Cornell Works

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, 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 imulsive 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. -From “Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell” by Deborah Solomon

(Cover) Object (Roses des Vents). 1942-53 | Brown hinged box construction | 2.5 x 21 x 10 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Murphy Fund. Signed. Wood lid divided into 3 latched parts, interior of lid lined with German maps of the Coral Sea and the Great Autralian Bight. Interior divided into upper and lower areas by removeable 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, constelllation 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.

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell’s

A Pioneer of Assemblage.

1903-1972

(Top) Untitled (Solar Set) c.1956-58 | Construction | 11 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 3 5/8 in. Collection Donald Karshan, New York

He had no formal training in (From top to bottom) Untitled 1942 | Construction | 13 1/8 x 10 x 3 1/2 in. Private collection, New York Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) 1945-46 | Construction | 20 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/2 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, Chicago Untitled (Medici Boy) 1942-1952 | Construction |13 15/16 x 11 3/16 x 3 7/8 in. Estate of Joseph Cornell

art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes’. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-àbrac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposi-

(Bottom) Untitled (The Hotel Eden). c.1945 | Brown box construction |15 x 15 x 5 in. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Signed. 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.

L’Egypt de Mlle Cléo de Mérode. 1940.| 4 x 10 x 7 in. Collection Richard L. Feign, New York. Signed. Hinged Casket; lid lined with marbleized paper, cutouts of printed phrases

(From top to bottom) Untitled (Window Facade) c.1950 | Box construction| 18 5/8 x 12 3/8 x 3 1/2 in The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas painted wood, glass, cracked glass, and mirror . A Parrot for Juan Gris Winter 1953-54 | Construction | 17 3/4 x 12 3/16x 4 5/8 in. Collection Paul Simon Tilly Losch c.1935 | Construction | 10 x 9 1/4 x 2 1/8 in. Collection Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, Chicago

in unsullied purity, expressed in the strict architecture within his boxes: white compartments and pigeonholes, sometimes - 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.” - From “American Visions”, by Robert Hughes

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.

tion and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films. “[Cornell] spent most of his life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, with his mother and his crippled brother, Robert. From there this reclusive, gray, long-beaked man would sally 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 never met;

and from them he made boxes. He would tinker with them for years. Object (Roses des Vents) was begun in 1942 and not finished until 1953. It is full of emblems of voyages Cornell never took, a little box of mummified waves and shrunken exotic coasts, peninsulas, planets, things set in compartments, with a drop-in panel containing twenty-one compasses, each with its needle pointing insouciantly in a different direction from that of its neighbor. Even the map on the inside of the lid, cut from some nineteenth-century German chart book, depicts an excessively remote coastline: that of the Great Australian Bight. The earth is presented not as our daily

habitat but as one strange planet among others, which to Cornell it was.

(Top) Untitled (Soap Bubble Set). c. 1936 | Construction | 15 x 14 x 5 in. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut, The Henry and Walter Keney Fund. 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 compartmentsby 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.

“Some of his beginnings in the 1930s lay in Surrealism: Cornell was particularly affected by the collages of Victorian steel engravings in Max Ernst’s series La Femme 100 tetes. Yet nowhere in Surrealism is there an imagery quite like his. Cornell distinguished between what he called ‘the Max Ernst white magic side’ of Surrealism and its darker, more violent aspects. He embraced the first but shied away from the second. He didn’t share the revolutionary fantasies of the Surrealists or their erotic obsessions. There isn’t a sexual image, let alone a trace of amour fou, in his entire output. The most he would permit himself was a gentle fetishism. If, as some have thought, Cornell’s imagery had to do with childhood, then it was one which no child has ever known, an infancy without rage or desire. Sometimes he would crack the glass pane

that protected the contents of the box, but that is all he allowed in the way of violence - it suggests that the sanctuary of imagination has been attacked. That glass, the ‘fourth wall’ of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two contrasting worlds. Outside, chaos, accident, and libido, the stuff of unprotected life; inside, sublimation, memory, and peace, one of whose chief emblems was the caged bird, the innocent resident of The Hotel Eden, 1945. “At times, though not often, Cornell’s imagination looks fey or precious. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly in his

(Top ) Untitled (Bébé Marie). Early 1940s | Construction | 23 x 12 x 5 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase (Bottom) 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

evocations of his own Edwardian environment as a child. Yet his gothic fantasies and fussily reverential evocations of dead Victorian ballerinas - 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 by the worn, comfy French colors of his box interiors, the ivory whites and pinks and faded bluegrays. But he was, just as intensely, an American artist, with his asexual Puritan imagination and his belief