This weekend I had the time to take a walk through The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, fortunately, is about three blocks from my home in New York City. I was interested in one of the exhibits currently in place: Birds of a Feather, showing the “boxes” that artist Joseph Cornell has made famous. Some refer to these boxes as “visual poems” and, indeed, they are. Cornell managed to capture mementos of his time inside these perfectly arranged boxes, from post cards, to hotel receipts to images, but, always, a newspaper page, logo or column of type lining up the box. That is what caught my eye, especially because this exhibit is about Cornell’s admiration for the Spanish cubist artist Juan Gris.

As the exhibit description puts it:

On October 22, 1953, Joseph Cornell wrote at the top of a page in his diary: “Juan Gris / Janis Yesterday.” The annotation referred to the previous day’s outing, when, on one of his frequent trips to the gallery district in midtown Manhattan, Cornell visited the Sidney Janis Gallery on East 57th Street. Among a presentation of approximately 30 works by modern artists, one alone captivated Cornell—Juan Gris’s celebrated collage The Man at the Café (1914), which is now a promised gift to the Museum as part of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection.

The Man at the Cafe is one of Juan Gris’ most revered works, and it shows a man in a cafe, overwhelmed and covered almost completely by the reading matter coming his way. How appropriate, I thought. And this was 1914. How would Gris capture the overwhelming amount of content that buries us today with the constant flow of information. I imagine that contemporary artists are already working on the concept. Joseph Cornell cited Juan Gris’s Cubist masterwork “The Man at the Café,” as the direct inspiration for his shadow box series from the 1950s.

Here is an image of The Man at the Cafe: