J o s e p h
COR NELL 19 0 3 - 197 2 A pioneer of assemblage
Joseph Cornell’s biography, if such an entity were imaginable to him, could have seemed only a grim joke, an assemblage of remarkably unremarkable moments. A biography needs a hero, a Picasso or a Jackson Pollock, someone to get drunk, smash up cars, and bed women. Cornell didn’t drink, never learned to drive, and, to his regret, died a virgin. On the other hand,
Joseph
CORNELL
Cornell was no stranger to desire. For women he felt a deep reverence as well as a nearly breathless longing. In his sixties, he finally relented and had his first physical relationships. But up until then he was unable to permit himself anything as impulsive as a love affair. An art monk, Cornell was determined to repent, for what sin he was not quite sure. Of one thing, however, he was sure: he was drawn to a vision of chasteness for himself, a vision that governed the arc of his life as well as his work. Paradoxically, the same impulse that condemned him to a lacerating aloneness would lead to romantic rapture in his art.
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He had no formal training in
fragments of once beautiful and
art and his most characteristic
precious objects, relying on the
works are his highly distinctive
Surrealist technique of irrational
`boxes’. These are simple boxes,
juxtaposition and on the evocation
usually glass-fronted, in which he
of nostalgia for his appeal (he
arranged surprising collections of
befriended several members of the
photographs or Victorian bric-à-
Surrealist movement who settled
brac in a way that has been said
in the USA during the Second
to combine the formal austerity
World War). Cornell also painted
of Constructivism with the lively
and made Surrealist films.
fantasy
of
Surrealism.
Like
“[Cornell] spent most of his life in
Kurt Schwitters he could create
a frame house on Utopia Parkway
poetry from the commonplace.
in Queens, New York, with his
Unlike Schwitters, however, he
mother and his crippled brother,
was fascinated not by refuse,
Robert. From there this reclusive,
garbage, and the discarded, but by
gray, long-beaked man would sally
A Parrot for Juan Gris Winter 1953-54 Construction 17 3/4 x 12 3/16 x 4 5/8 in. Collection Paul Simon Untitled circa 1940’s Medium box construction 1.31 x 2.38 in
Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery 1943 Construction 15 1/2 x 11 1/8 x 4 1/4 in. Des Moines Art Center, Coffin Fine Arts
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Untitled (Soap Bubble Set). c. 1936 Construction. Brown box with recessed metal handle on each side and removable glass front. Interior lined with pale blue fabric held in place by blue thumbtacks, rear wall partially lined with French map headed CARTE GEOGRAPIE DE LA LUNE . Interior divided into 7 compartments by 6 sheets of glass painted white on outside edges and held in place by metal pins. Upper compartment: 4 hanging cylindrical blocks painted white with reproductions adhered to the blocks on each end; left compartment: cordial glass holding egg painted blue with gold highlights; right compartment: small blue and gold child’s head attached to wood block; center compartment: clay pipe, flanked by two white wood elements attached to rear wall resting on glass shelf, below which are three glass discs, each in its own compartment.(15 x 14 x 5 in.) Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut, The Henry and Walter Keney Fund.
Untitled (Fish and Hands) circa 1933
A metal spring from a discarded wind-up clock may evoke the passage of time; a ball might represent a planet or the luck associated with playing a game. 3
forth on small voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets. To others, these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another. “In the studio he would sort his
finds
into
their
eccentric
categories - ‘Spiders,’ ‘Moons,’ and so forth - and file them with boxes of his own mementos, like love letters to Jennifer Jones and other movie stars or ballet dancers he’d
Untitled (The Hotel Eden). c.1945. Brown box construction. Interior partially lined with paper, painted white, divided into 3 areas by white wood strips. Contains yellow wood ball resting on white wood dowels; spiral-painted paperboard cutout and metal spiral behind wood-framed glass window painted with spiral; cutout of parrot, mounted on wood, resting on wood branch; cord passing from bottom of box through parrot’s beak to spiral; music box enclosed in wood in which sits inverted glass bottle with newspaper stopper containing 12 white cylindrical wood blocks; 3 loose cylindrical wood blocks; white dowel placed at angle below parrot; and 3 printed labels affixed to back of box, including advertisement for Hotel Eden, which is splattered with white paint. Signed. 15 x 15 x 5 in. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Cornell was a kind of magician, turning everyday objects into mysterious treasures. Untitled (Medici Princess) c. 1948 Construction 17 5/8 x 11 1/8 x 4 3/8 in. Private collection
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never met; and from them he made
chart book, depicts an excessively
boxes. He would tinker with them
remote coastline: that of the Great
for years. Object (Roses des Vents)
Australian Bight. The earth is
was begun in 1942 and not finished
presented not as our daily habitat
until 1953. It is full of emblems
but as one strange planet among
of voyages Cornell never took, a
others, which to Cornell it was.
little box of mummified waves and
“Some of his beginnings in the
shrunken exotic coasts, peninsulas,
1930s lay in Surrealism: Cornell was
planets, things set in compartments,
particularly affected by the collages
with a drop-in panel containing
of Victorian steel engravings in
twenty-one compasses, each with
Max Ernst’s series La Femme 100
its needle pointing insouciantly
tetes. Yet nowhere in Surrealism
in a different direction from that
is there an imagery quite like his.
of its neighbor. Even the map
Cornell
on the inside of the lid, cut from
what he called ‘the Max Ernst
some nineteenth-century German
white magic side’ of Surrealism
distinguished
between
Untitled (Medici Prince) c. 1952 Construction 15 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 5 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Shapiro, Oak Park, IL Untitled (Medici Boy) 1942-1952 Construction 13 15/16 x 11 3/16 x 3 7/8 in. Estate of Joseph Cornell
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and its darker, more violent aspects.
the box, but that is all he allowed
He embraced the first but shied
in the way of violence - it suggests
away from the second. He didn’t
that the sanctuary of imagination
share the revolutionary fantasies
has been attacked. That glass,
of the Surrealists or their erotic
the ‘fourth wall’ of his miniature
obsessions. There isn’t a sexual
theater, is also the diaphragm
image, let alone a trace of amour
between two contrasting worlds.
fou, in his entire output. The most
Outside,
he would permit himself was a
libido, the stuff of unprotected life;
gentle fetishism. If, as some have
inside, sublimation, memory, and
thought, Cornell’s imagery had to
peace, one of whose chief emblems
do with childhood, then it was one
was the caged bird, the innocent
which no child has ever known,
resident of The Hotel Eden, 1945.
chaos,
accident,
and
an infancy without rage or desire.
“At times, though not often,
Sometimes he would crack the glass
Cornell’s imagination looks fey or
pane that protected the contents of
precious. There is a treacherous
Beehive (Thimble Forest) 1939 Medium box construction 4.88 x 9.75 in
Untitled (Window Facade) c. 1950 Box construction: painted wood, glass, cracked glass, and mirror 18 5/8 x 12 3/8 x 3 1/2 in. The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Pharmacy c. 1935 Construction 10 x 12 x 2 1/8 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, Chicago
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Untitled circa 1931 Medium collage 7 x 10 in. Provenance Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan
Object (Roses des Vents). 1942-53. Brown hinged box construction with wood lid divided into 3 latched parts, interior of lid lined with German maps of the Coral Sea and the Great Australian Bight. Interior divided into upper and lower areas by removable wood panel, its bottom surfaced with plexiglass on which rest 21 compasses, fitted into holes (3 rows 0f 7) pierced through panel. Lower area divided by corrugated cardboard and wood strips into 17 compartments of unequal size, which contain maps, spirals, marbles, plaster chips, spring, seeds, shells, glass balls, beetle, sequins, torn paper, pins, paper fish, constellation diagrams, etc. Five compartments are covered in clear, green, yellow, or blue glass; some are painted or lined with paper. Rose des vents is French term for compass dial. Signed. 2.5 x 21 x 10 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Murphy Fund.
Using things we can see, Cornell made boxes about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams. 7
line
between
sentiment
and
sentimentality, particularly in his evocations of his own Edwardian environment
as
a
child.
Yet
his gothic fantasies and fussily reverential
evocations
of
Victorian
ballerinas
-
dead Marie
Taglioni being a special favorite are usually drawn back from the edge by Cornell’s rigor as a formal artist. Not for nothing did he call himself a ‘constructivist.’ Cornell was intensely Francophile, though he had never been to France witness his many references to French provincial hotels, and even
L’Egypt de Mlle Cléo de Mérode. 1940. Hinged Casket; lid lined with marbleized paper, cutouts of printed phrases L’EGYPT /de Mlle de Cléo de Mérode/COURS ELEMENTAIRE/D’HISTOIRE NATURELLE and picture of seated Egyptian female; box divided by sheet of glass into 2 horizontal levels. Contents of sealed lower level: loose red sand, doll’s forearm, wood ball, German coin, several glass and mirror fragments. Contents of upper level: 12 removeable cork-stopped bottles (tops of corks covered with marbleized paper, most bottles labeled with cutout printed words), in 4 rows of 3 set in holes in sheet of wood covered with marbleized paper, strips of glass forming 2 rows of glass-covered compartments (3 each) at sides of bottles. Contents of each bottle (and labels): (1) cutout sphinx head, loose red sand; (2) numerous short yellow filaments with glitter adhered to one end (Gameh, Kontah/Blé [Triticum sativum, Linn]); (3) 2 intertwined paper spirals (Les reptiles des illes du Nile); (4) cutout of Woman’s head (CLEO DE MERODE/momie/sphinx); (5) cutout of camels and men, loose yellow sand, ball (sauterelles). Cléo de Mérode was a famous courtesan and ballerina in the 1890s. Signed. 4 x 10 x 7 in. Collection Richard L. Feign, New York.
He was first and foremost a collector. He loved to scour old book shops and secondhand stores of New York. 8
by the worn, comfy French colors of his box interiors, the ivory whites
- From “American Visions”, by Robert
and pinks and faded bluegrays
Hughes
But he was, just as intensely, an American artist, with his asexual Puritan imagination and his belief in
unsullied
purity,
expressed
in the strict architecture within his boxes: white compartments and
pigeonholes, sometimes
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as in his series of ‘Dovecotes’ without anything else in them. It is an imagery of New England spareness, suggesting clapboard meetinghouses, plain fences, and rectitude above all.” Untitled (Soap Bubble Set/Longitudes) C. 1953 Construction, 10 x 15 x 4 in. Private collection
Verso of Cassiopeia #1
Cassiopeia #1 c.1960 Construction, 10 x 15 x 3 3/4 in. Estate of Joseph Cornell, CourtesyCastelli Feigen Corcoraan
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