Director Thomas Messer declared Joseph Cornell to be ”an archivist of a vanished age” in the catalogue introduction to the artist’s 1967 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In the catalogue essay, Diane Waldman traces the rise of Cornell’s artistic career, his Surrealist contemporaries, and the influence of film and theater on his art. She notes that Cornell’s three-dimensional box structures have ”the ability to maintain a dialectical tension between the painterly and the sculptural.“ The catalogue also includes a bibliography and 28 color and black-and-white reproductions of his boxes and collages.