Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe …

—Martica Sawin, Bowdoin College Catalogue, 1990 (excerpt)

Cornell, after two years of work, has just completed and installed a 22-foot series of paintings entitled “The Four Seasons.” …In this age, the panels are an exceptional achievement in figurative art. Sensual, voluptuous, ripe – not as muscled as Michelangelo, not as full-blown as Rubens – Cornell’s figures demonstrate his pursuit of the classical goal.

—Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram, May 11, 1986

One of the images in the painting that I am most pleased with and I think has importance, is the image of the father with the two children. If you look through Western art, it is always the Virgin and the Child and the father is always distant; even in the famous Michelangelo Sistine Chapel image, they are almost touching…The issue now is perhaps to have men touching children, and …

—Cornell, Theresa Woody-Rhodes Interview, Maine Public Broadcasting Network, April 1986

Among the artists whose work struck me as exceptions to this dismal standard are Lennart Anderson…Ann Chernow…Thomas Cornell, for his oil sketch of The Birth of Nature, William Beckman…Yvonne Jacquette…Paul Resika…and Daniel Bennett Schwartz.

—Hilton Kramer, The New York Observer, July 11,2005

Thomas Cornell’s meditation on Dionysos reflects his concern for the relationship between humanity and nature, including a response to feminism. The maneads were associates of Dionysos, women who left their domestic chores to be free in nature. The etchings were made outside in a particular environment. In the 1960’s, much of Cornell’s work was made in response to rapid social changes in the world. He found Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy …

—The Manead Etchings, by Rose Marie Frick, Frick Gallery, 1990

Mr. Cornell’s forte is a certain kind of shimmering, almost immaterial light, in which the very atmosphere is rendered as thin veils of color…he has captured it with notable success in his own self-portrait.

—Hilton Kramer, The New York Times, November 30, 1979

As a master of traditional techniques in etching and lithography at their purest, Mr. Cornell must have few peers today. Since he is also a correspondingly proficient draftsman and a determined humanist, he gets a high mark on this group of prints…

—John Canaday, The New York Times, January 15, 1972

Thomas Cornell’s paintings and prints always presented a message… In the early ‘60’s, he portrayed French revolutionary figures clearly out of sympathy with the revolution. He went on to print illustrated broadsides about civil rights focusing on Frederick Douglass, and later painted a large dance of death against the Vietnam War. In the early ‘70’s he made some remarkable images of fiercely feminist nude women,. Thomas Comell offers yet more …

—Paul Smith, Arts Magazine, February 1982

Tom has always been very good at portraiture… In my typical art-historical fashion, I immediately attempted to place these portrait drawings in relationship to others both past and present. Among the many possibilities that occurred to me, I thought first of some of the great French draughtsmen of the nineteenth century; but the apparatus did not work… In the final analysis, however, great art always defies the question of influences. …

—Marvin Sadik, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Bowdoin College Catalogue, 1971

For those who thirst for a taste of genius combined with a historical perspective in art, Thomas Cornell provides this through his work as master draftsman and superb graphic artist. At the same time, he moves us into the meaning of things that we have experienced; the horrors of war, the civil rights movement, and indeed all classic struggles for justice are here reborn. The elegance and courage of Frederick …

—David C. Driskell, Fisk University Catalogue, November 1967

At the Rex Evans Gallery, Thomas Cornell, a prodigious young talent, demonstrates that some of our ablest young artists continue to seek their fulfillment by refining and enlarging the traditional realm of figurative art without denying their personal vision. In a period which likes to speak of art as ‘forward looking’…there are few young artists who choose to concern themselves with basic humanistic ideas and with historical personages who symbolize …

—Henry J. Seldis, Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1962 and February 1965

…These intentional mixtures of time and place are not disturbing because of the overriding unities of mood and style. A lyrical celebration of the birth of wine – of strength, Eros, and the rebirth of nature – is convincingly portrayed in the gestures and glowing colours. One believes in the equation of sexual energy and nature’s renewal…Since most of us are unfamiliar wit the particulars of Dionysus’ early years, we …

—Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Rizzoli, New York © 1987

Although there is little here (the National Academy members’ exhibition) that will surprise you, some works gain interest when read against the grain. Paintings like Thomas Cornell’s …would register as quirky-cool if moved to a different context (say, further downtown).

—Martha Schwendener, The New York Times, June 1, 2007

I discover that at the level of ideas we have much in common. He (Cornell) is a Feuerbachian, ‘humanist’ socialist, who clearly believes in the significance of a utopian, affective vision of aesthetic practice… The problematic he has set himself as a painter is that between percepts (or direct observation) and the construction of a totalized image of the world…The nearest parallel I know to Cornell is in fact Kitaj: …

—Peter Fuller, Art Monthly, March 1980