Beneath Joseph Cornell’s rather staid little Dutch house in Flushing, New York, lay his factory, filled with parts waiting to be assembled – with worlds, unconstructed. Plastic shells, watch parts, springs, white pipes, owl cut-outs, glass cubes, magazine articles, sheet music, ticket stubs, old books, photographs, and coins were amongst the countless articles that lingered, portioned off according to type but nevertheless haphazardly, in the pregnant dark of his basement. In some senses it was a dream factory, not so very far removed from Roald Dahl’s BFG’s cave, its shelves lined with the captive dreams that he would spend a lifetime bestowing in the form of strange gifts upon children and the childlike. His mother’s kitchen, which she shared, rather begrudgingly, with her artist son, doubled as a sort of operating theatre in reverse, on whose dissecting table these sovereign parts – objects, images, films – were not so much cut apart as lovingly cut together, by a nocturnal architect-cum-switchboard-operator speaking ‘his open sesame … to a vast and total other dimension’.2
This chapter will suggest that the city of New York, in which Cornell lived for his entire life, was the fundamental component of his life’s work, and assert that it was the practice of collage that enabled him to carry it out. Broadly, it will consider his relationship with the city in which he lived, examining his dialogue with the European avant-garde within that context, and assessing the problems that occur when his work is too closely associated with the Surrealist movement in particular. Beginning by exploring why Cornell used collage, and considering his discovery of it in the light of the artistic apprenticeship he received from the streets of New York, I will argue for an anthropological as well as a literary and art historical approach to his work. The special reciprocal link that collage provides between habitat, artist, and work of art will be demonstrated by an examination of Cornell’s childhood, his aesthetic tastes and his love of the city. Following on from this, the significance of his discovery of Max Ernst’s collage novel, La femme 100 têtes, at the Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan, will be posited, as I introduce the problem of comparing Cornell’s work too closely with Surrealism. Looking in detail at Cornell’s first collages, I will assess his faux-nostalgia for a Europe that existed primarily in his imagination, considering whether his recreation of fleeing images and intersecting glimpses are in fact more Symbolist than Surrealist. Establishing Cornell’s eclectic, selective approach to European art and conducting a sustained comparison of his collages with some by Ernst, I will explore Cornell’s ability to raise the Surrealist formula above its own standards, enabled by his unique vision of the world. The comparison with Ernst will subsequently lead into an exploration of representations of childhood in Cornell’s work. Finally, I will discuss the sense of privacy and shared confidence in Cornell’s body of work, compared with the politics and violence of the European avant-garde, taking into consideration his use of dolls and images of women, his physical manifestations of thought, his creation of fragmentary visual narratives, and his lifelong compulsion for sharing, bartering, and passing things on. Whilst my chief focus will be on Cornell’s two-dimensional paper collages, it is important to note, as I mentioned in my introduction, that his boxed constructions are also best viewed as three-dimensional collages, which emerged naturally as an extension of his early work in paper. Collage was Cornell’s first love and key artistic tool; it enabled him to energetically reframe the frustrations of his working and domestic life in a positive light, and to narrate the story of his life in New York City in unique and uncompromising terms.
Cornell began to make art in 1931, something of an artistic greenhorn at the age of twenty-seven, having spent a decade working in the cloth-cutting industry, peddling fabric samples on the ‘the “nightmare alley” of lower Broadway’.3 He was in some ways like a latter-day version of the woodcutter Ali Baba, transported from the forests of Persia to the concrete jungles of New York City, where he was forced to earn a frustrated, alienated living out of a valuable commodity in order to support his fatherless family. It was here, in Manhattan, that he first made his ‘wonderful, irrational discovery’4 of collage, the open sesame exported from Europe in the minds and travelling cases of a throng of artists and writers, which was for him the password to that cave of treasures, the art world, revealing it to him, and granting him access, without ever requiring that he learn how to draw or paint.
Despite his lack of formal training, Cornell was able to accommodate himself very successfully within the context of twentieth-century art by making use of this exported practice; in fact, it was typical of him to use it, it being in a sense the very first scavenged, recycled, or found idea in the long line of many that would make up his career. By the time Cornell happened upon collage, in the backroom of an art gallery on Madison Avenue in 1931, it had become a prevailing artistic mode, and was continuing to be instrumental in promoting the role of the artist not just as painter but also as storyteller, architect, and thinker, advocating the associative processes of art construction over and above traditional estimations of painterly talent and finished products. From the angled vernacular of Cubist art to the frenetic vortexes of the Futurists and the seductive, sadomasochistic dreamscapes of Surrealism, collage encouraged experimentation and the idea of unlimited possibility. It also emphasised the value of the working process, meaning that Cornell, who had not so much as picked up a paintbrush since high school, was able, with relative ease, to align himself with the European artists in whose company he soon found himself. The only artistic apprenticeship he received took place as he traversed the streets of New York City, delivering cloth samples and simultaneously crafting in his head a ‘collage of things seen’.5 The art of collecting is fundamental to the collage practice. Both mentally and literally, Cornell scrapbooked pieces of the city – ‘NY ephemera’,6 as he put it – from Victorian ornaments found in thrift shops to the girls he saw in theatre box offices, finding, as Deborah Solomon notes in her biography, ‘connections where others saw only fragments’.7 For Cornell, as for Frank O’Hara, writing over thirty years later, New York was a ‘jungle of impossible eagerness’ (CP, 326), overflowing with possibilities for collecting and constructing art.
John Ashbery, in 1989, observed that Cornell was ‘almost universally recognized by artists and critics of every persuasion – a unique event amid the turmoil and squabbles of the New York art world’.8 His remark sustains the views of Solomon, who notes that ‘artists who agreed on little else agreed on Cornell’, and Brian O’Doherty, who reflects that Cornell was ‘one of those rare artists whose universe is … so imaginatively authoritative that it corrects the narrow views we accept without question from the official “art scene” itself’.9 O’Doherty correctly attributes much of Cornell’s ability to appeal to and inspire other artists to his vast aesthetic ‘range of territory’ and ‘the fact that his art includes all the others’. His identification of the lynchpin of Cornell’s oeuvre as being ‘the most mundane grounding in present experience’ highlights the profound and wide-ranging significance of the habitat out of which he worked, both in terms of his own inspiration and, subsequently, in inspiring others. To borrow from Jed Perl, Cornell ‘gave esotericism a contemporaneity by suggesting that these were the thoughts that might come to any twentieth-century man as he ambled the streets of a democratic city and gathered curious images and bits of information’.10 Certainly Cornell was particularly influenced by Surrealism, but, over the four decades in which he made art, the ‘present experience’ through which he lived was necessarily shaped to a great degree by the art world of New York City, which naturally included the Surrealist movement, but also comprised the precedents set by the French Symbolists and American Realists, by the Transcendentalists, by the city’s rival affections for Cubism and Futurism, by the not-quite-credible Neo-Romanticists, and by the rising stars of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and 1950s, and Pop Art in the 1960s. It is possible to distinguish traces of all these in Cornell’s body of work, without feeling that any ever seek to govern an artwork outright (in the distinctly Cubist collage backdrop to the 1953–1954 piece A Parrot for Juan Gris, made up of pasted newsprint, for instance, or in the notably abstract Blue Sand Box, from 1950). The links between these movements and Cornell’s work is, rather, one that he cultivated himself; one discerns discrete lines of communication with individuals he admired rather than wholesale deference to any particular school or manifesto. Cornell has often been incorrectly labelled a recluse, but in fact he never shut himself off from the world, manifesting a lifelong alertness to the currents and vicissitudes of his habitat and surroundings. The enigmatic qualities of his work, of which he himself is often the deconstructed subject, have resulted in varying critical perceptions of what he was like as a person: was he reclusive, damaged, obsessed with the past, Surrealist, childlike, prematurely aged, or sexually odd? It is interesting that his work generates this kind of response (and certainly all of these traits can be discerned in his work), but too often critics have felt the need to choose between them, or to characterise him according to their own expectations, rather than critiquing him using the collage principles that he himself fostered and disseminated, and allowing him to be represented as a combination of many character traits, influences, and experiences.
A photographic collage portrait, created between 1933 and 1934, is emblematic of Cornell’s approach to each of the art movements with which he was surrounded, and with which he has since been associated, to a greater or lesser degree. The collage photograph (Figure 1.1), taken by the young photographer Lee Miller, features Cornell’s face as the outsized figurehead of a model sailing boat, with a long skein of blonde hair floating strikingly behind it against a dark background. It is an illustration of the type of artistic synthesis for which Cornell strove, embodying vessel and androgynous voyager as a unified entity in a shadowy setting, and demonstrating, as Dickran Tashjian notes, Cornell’s ‘affinities with the androgynous imagery that existed on the margins of the Surrealist group among women artists disaffected by its male domination and often violent if not misogynous images of women’.11 The creative exchanges that Cornell had with women on the fringes of Surrealism, such as Miller, the painter Leonor Fini, and the painter, writer, and set-designer Dorothea Tanning, ‘offered lessons of autonomy: Miller, by breaking with Man Ray and forging her own career as a photographer; Fini, by refusing to join the Surrealist movement in the first place; and Tanning, perhaps most of all, by striving for her own artistic authenticity’.12 Cornell learned a great deal from these women and from others, including the ballerina Tamara Toumanova and, later, the writer Susan Sontag, all of whom reinforced his sense of the importance of unfailing artistic experimentation and the need to push or even disregard boundaries, rather than allowing oneself to fall easily within one identity category or another, either socially or creatively. This is also, of course, one of the principle lessons of collage: the continuous cross-pollination of discrete fragments results in striking singularity of product and infinite aesthetic possibilities that simultaneously allow and deny creative autonomy.
Fig. 1.1 Lee Miller. Joseph Cornell, New York Studio, 1933. Black and white photograph. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2013. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk.
It is important, then, to temper a specifically art historical or literary critical approach to Cornell’s work with a more anthropological methodology, prioritising the strong attachment that he felt to his life in New York City, and the importance of this in establishing him as a credible artistic figure. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s discussion, in The Interpretation of Cultures, of his method of employing a literary analytical approach when studying the culture of a people, indirectly points to the significance of doing this in reverse. If we are to start with a study of the artist in his habitat, and work thereon from the bottom up, rather than zooming slowly in along the lofty but possibly inaccurate trajectory of a given literary or artistic movement, our study of the subject is illuminated by the cultural ephemera which inevitably forms a substantial part of our analysis. Geertz argues that ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, and concludes that the study of culture, which he takes to be these webs, is ‘therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’. He reasons that as with the study of literature, a greater understanding of the ‘imaginative universe’ of another can be reached by ‘guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guess’, rather than seeking pedantically to discover ‘the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape’. Geertz contends that ‘if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do’.13
These arguments are particularly relevant not only in assessing the relationship between Cornell and Surrealism, but in coming to terms with his life and work. If we look for ‘laws’ in Cornell’s work, particularly the laws of the European avant-garde, we should also look for meaning in the wider ‘webs of significance’ which he himself spun, and, indeed, in which he lived. In entering his ‘imaginative universe’, we should allow ourselves to construct a shifting collage of guesses, based on the evidence of the primacy – and mystery – he assigned to his habitat. In order to understand the ‘science’ or ‘laws’ of Cornell’s art, it is necessary to look again at what he actually does: he makes collage, both two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally, out of bric-a-brac found in the environment he inhabits. He defines himself by the objects he chooses. The arrangements he makes distinguish him and enable him not only to assert control over his universe, but to suggest ways of understanding it and narrating its story, and even of aestheticizing it; as Eliot (quoting Mallarmé), wrote, the poet can ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’.14 Cornell attempts, with his unique capacity for imaginative independence enhanced by his use of collage, to crystallise the fleeting instant of visionary creativity or of pure inspiration that he repeatedly found to germinate from a momentary experience, whether in an art gallery, on a street on a rainy day or on a crowded commuter train. Cornell’s work may often look Surrealist, but to conclude that that is all it is, is to ignore the significance of his environment, which is, of course, how he came into contact with Surrealism in the first place. Not only was New York crucial in the establishment of Cornell as an artist alongside the Surrealists – in other words, as an artist with a biographical rather than an aesthetic connection to them – but it was, furthermore, the very fabric out of which Cornell created his artworks. His habitat was what mattered most to him, being both the source of and material for his expansive imagination, with Surrealism operating simply as a component part of this environment. As Perl observes, ‘in Cornell’s New York, time and place flowed, reversed, overlapped. In his imagination, the city was transformed into an urban pastoral – a city that was both in time and out of time’.15 This is why his work is so original (and so recognisably his), made up as it is from factors encountered in a way that he alone could encounter them. He used this privately associative ‘harvest’16 according to mood or whim, eclectically, regardless of artistic status: a famous collage by Picasso or Ernst ranked equally in his eyes with an old mustard jar found on the beach or an outdated map or item of jewellery found in a junk shop. All are equally important in the context of his art.
He produced no manifesto, and because he attached himself to no specific movement or school, or to all of them, there can be no exact science to the study of Joseph Cornell. Furthermore, as Robert Hughes observes, ‘his work was so idiosyncratic that it made nonsense of its imitators, so that there could be no école de Cornell’.17 The desire to link him too closely with Surrealism or any other school risks overlooking what he actually does, in favour of what the movement in question, and its proponents, might have to say about him. History may have identified him as an American Surrealist, but this is partly because he emerged into the art world at the same time that Surrealism itself began to be seriously taken note of by American culture. Ultimately, as O’Doherty insists, he is ‘a figure large enough that history must inconvenience itself to rearrange its priorities’.18 Adding an ethnographic angle to a critical approach, whereby Cornell’s aesthetic behaviour can be attended to within its own context, ‘according to the pattern of life by which it is informed’, guards against the temptation to ‘arrang[e] … abstracted entities into unified patterns’,19 and reveals his own particular voice within the biographical reality in which he was inevitably contained. Biography may strip the mystery from art,20 and in the case of Cornell may offer itself up all too often in the form of a seductive psychoanalytic quagmire,21 but in order that the figure in the carpet may be clearly discerned, and in order that the details of his constructions may be uncovered, it is necessary to situate the artist not within the hyper-real context of a particular art movement, but, instead, within the real spaces of the darkened movie houses, the tide of the New York streets, the crush at gallery openings, the microcosmic front room, basement and kitchen in Flushing, the backstage spaces at the New York City Ballet, and the carriages of the Third Avenue El as it thundered through unfolding lives in great, inelegant buildings. These places were where Cornell’s inspiration originated, as well as providing his artistic apprenticeship. The conceptual articulation and interpretation of Cornell’s life within these places enables the viewer of his work to converse directly with him (rather than with the things he looks like), to decipher his collage codes and learn to understand his language, to address the opacity in his art, and to clarify the increasingly ubiquitous role that collage came to play both in his life and in the artistic life of New York City. As far as his relationship with Surrealism is concerned, it can be viewed within the context of the metalanguage of collage. As I noted in my introduction, Rosalind Krauss argues that such a language
can talk about space without employing it; it can figure the figure through the constant superimposition of grounds; it can speak in terms of light and shade through the subterfuge of a written text.22
When this theory is applied to Cornell’s work, we can see that in its imagery, form, syntax, and visual rhyme, it evokes a sense of Surrealism which is never fully Surrealist, figuring the figures of artists (Max Ernst in particular), that are, in fact, never quite there. His work, like the aesthetic of collage, ‘inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin’.23 Throughout Cornell’s career, then, the Surrealist movement, in its influence, its perceived influence, and its non-influence, and in its aesthetic and its biographical authority, operates as this absent origin.
Although Cornell made his first collage in 1931, both his upbringing and his own sensibilities had prepared him thoroughly for the practice’s potentialities. His mother was a kindergarten teacher, well versed in the German educator Friedrich Froebel’s advocacy of collage to inspire creativity and imaginative exploits in children. As was fairly customary for American children raised during the Progressive Era, Cornell would have received basic schooling from his mother in the visual arts and simple manual crafts, and amongst the books he owned as a child was Warne’s Picture Puzzle Album, a Victorian-era prototypical collage handbook for children, which provided backdrops onto which images could be pasted. Cornell’s father was a fabric designer by trade and a talented woodworker and singer in his free time, whose pockets were always filled with small presents for his children. Cornell’s childhood, before his father died and he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, was a happy one; born on Christmas Eve, he was himself a sort of gift, and his earliest memories would have been of toys and presents, of the lights and music and magic of a child’s favourite time of year. His parents frequently took him and his younger siblings into Manhattan, to watch vaudeville shows or the lights at Times Square, or down to Luna Park at Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he first encountered the penny arcades that would later have such a significant bearing on his work. His parents also acquainted him with children’s stories and French literature as he was growing up, to which he remained attached as an adult. Consequently, he sought solace from the boisterous clamour of his reluctant Broadway sales pitches in amassing books and magazines from the second-hand shops on Fourth Avenue below Union Square, in the now vanished Book Row. In his aesthetic preferences he made no particular differentiation between high and popular culture, between Europe and America, or between past and present; although his taste for Victorian nostalgia is well documented, he simultaneously absorbed with equal earnestness the cheap melodrama of the silent film industry, the overblown emotion of the grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, and many of the great art exhibitions of the 1920s. He was equally thrilled and moved by catching a glimpse of a famous silent movie star in Flushing as he was by seeing such paintings as Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Georges Seurat’s Le cirque (1891), and Picasso’s Mother and Child by the Sea (1902). He also found exciting the technological developments heralded by the twentieth century. In his unqualified approval of the telephone, the aeroplane, the cinema, and the mass media, he anchored himself to and invested himself in, in spite of his strong nostalgic tendencies, a present and indeed a future, in which the inevitable conversation between popular culture and the production of art was beginning to take place, and in which he would play his own small but significant role. His keenness to understand and to engage with the innovative idioms of modernity enabled his relationship with his primarily urban environment to have both physical and intellectual qualities, operating as a functioning economy facilitating daily transactions between past, present, and future moments in the streets, theatres, art galleries, railway stations, and bargain stores of New York City. Cornell was simultaneously a Manhattan scavenger and a nostalgic hoarder of Victorian ephemera, and much of his work embodies the relationship between the two roles, combining elements of the conceptual, discordant collage techniques of the twentieth century with the scrapbooks and picture-puzzle albums of the nineteenth.
Analysts of and apologists for twentieth-century collage generally define it abstractly in terms of space and context, in terms of reciprocity and response, and in terms of its claim to achieve that apotheosis of modern and postmodern aesthetics: the ‘new’. Russian Constructivist Kazimir Malevich described collage as ‘the growth of the surface towards us in real space’. To Robert Motherwell, it provoked ‘the sensation of physically operating on the world’, whilst for Carlo Carrà it was fundamentally an ‘intuitive self-definition of the artist among objects’. For Daniel Belgrad, collage is defined psychophysiologically, as ‘the combined intellectual, emotional, and physical engagement of the body-mind with its environment’.24 The general implication, then, is that collage provides a special link between the habitat or context in which the artist is working, the artist themselves (both bodily and psychically), and the piece of art being made, which may or may not also develop its own internal context. We have, by way of example, the Merzbau (1923–1947) of Kurt Schwitters – whole rooms in an inhabited house converted into collage sculptures into whose fabric the detritus of the artist’s life in Hanover was laced, from ticket stubs, torn letterheads, cigarette wrappers, and presents from friends, to fragments of newsprint, pieces of wire, perambulator wheels, and test prints of his own graphic designs. Schwitters sought ‘the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes’;25 his desire, both literally and aesthetically, was to create a new habitat out of the fragments and junk of his old one. A further instance is the work of the German artist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld), whose dissident photomontages subverted the Nazi advertisements, newspapers, and magazine articles, out of which many of them were made. Heartfield ‘used newspapers like voodoo dolls’ in order to deny ‘both the logic of sentences and the unpleasant reality of news’.26 On account of having stuck a knife into his society in this way (once again both literally and metaphorically), Heartfield found himself forced into exile for more than twenty years. With both Heartfield and Schwitters, the links between artist, context, and artwork, facilitated by their use of collage, are explicit.
This was also, of course, the spirit in which much of Cornell’s work was conceived, as he persistently worked to construct a fictitious alternate or parallel universe for New York, which he could give as a series of gifts. His boxed assemblages and collages show him to be an extraordinary craftsman of the irrational form, whose work, as he himself asserted, was quite literally ‘a natural outcome of [his] love for the city’.27 He realised that the objects with which he worked were, to borrow from Hermann Hesse, ‘the plastic material of love, of magic and delight’.28 His sprawling journals and working dossiers make repeated references to ‘wandering NY streets’, to ‘NY ephemera’, and to the ‘collage of things seen’.29 Throughout his career, his artworks were made out of ‘the world in which he travelled’,30 from the white clay pipes that he picked up en masse at the 1939 World’s Fair that took place practically in his back yard, and the outdated star charts that he found in second-hand bookshops, to the fleeting visions, missed opportunities, crossed paths, and naturally-occurring montages so innate to the daily urban experience.
Cornell lived all of his life in Flushing, with his overbearing, overly fond mother, and his disabled younger brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy. Devoted though he was to both of them, Cornell’s life in Flushing was unavoidably tainted by a sense of stasis, claustrophobia, fragility, and arrested development, and whilst this casts a revealing light on his preoccupation with childhood and the childlike, and on his decision to work using the closed box form, it was nevertheless his trips into Manhattan which enabled him to perceive the world from a fresh standpoint, and to renew his creativity. The collage Untitled (Encrusted Clown) (Souvenirs for Singleton) (1946), for instance, which features a clown made up of a Pierrot engraving head and a colourful body of scraps and small objects found on the city streets, and is named after a character played by the actress Jennifer Jones, subtly commingles Cornell’s life looking after the permanently childlike Robert with his adventures in the city. The collage is a toy made out of the detritus of New York, out of the kind of worthless urban oddments that only a person with an extraordinarily childlike sensibility and heightened appreciation of urban culture would find valuable, including a ticket from the New York Zoological Park worth 5¢, a prizewinning coupon, several stickers, a broken watch-face, and numerous small cogs. It also combines an impression of rudimentary craftsmanship and camp homage with the unattainable glamour of the silver screen, emblematic of the average citizen of New York’s close proximity to, yet inevitable remove from, the great movie stars of the age.
The state of flux in which Cornell existed is key: the exhilaration of his visits to Manhattan or Brooklyn, where he gathered the material for his collages and boxes, combined with the inertia of his home life, where he found the opportunity to turn this flotsam into art, enabled him to invest with a distinctive, almost enchanted quality the everyday objects, situations, and even individuals which would otherwise be mere quotient parts of the ‘serial, reproducible character of urban mass culture’.31 He was uniquely placed in his emotional, physical and intellectual interaction with New York, experiencing it, as Jodi Hauptman observes, ‘as both site (spatiality) and sensation (memory)’. Furthermore, as Hauptman continues, ‘by replacing inscription with collection, Cornell composes a picture of the city as it is lived, not an abstraction charted from a safe and sterile distance. Cornell’s city is loud, bustling, and dirty, soiled with history’.32 His collages, and the boxes that make up the bulk of his life’s work, both ‘salvaged and preserved’33 the things he collected whilst wandering. They are simultaneously imbued with a biographical quality that retains its referential freshness, whether in the form of tiny recurring photographs of Manhattan buildings as in Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1945–1946), or in the freely mixed urban ephemera (stamps, coins, cut-outs) of Untitled (Penny Arcade with Horse) (c. 1965). Indeed, the very act of wandering, by which Cornell collected the component parts for his work, serves to counterbalance the inevitable sense of claustrophobia that the box form suggests, evoking for the viewer the lived processes by which his uniformly beautiful pieces were constructed, and embodying the fruitful tensions between the productive peace of life on Utopia Parkway in Queens and ‘the electric feeling of city life, the contemporaneity, the bustle of crowds’.34
In November 1931, Julien Levy, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard dropout who had married Joella Loy, the daughter of the vanguard European poet Mina Loy, opened an art gallery at 602 Madison Avenue. Levy had studied literature and fine art at Harvard, but left before graduating, instead sailing for France in 1927 in the company of Marcel Duchamp. Once in Europe he befriended Man Ray and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who would act as witness at his wedding to Joella. Levy’s passion was not just for art but for art promotion, and with the help of his mother-in-law, who acted as his Paris art-scout and sometime selector, his gallery was later credited with ‘single-handedly import[ing] French Surrealism to New York’.35 When the gallery’s initial retrospective of American photography, including the work of the great Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White, proved critically and financially unrewarding, the well-connected Levy turned his gaze more emphatically toward the European avant-garde, although he ensured that American photography and experimental film continued to be well-represented, and always kept collectors’ bins filled with old photographs in a room at the back of the gallery. The gallery soon evolved into an authentic pocket of Paris, an enclave of dream and imagination, secreted within an outwardly conservative Manhattan. For the next seventeen years the Julien Levy Gallery became a revolving door of European and Surrealist art, boasting works, and in many cases visits, by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Yves Tanguy, and, of course, Joseph Cornell.
Although Cornell had had no direct artistic experience or training, it is unlikely that he had not heard of the Surrealist movement prior to visiting Levy’s gallery – certainly he had attended the unprecedentedly popular International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in late 1926, in the organisation of which Duchamp had been heavily involved.36 In his literary, musical, and artistic tastes, he was resolutely European, and his penchant for all things French was as fully nourished as his circumstances would allow, meaning that in many ways he was already aligned with many of the same influences as the Surrealists. He read De Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, and listened to Debussy, De Séverac, Dukas, and Satie (who, in 1924, had composed the music for René Clair’s short film Entr’acte, which featured the bearded Francis Picabia, who wrote the film, dressed as a ballerina and dancing a ballet). Among his favourite films were Carl Theodore Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1926). Lynda Roscoe Hartigan notes an important purchase Cornell made in 1921 from Albert F. Goldsmith’s shop, At the Sign of the Sparrow: a 1912 issue of the Paris periodical Musica. The issue featured ‘an intimate photograph of the late nineteenth-century composer Emmanuel Chabrier playing with his children around an iron sculpture of a bear’.37 Cornell later used the image in a collage made around 1935 for a series he called Dedications. During the 1920s he was impressed by and eager to engage with what was increasingly being called modern art, an eclectic combination of French Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the European avant-garde. Hartigan has discovered that he had access to a range of little magazines, and had ‘encountered reproductions of works by Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Juan Gris, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Odilon Redon, among others’.38 But it was not until he ventured into Levy’s gallery, that ‘trans-Atlantic bridgehead’,39 and came across Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes (1929) that he was able to encounter in all its nightmarish esotericism the extraordinary nature of Surrealist collage first hand. Although Cornell, by his own confession, was taken aback by Ernst’s collages’ lewd and often violent subject matter, he was struck by their form and immediately stimulated not only by the recycled Victorian source material, but by the revelation of the possibilities afforded by the practice of collage for an individual artistically-minded but not artistically trained, and, furthermore, by the idea, as Levy later wrote,
that two entities unutterably dissimilar should in conjunction make … Not a grotesque combination of the parents, not a cumbrous Siamese twin, not a dead stuck-up combine, but a persuasive, convincing new species, living all on its own.40
Cornell later confirmed that La femme 100 têtes was the definitive stimulus for his entry into the world of art,41 linking him to the Surrealist movement in ways that, for critics of his work, would prove to be endlessly problematic. The artist David Hare made the important observation that ‘Surrealism really had nothing whatsoever to do with painting and not very much to do with literature, it had to do with an attitude of mind’.42 Whilst the wording of his statement comes across as both hyperbolic and reductive (given that Surrealism really had quite a lot to do with painting and literature), it nevertheless highlights the significant attitudinal nature of the movement, and helps to set out why Cornell is often mistaken for a Surrealist artist, and why he should not be. Although thematically and stylistically aspects of his early work resemble that of Ernst, Cornell’s ‘attitude of mind’ was resolutely not that of the Surrealists. He did not believe in chance as a guiding aesthetic force – he believed in fate and the inescapable. He was also a devout Christian Scientist, firmly believing, amongst other things, in the power of prayer to cure illness (in spite of the evidence of Robert’s persisting disability), whilst the Surrealists, on the whole, were delinquent Catholics who, as Hughes suggests, used their art as a series of ‘small step[s] in the gradual freeing of man from superstition’.43 Furthermore, Cornell’s art was never purely automatic or mechanical: he shaped, carefully, whatever emerged from his unconscious, tempering and censoring it with his own, very distinct, sense of reason, morality, and aesthetic judgment, a fact which goes some way toward explaining the noticeable absence of any explicit sexual content in his work, despite his attested interests in sex and his attraction to women. As with his fluctuating beguilement with Victorian ephemera, visions of childhood, unattainable women, and caged birds, his relationship with Surrealism was always predicated on ‘evocation rather than emulation’,44 homage rather than slavish imitation.
The problem of associating Cornell too closely with Surrealism is that, while it may prove illuminating and of interest to the study of Surrealism itself, it risks both detraction and distraction from Cornell’s own work, unless the alleged similarities are rigorously interrogated. Michel Leiris said of Raymond Roussel that he ‘never really travelled … in all the countries he visited, he saw only what he had put there in advance, elements which corresponded absolutely with that universe that was peculiar to him’.45 It is tempting for viewers of Cornell’s work to do the same thing, and it is important, therefore, to establish the differences between Cornell and his Surrealist predecessors and contemporaries, particularly Max Ernst, in order to allow the dialogue between them to illuminate his work, rather than theirs.
Returning home after having seen La femme 100 têtes, Cornell began a reconnaissance of the books, sheet music, cut-out articles, and pieces of Victorian ephemera that he had compulsively hoarded throughout his life, embarking on the collages that would ultimately frame and inspire a unique and successful career by treading gingerly in the footsteps of the Surrealist trickery he had encountered at Julien Levy’s gallery. His early work appears to be an attempt to imitate the macabre interventionism of Ernst’s collage-novel, and although it is technically and stylistically derivative in many ways, it was clear from the outset that Cornell took a more oblique angle on the collage export than the contrived shock and simulated psychosis that pervaded Surrealism. Finding himself disturbed by Ernst’s violent and disconcerting collages, and unable to commit to the black magic of the European art movement which saw itself as ‘exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’,46 he quickly abandoned this artificial form of nightmarish mimicry, transposing it instead into work that increasingly took on the characteristics of lucid dream, as he first adopted and then successfully adapted the collage practice to his own ends.
Although the main body of his work would subsequently take the form of the boxed assemblages for which he is best known, Cornell used collage throughout his career. Having achieved success with paper collage, Cornell subsequently found that he wanted the intricacy, detail, and evocative effects of collage to be magnified, rendered on a larger scale. This, ultimately, is what his box constructions are: more than assemblages, they are three-dimensional collages, fastidiously built according to the principles of the practice. In some senses Cornell can also be seen as writing his own life, and the life of his city, out of his daydreams, and then, as noted previously, giving it as a series of gifts, much as Frank O’Hara’s poems were often ‘for’ someone. The serial approach that Cornell took to his work is reminiscent in some ways of the fiction of the Victorian era to which he felt so drawn (he identified himself closely with Henry James in particular), in the sense of being ‘a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions’.47 His body of work, taken as a whole – an extended personal collage – can be viewed as a cohesive and literary achievement, manifesting the prolonged recompense and ‘enlarged sense of time’48 of the serialized Victorian novel, achieved in Cornell’s case through the repeated superimposition of strata using the collage technique.
Cornell returned to Levy’s gallery not long after having seen Ernst’s work, this time to offer up his own batch of precisely crafted collages. The most striking of these was Untitled (Woman and Sewing Machine) (Figure 1.2), made early in 1932, which riffs gently, even slightly irreverently, on the Comte de Lautréamont’s image of the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella atop an operating table, discussed in my introduction, which the Surrealists prized so highly. In Cornell’s collage a paper doll is bisected by a sewing machine on top of a table in what appears to be a Victorian factory filled with seamstresses. An ear of corn rests, almost as an afterthought, on the train of the paper doll’s dress, whilst a large flower blossoms with conspicuous luminosity from the wheel of the sewing machine. The well-loved and often studied Untitled (Schooner) (Figure 1.3), a tiny artwork measuring less than six inches square, was also among Cornell’s first collages, made in 1931. In this piece a clipper ship floats with its sails unfurled on a placid expanse of steel-engraved water. Looming over a diminutive figure positioned in a rowing boat close to the ship’s stern is a spider, crouched in a web, which is shrouded by a huge grey rose. In both collages Cornell’s necessarily visual approach to art production is imbued with a distinctly narrative quality. The colour of the rose-petals visually rhymes with the colour of the murky water, as do the ropes of the ship and the spider’s web, itself a manifestation of the latent webs of significance that ground the collage. In camouflaging the web within the sail, Cornell creates a visual pun on the French translations of ‘web’ and ‘sail’ – ‘toile’ and ‘voile’49 – here so intertwined. In Untitled (Woman and Sewing Machine) he plays on the corresponding ideas of sewing with thread and sowing crops, indicated by the burgeoning plant life integrated into the collage. There is a gratifying tension in both as the industrial desire for movement and accomplishment, as illustrated by the clipper and the rowing boat, the sewing machine and the rank of seamstresses, is ironically frustrated by the fecund stasis of natural elements. Once again, this reflects the duality of his life, divided between the strident bustle of Manhattan and the relative tranquillity of his life in Flushing. There are also facets of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty (1696) at work in these collages, not least in the sense of anticipatory enchantment experienced at a distance, which also reverberates throughout the rest of Cornell’s body of work.
This is all quite alien to the political agenda that was prerequisite to Surrealism, a movement born out of cultural trauma and intended always as a forward-thinking, insurrectionist ‘instrument of cultural revolt’.50 The Surrealist artist Kurt Schwitters, for instance, used collage techniques and sensibilities to rebuild shattered worlds and to come to terms with the brutality of the First World War and, following it, the increasingly ominous political situation in Europe. By contrast, Cornell’s artistic sensibilities had developed thousands of miles from the violence and upheaval of early twentieth-century Europe, in isolationist America, where he existed in what he later referred to as the ‘vanished golden age of gallery trotting’.51 His introspective art is filled with contemporary American material, but what is particularly American about his work is his demonstrable faux-nostalgia for a version of Europe that did not quite exist; in other words, as Robert Hughes observes, ‘the Europe in his boxes lasted from the fifteenth-century to the Belle Époque’.52 Other than in the individual Europeans whom he encountered in New York, Cornell demonstrates little interest in the realities of contemporary Europe, preferring the American present, linked in myriad ways to myriad pasts, but anchored firmly in the burgeoning modernity of the city in which he lived. Cornell’s concern appears, in these early collages, to be to construct – or even, at this stage, simply to interpret – a kind of a delicate fiction, in the sense that he is engaged in a skilled ‘act of fashioning or imitating’.53 More Symbolist than Surrealist, he is pursuing fleeting constellations of imagery in the form of intersecting, unexplained, and resolutely mysterious glimpses, both real and fantastical, European and American, in a response to an idealised version of a world which embraces the cultural ‘continuity of past and present’, and is inspired by ‘the community of tradition, the spiritualism … of culture’.54
Fig. 1.2 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Woman and Sewing Machine), 1931. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.3 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Schooner), 1931. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Levy was impressed by Cornell’s ‘delicate understanding of what can and cannot be matched’,55 and accepted several of his collages for an exhibition, Surréalisme, which would also feature work by Picasso, Pierre Roy, Jean Cocteau, and Duchamp. In the absence of the show’s heavyweights, including Man Ray, Dalí, and Ernst, Levy even commissioned Cornell to create the show’s publicity (Figure 1.4). Cornell produced a blithe, unpretentious collage featuring a boy trumpeter blowing the word ‘Surréalisme’ into the air from a cake-icing tube. The piece simultaneously reveals Cornell’s enthusiastic adherence to certain tenets of Surrealism whilst manifesting more subtly his somewhat ascetic dissociation from what he viewed as the movement’s unhealthier aspects. His choice of the cake-icing tube lends the collage a youthful vitality, and illustrates his inherent aesthetic appreciation for and affinity with what André Breton (Surrealism’s dour and formidable captain) described as ‘objects that … go off to dream at the antique fair’.56 The drifting letters, floating with a gentle, lyrical dynamism above the head of the trumpeter, embody the Surrealist Georges Hugnet’s belief that ‘with Surrealism all poetic and pictorial manifestations are situated on the level of life and life on the level of dreams’.57 But whilst Cornell’s figuring of a child in the collage (as well as the deliberate reference to his own considerable fondness for cake) exercises Louis Aragon’s notion of the artist’s ‘individuality of choice’,58 it also marks the absence of the disquieting panoramas, aphrodisiac conspiracies, and argumentative absurdities that are the benchmarks of Surrealist art. The piece is partially an exposition of Hugnet’s idea of ‘the physics of poetry’, but it lacks, deliberately, the ‘formidable meaning’59 that the Surrealists used collage to convey. Cornell chooses instead the frugal, emotive, transfigurative precision of Symbolist writing. As O’Doherty suggests, herein lies the paradox at the heart of Cornell’s work: ‘Surrealism enabled him to become the last great Symbolist poet’.60
Fig. 1.4 Joseph Cornell. Exhibition poster for Surréalisme, Julien Levy Gallery, 1932. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Cornell’s initial creative dialogue with Surrealism was partly what drove him to his own unique idiom, which remained constant to elements of this preliminary dialogue throughout his career. Like William Burroughs and Bob Dylan, as I will discuss, Cornell took an eclectic approach to European avant-garde art, using some techniques and adopting some attitudes, whilst ignoring or disparaging others, taking what he needed and discarding what he did not. He took from the collages of André Masson and Max Ernst an understanding of the power of the practice for conveying almost inexpressible emotion to the viewer. He garnered partly from Duchamp his lifelong love of boxes and mechanical forms. Increasingly, in his later years, as he returned more directly to the practice of pure collage and began making fewer boxes, he lapsed back toward Surrealism, displaying a stylistic closeness with Magritte from about 1959 onwards. There is a conspicuous similarity between Cornell’s Untitled (First Collage in a Long Time) (1959) and Magritte’s The Rape (1934), for example, both in the initial visual impressions of each and in their employment of a Freudian sense of displacement. Both feature a female nude against an indistinct landscape and a blue sky. The colouring of each is similar – both women have auburn hair – and the form of each is incomplete. As ever, the similarities end with form and visual content. Whilst the female in Magritte’s image is unsettlingly objectified, both in terms of the title of the piece and by her face having been substituted for her naked torso, Cornell’s piece instead displays an underlying sense of Mondrian-esque order, as he bisects his nude, replaces the right side of her body with a vibrantly autumnal tree, and criss-crosses the entire collage with a mathematical grid, creating a tension between the urge to measure and master femininity, as well as the natural and the artistic worlds, and the manifest impossibility of ever being able to do so.61 Cornell plays on this idea again in a later collage, Untitled (Ship with Nude) (1965), in which an image of a young female nude, wearing a pearl necklace and gazing unwaveringly upwards, is pasted over an image of a ship sailing at night, in such a way that the girl is rendered simultaneously the vessel’s figurehead and its mast and sail, recalling Lee Miller’s portrayal of Cornell in a similar fashion, over thirty years earlier. Pasted over both ship and nude is an astronomical map cut so that it details only the constellation of Hercules, once again alluding to Cornell’s desire to map and measure the complex (and, in his eyes, celestial) aesthetics of femininity, as well as to come to terms with the mystery of a wider world which he had never seen, and never would.
Cornell was a consummate archivist, and in possession of a wealth of unrelated objects, many of which held an almost spiritual meaning for him, and which would ultimately feature throughout his work as emblems of his strong autobiographical impulses. Surrealism was, in many ways, merely a stepping stone in the development of the box form, providing the means but not the matter for his move into art. By 1931, as Hauptman notes, he was ‘poised for the theoretical framework that would give his archival activities … form’.62 There is perhaps a case to be argued that in terms of achieving what their manifestos set out to do, Cornell was actually more Surrealist than the Surrealists. His work is smaller and more fantastic, less wilful, less contrived, less precocious, and less egocentric than many Surrealist pieces, and it possesses an ingenuousness that seems able to tap genuinely into the realm of unconscious desires. Mina Loy observed in 1950 that Cornell, ‘while adhering to the Surrealist formula alone has raised it above reality, having achieved an incipience of the sublime solidified’.63 Much of this is due to the levelling effects of his boxes, in which high art converses with popular culture and city detritus, within the quasi-private confines of a space which by its nature operates variously as a theatre, a treasure chest, a mausoleum and a specimen cabinet. In Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach) (1942), for instance, a group of red plastic toy lobsters wearing tutus dances on an otherworldly stage made up of cut-out paper food, silver cutlery and napkins; in the breath-taking Taglioni’s Jewel Casket (1940), cubes of artificial ice rest in a treasure case lined with dark blue velvet, whilst behind a rhinestone necklace (which Cornell purchased from a New York dime store), a note in the lid of the box recounts the legend of how the eponymous ballerina once danced for a highwayman on a panther’s skin spread over the snowy ground, and subsequently kept an imitation ice cube in her jewellery box, in memory of the evening. These works embody the qualities which John Ashbery believed set Cornell’s work above his contemporaries: they ‘keep all the stories that art seems to want to cut us off from without giving up the inspiring asceticism of abstraction’.64
Cornell’s ability to raise the Surrealist formula above its own standards is also due to the startling originality of content and sentiment found upon looking closely at work that at first glance appears derivative. Almost without intending to, he manages to subvert the subversive, turning horror on its head and revealing it to be beautiful. Cornell’s idea of the marvellous was quite different to that of the Surrealists: they viewed beauty, horror, and sexual desire quite equally in terms of human experience, whereas for Cornell, the marvellous was usually something simple, ordinary, almost always unexpected, and often transient, an instance or series of instances of fleeting gratification which sustained and inspired him. Waiting in a railway station on a rainy afternoon in January 1949, for instance, he scribbled down a typical encounter on a scrap of Western Union paper (Figure 1.5). Having been ‘thinking how uneventful the station is for anecdotes or touches’, he suddenly sees a ‘jovial man’ with a Great Dane on a leash. Cornell overhears the man telling a little girl that the dog is thirty-five years old, to which she responds in amazement, as the man moves toward his train: ‘they only have that many birthdays up in heaven!’65 His diaries include numerous examples of moments like this: on September 10th 1953 he noted down the ‘miracle of beauty in the commonplace – house with black tarred roof and chimney purple showing slightly in backyard – completeness of beauty in the unexpected commonplace’.66 Similarly, he observed on November 13th 1955, whilst shooting a film at Union Square with Rudy Burckhardt, an ‘unexpected yield of incidents and enrichment’.67 It is these unexpected moments of inspiration which Cornell would then painstakingly and in a fervour of premature, or even imagined, nostalgia, attempt to recreate. He spoke of seeing in his surroundings a ‘kind of richness in which a revelling in detail becomes such a feast of experience’, as on January 24th 1947:
Shaved and dressed and waved good-bye to Robert on porch (Mother shopping). Waved to Robert from train … went all the way in to Penn Station. Just before going under tunnel looked up at freight cars – the word Jane scrawled on a box-car in large letters, red with a touch of pink, then touches of primary colors mingling with a scene of men working on the tracks with a long crane mounted on a car – all over in a flash but evoking a strong feeling – had not remembered anything just like that at that point – but similar varied combinations many times from the elevated viewpoint of the subway before going under at same point (the puffing locos, omnipresent pigeon, markings on cars in freight yard, etc. Once in a while a touch like the above … Went up in freight elevator and got glimpses into different floors not afforded by passenger elevator (out of order) of workers in grimy industrial plants … Unusual feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, unexpected and more abiding than usual.68
We can learn from such journal entries that Cornell not only saw the world through an artist’s eyes, carefully noting the intermingled colours of the places through which he travelled, but through a collagist’s eyes, inspired and provoked as he was by ‘varied combinations’ and unexpected juxtapositions, by images seen ‘in a flash’, and by ‘glimpses’ into other worlds afforded by novel modes of transport. Like the Surrealists, he believed that art could not make experience, but it could release it ‘mediumistically’69 – though perhaps, as a Christian Scientist, he would have objected to this particular word. There was an ambiguity at the heart of his artistic process, however, whereby he seems to have been alternately motivated by and disconnected from both the creative process and the finished product, which he found paradoxically liberating and confining. In October 1950, for instance, he added the finishing touches to his Moutarde Dijon box, and wrote: ‘Suddenly the sense of completeness, poetry, and connection with life as opposed to the confining, esthetic feeling of limitation experienced too often in working with the boxes’. A few lines later he seems to contradict this mood, however, describing an ‘intense longing to get into the boxes’ and of a sense of ‘overflowing, a richness and poetry felt when working with the boxes but which has often been completely extraneous in the final product’.70 Clearly, he experienced both an intense attachment to his artworks and a sense that they failed in some way to fully capture the ‘yield of incidents’ to which he felt he owed his inspiration.
Fig. 1.5 Joseph Cornell. Diary entry written on a blank Western Union telegram form, January 5, 1949 / Joseph Cornell, author. © Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Much of this inspiration had its roots in the Victorian ephemera with which his house was filled as a child; his early collages were not, like Max Ernst’s, a form of raw vengeance unleashed upon the memory of a repressive Victorian childhood, but often an oblique celebration of that era, which he knew only through an imagined nostalgia, partly projected onto him by his parents, and propelled by a narrative impulse that seems more about telling a story than proving a point. His collages are alive not with ever-present threat or the bitter urge to parody, as Ernst’s are, but with an inquisitive sense of uncomprehending fascination, ‘reflective of a child’s worldview and experience’,71 and manifested in images of ants carrying playing cards or children with giant birds. Ernst’s collage novels, conversely, are pervaded with menace and mutation. A plate from Une semaine de bonté (1934) (Figure 1.6), for instance, features two Victorian ladies seated on an upright sofa in a lounge or parlour. The elder, darker woman seems to be advising the younger blonde; they appear, at any rate, engrossed in conversation. Although light seems to be falling on them, the room itself is dark and richly furnished, its walls papered with a substance which seems to be almost as thick as the carpet, and which, in its swirling design, seems to move and mutate. The two women hold hands and look intently at each other. Above their heads in a heavy frame hangs a painting of two women – again, one dark and one blonde – with their faces pressed together. Without either woman seeming to have noticed it, a gargantuan reptile with huge pointed scales and a tail that indicates brute strength has climbed up the legs and across the back of the elder woman, and has placed its claws with a sense of calculated menace on either side of her face. By contrast, an untitled Cornell collage, from circa 1930–1940, features a very similar scenario, with very different connotations (Figure 1.7). A Victorian woman, bathed in light, is seated on an upright chair in a heavily upholstered lounge or parlour, with a large fan in her right hand. In Cornell’s collage, the patterns on the wall do not appear to writhe or twist, but the setting is analogous. Leaning against the woman is a huge lion; an equally impressive lioness lounges at her feet on a crumpled rug, her paws spread languidly in the manner of a contented domestic cat. The woman is paying no attention to either animal, and yet seems to possess the loving disregard of a relaxed and experienced cat-owner. A large camera is positioned at the edge of the collage, held at an odd angle by a disembodied pair of hands. The woman looks towards it. We can see in the contrast between the collages that whilst Ernst uses the irrational in order to subvert restrictive domestic order and rationality, in a manner ‘akin to an act of terrorism’,72 Cornell chooses to embrace the irrational with the enthusiasm of any child who ever wanted a lion for a pet, integrating it favourably into the familiarity of a recognisable domestic situation. Whilst Ernst’s reptile is determinedly predatory, Cornell’s lions have the non-threatening and alluring nonchalance of household cats. Both artists have used exotic creatures that exist partly in myth; but where Cornell’s animals are warm-blooded, and embody the gentle, big-hearted ferocity for which their species is fabled, Ernst has chosen a cold-blooded, creeping, half-fantastical fiend that has more in common with the bloodlust and killer stealth of the Komodo Dragon. Ernst has deliberately, with the quasi-misogynistic air of patriarchy associated with Surrealism, depicted the women in his collage as being oblivious and defenceless, whereas Cornell’s collage operates on the rationale that the woman is ignoring the lions because she is concentrating on having her picture taken. Furthermore, by putting two people in his collage, and thereby forcing himself to choose which one to subject to his reptile’s attentions, Ernst turns the momentum in the artwork upon himself, making it about him, and his choice, rather than about what is happening to the women in the image. Conversely, as Walter Hopps recollects, Cornell’s dossiers were often centred ‘around a person or the idea of someone’.73 This is evident in many of his collages, and applies in this instance: the self-referentiality indicated by the woman’s disembodied photographer is subordinated to the implied outcome of his efforts – in other words, the photograph of the woman herself.
Fig. 1.6 Max Ernst. Untitled plate from Une semaine de bonté, 1934. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.7 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Woman with Lions), c. 1930s. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Both collages function through psychic disproportion and the power of suggestion, but the sense of dread implied by Ernst’s lizard, and further evoked by the serpentine carpet and shifting wallpaper, could not be further removed from Cornell’s tranquil, yet no less fantastical, collaged living room. Ernst depicts a sort of psychotic vengeance, typical of the Surrealist movement, in his calculated infliction of victimhood upon the women in his collage: it is a manifestation of his belief in wielding a sadistic authority over the past. By contrast, there is a nostalgia in Cornell’s collage, a yearning for a past half real and half imagined, where, in a parlour not dissimilar to the one in the house in which he grew up, a lady such as his mother might well have sat straight-backed and noble, with two fully-grown lions at her feet, photographed, perhaps, by her son. Ronald Feigen recalls that Cornell seemed to be ‘always struggling to give us a past’,74 while Ernst, on the other hand, seemed always to be struggling to kill it. Although in both collages the context is dreamlike, and the subject enigmatic, Cornell’s image is unified by its narrative impulse, and by a sense, also, of being a unique event, rather than part of an image-cycle. It is a simple, self-contained, peculiar little fairy tale that exists independently within the body of Cornell’s work. Ernst’s collage, however, is very much part of a series – a series which, in its thinly veiled misogyny, suppressed violence, and sheer repetitiveness, borders on the pornographic, a genre that could not have been farther from Cornell’s aesthetic psyche.
In terms of style, form and visual content, Cornell remained close to Ernst as he continued to make his early collages, depicting, as Ernst had also done, nautical scenes, birds and their relationships to humans, and children, whilst remaining clearly distinct in terms of sentiment and subject. Cornell’s collage Untitled (Man with Portable Motion Picture Camera and Musical Score) (1932–1938) (Figure 1.8), which he imbues with the emotional luminosity of silent film, corresponds with another plate from Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté, entitled Le geste élégant du noyé (Figure 1.9). In Cornell’s collage, a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat stands behind a music stand, upon which sits the eponymous score, as well as a fantastically large bird, which is looking up at him. He points his camera towards a flat and empty expanse of water. In Ernst’s collage, a man in evening dress, whose top hat has been blown off, looms disproportionately out of a black and stormy sky, over a shipwreck. Tiny birds swoop and plummet over the mayhem. There are stylistic similarities between the two collages but the correlation here is principally thematic (although once again the differences in tone, mood and imagery are remarkable). Cornell’s figure appears to be that of an orchestra conductor doubling as movie director. Parallels emerge with the watery settings, and with Ernst’s figure, whose garb, outstretched arms, and position in the collage, elevated as he is above a number of men, also lend him the air of conductor or movie director. However Ernst’s figure is portrayed as godlike and terrible, holding sway over a dramatic and brutal scene, and appearing to be whipping it into a frenzy rather than merely recording events. His lost hat suggests a loss of control over the tumult. By contrast the man in Cornell’s collage points his camera serenely at a peaceful seascape. Whilst the similarity between the camera and a firearm (point-and-shoot) also render his figure godlike, there appears to be nothing in his sights for the figure to aim at. There is also no orchestra or choir for him to conduct, suggesting that the musical score is merely a souvenir, serving no practical purpose other than as an agent of nostalgia. This renders the image acutely Cornellian, to the extent of being almost a self-portrait. Cornell was a man who wore dark suits, who loved birds and sheet music and often combined the two in his boxes, and who made movies of tranquil scenes in which nothing very much happened. In spite of the parallel use of birds, men in dark suits, hats, musical imagery and an expanse of water, the difference between the two collages is striking. In Cornell’s scenario, nothing is being manipulated, and no one is getting hurt. No violent fantasy is being enacted in order to prove a point about history, or childhood, or the state of modern art, or politics. Instead, a rather private daydream appears to have been collaged together out of Cornell’s ‘decidedly nonlinear thought process’.75 It has been created, it would seem, in accordance with Cornell’s principle of ‘making things without any thought or expectation of exhibiting’.76 The virulent exhibitionism and desire to shock, which pervades many of Ernst’s collages, is noticeably absent. Cornell has not taken Ernst’s more prurient ideas and watered them down into self-denying versions of the originals: rather, his own ideas are the originals, pieced together using a combination of established techniques and unique fragments, in order to produce entirely new and unrelated images – which is, of course, precisely the purpose of collage.
Fig. 1.8 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Man with Portable Motion Picture Camera and Musical Score), 1932–1938. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.9 Max Ernst. ‘Le geste élégant du noyé’, plate from Une semaine de bonté, 1934. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
Cornell lost his father to cancer when he was just thirteen, an event which effectively ended his childhood. As the eldest child, he was left, in a sense, at the head of a grieving family. Being prematurely catapulted into adulthood in this way seems to have had the effect of enshrining childhood for Cornell, transfixing it in a state of enchantment, which made him view his own childhood as an isolated collection of treasured moments suspended in time, around which he oriented himself, like an object to which he was deeply attached. The fact that his beloved brother Robert, brain-damaged from birth, was trapped in a permanently childlike state of arrested development, further added to the veneration with which Cornell viewed children, as well as objects or images relating to childhood, such as dolls, shells, or penny arcades. Children in his work are consistently treated like young aristocrats (most notably in the Medici Slot Machine series of boxes), in such a way that the viewer understands that their nobility is inherently linked to their childishness, to the artless wonder with which they perceive the world, and to the associated democracy and insight of their vision. Cornell chooses to use in his work children such as the Medici princes and princesses or the seventeenth-century Spanish princess from Velázquez’s Las Meninas,77 in order to highlight the aristocracy of the state of childhood, and the nobility of a childish demeanour. Toward the end of his life, in 1972, Cornell held an exhibition specifically for children, at the Cooper Union in Greenwich Village. Having always felt them to be ‘uniquely qualified to understand the spirit of his work’, he positioned his by now world-famous artworks low down, at the eye-level of the children, and mingled with his diminutive guests, drinking cherry soda, at the opening of the show.78 Of course his art itself was not that of a child, but this exhibition, and the one that followed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, featuring an exclusive children’s preview, vindicated a review by Hilton Kramer:
his fantasy seems closer to the world of fairy tale and childhood romance than to the scandalous sexual encounters so much prized by the vatic voices of Surrealism … Not the pathos of experience, but the sentimental revery of an innocent dreaming of experience, has been his particular forte. Psychologically, Mr Cornell’s imagery has always been very knowing, but it is knowing in the manner, say, of the children in Henry James’s stories – divining things they have never confronted in the flesh.79
It is precisely this ‘knowingness’ which defends Cornell’s work from charges of being overly bijou or saccharine; and whilst Kramer is right to assert that Cornell is closer to the realms of childhood fancy than to Surrealism, it is equally possible that it was his initial encounters with the Surrealist idiom that facilitated the otherworldly ‘knowingness’ of his work. In his receptiveness to the techniques particularly of Max Ernst, Cornell was able to transmute the former’s shock effects (often stemming from images of children in danger) into the enigmatic, secretive energy of children with power, more akin to the daring, self-governing children depicted by fellow outsider artist Henry Darger. In Cornell’s dossier for the Crystal Cage (for Berenice) (1943) series of collages, for instance, photographs of children in wartime scenarios, in front of piles of rubble or bombed-out buildings, are accompanied by light-hearted or positive headlines such as WAR GIVES BREAK TO BOY, and, in one collage, RABBIT JOINS BATTALION. The indication here is that the children are not terrified, helpless victims (as they would be in a more cynical – even realistic – wartime work), but serve in some way to negate the misery created by war, transcending its privations. The positivity that emerges from these references to war, a theme which overall is scantly represented in Cornell’s body of work, may also relate to the sense in Manhattan’s cultural circles that the systematic dismantling of Europe by outbreaks of war resulted in the reinvigoration and renewal of New York by Europe’s displaced artists and writers.
Many of Ernst’s shock effects come from two recurring themes in his work: images of women and children, and images of birds, often used in conjunction with one another. His collage painting Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale, for instance, evokes an irrational hallucinatory sense of dread as two children are menaced by a tiny songbird. In both Une semaine de bonté and La femme 100 têtes, women and children come repeatedly under threat: some images feature mutilated or metamorphosed female bodies, whilst others depict children fleeing an unseen enemy, their faces contorted with terror. When children appear in Ernst’s work they are rarely spared the hallucinogenic torment that afflicts his adult figures. In a collage accompanied by the words ‘Ici se préparent les premières touches de la grâce et les jeux sans issue’, from La femme 100 têtes, for instance, three terrified children are depicted bent almost double as they are guided in their flight from an unknown menace by a solemn, half-naked phantom (Figure 1.10). Cornell’s Untitled (Children with Carnival Carts and Suitcases), from 1934, corresponds with this in some ways, also depicting a group of children undertaking a departure, only here they are playing blithely on the chassis of a great, old-fashioned wagon (Figure 1.11). A further image from La femme 100 têtes features two children grimacing agonizingly with paralyzing fear before the faceless menace of a figure draped in white (Figure 1.12). The image chimes with Cornell’s Untitled (Seated Figure with Suspended Plates and Bottles) (1932–1938), again with subtle, attitudinal differences (Figure 1.13). In the Cornell collage, a seated boy appears to have been decapitated by a plate, upon which his head now rests. Nonetheless he sits quite calmly, and appears to be enjoying a good book, whilst the suspended plates and bottles float around him like a scene from Mary Poppins or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ordinarily, an image of the decapitation of a child would provoke a sense of profound horror in any viewer, but the complete absence of any force for evil within this picture negates this. The steadying presence on a floating plate of a disembodied hand from stage right evokes a sense of dreamlike theatricality or tricksy sleight of hand, which distinguishes this childlike reverie from the gut-wrenching night-terror of Ernst’s collage. It is clear that Cornell’s boy is not in danger – he is, rather, part of the illusion. For the children in Ernst’s collages, there is no such reprieve: whilst the threat may be illusory, originating in a false vision or hallucination, there is no guarantee that it will be over any time soon, or that it will not hurt them.
Ernst’s children also face danger from strange winged creatures, including Ernst’s sinister shamanistic alter ego Loplop, a collaged man-bird, who came to play a central narrative role in his work. Cornell seems to have taken from this, particularly later on in his career, an invitation to subversion: his own portrayals of children and birds together are, as ever, far more harmonious. An untitled collage created by Cornell at some point between 1930 and 1940 partially subverts the aforementioned Ernst painting, Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale, in its inclusion of two stylized, wooden, yet oddly lifelike birds and one child. It goes further: it distorts the sizes of both the birds and the boy, whilst simultaneously emphasising through the positioning of the figures the total absence of threat. The larger bird is perched near the boy’s arm, with its beak near his face in a manner that, like the lions in the collage discussed above, is both nonchalant and captivating. The smaller bird rests coyly on the boy’s head, in a manner reminiscent of a story by Hans Christian Andersen or Oscar Wilde. In a similar image, pasted onto the bottom of a letter written to Parker Tyler on October 6th 1940, a boy holds a bird in his hands, whilst a pigeon, again somewhat larger than life, roosts peacefully on a branch to the left of the boy’s head. Birds recur throughout Cornell’s career, as do children, from the Medici boxes to the Habitat constructions, but it was not until the 1950s that he began to combine the two in earnest, in boxes such as the Caravaggio Boy Dovecote (1953), in which the repeated image of a young boy’s face peers out from each of the nesting spaces in the eponymous dovecote, and Variétés Apollinaris (for Guillaume Apollinaire) (1953), in which the cut-out image of a young girl holding a basket is pasted onto the back inner wall of the box, whilst three doves flutter around her. In his later work from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when Cornell found himself returning increasingly to the practice of collage, and by association, to Surrealist techniques and imagery, he revisited and reused these motifs on numerous occasions.
Fig. 1.10 Max Ernst. ‘Ici se préparent les premières touches de la grâce et les jeux sans issue’, plate from La femme 100 têtes, 1929. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.11 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Children with Carnival Carts and Suitcases), 1934. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.12 Max Ernst. ‘Suite’, plate from La femme 100 têtes, 1929. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
Fig. 1.13 Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Seated Figure with Suspended Plates and Bottles), 1932–1938. Collage. © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2013.
But in spite of continuing to share similar concerns, the manner in which Cornell handled his subject matter remained distinct, as a comparison between the uses of bird imagery in a collage entitled Allegory of Innocence, and the Surrealist André Masson’s painting The Blood of Birds, both made in 1956, illustrates. In Cornell’s collage, numerous over-large birds perch almost voyeuristically in the foliage around two identical cut-out images of a woman who is naked from the waist up. In Masson’s painting, by contrast, a selection of disembodied feathers is glued to a canvas daubed with sanguinary splashes. In Cornell’s Observations of a Satellite I, from 1960, a vast hummingbird hovers unthreateningly behind Velázquez’s tiny blonde Spanish princess, taken from Las Meninas (1656). Again, Cornell seems to be invoking and subverting Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale. The scenario is once again criss-crossed by a grid, and takes place under a bell jar, in a snowy garden with a tree and a low fence, against a dazzlingly blue sky in which is hung the titular satellite. Whilst the bird, the child, the colour of the backdrop, and the fence all bring Ernst’s painting to mind (as well as Velázquez’s, and, indeed, Picasso’s many variations on it), it appears that what Cornell was really trying to portray when he made the collage was his own garden, and the elusive girls who would sometimes visit him at home, or the songbirds and movie stars about whom he fantasized ‘with the sentimental reverie of an innocent dreaming of experience … divining things they have never confronted in the flesh’.80 He himself is the satellite, removed both by distance and by an ever-present pane of glass. The child in the image could not be further from danger.
Cornell had little interest in the suspended violence or the cultural, social, and sexual recalcitrance iterated by the European artists who were filling up New York; his artistic intent was relentlessly associative, empathetic, and dialogic, imbued with the ‘sense of a ciphered intimacy’,81 as Stamatina Dimakopolou reflects. His work treads the contours of extreme privacy and shared confidence; in a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, one has the sense of reading a diary that the writer both insisted was private and yet always hoped someone would see. However, in even the most eerie of Cornell’s works, such as Bébé Marie (1940–1942), in which a doll stands in a wooden box behind a barrier of silvery twigs, the viewer is unlikely to discern any of the violent sexual mythology so prevalent in preceding Surrealist objects such as Alberto Giacometti’s violent bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra-Furniture (1938) (a stool consisting of three mannequin legs in stockings and high heels), or Hans Bellmer’s The Doll (1935), one of many chilling photographs taken by the artist of a naked, dismembered, and grotesquely reassembled mannequin. Unlike any of Surrealism’s presiding female images, most notably the faceless and aggressively manipulated mannequin, Cornell’s doll is fully clothed in a long, rather dowdy dress, and is wearing an elaborate flowery straw hat. Crucially, she has her own face, with wide, dark eyes, well-defined eyebrows, a neat fringe, a childlike nose, rosy cheeks, and a bright red mouth.
Studying Bébé Marie from a book, rather than looking at the original artwork, it is easy to mistake the way in which the box is presented in a gallery. The doll is not, as is often thought, lying in a coffin-like box under a restrictive covering, and cannot be, therefore, a version of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. She is, rather, standing up, gazing through a beautiful, living fortification – making her more like a Rapunzel or a Pocahontas, a Daphne or an Alice, perhaps. But there is little sense of victimhood about her; she manifests, as do so many of Cornell’s children, or objects associated with childhood, the mysterious potency of the very young. Furthermore, as Solomon observes, in looking in at Bébé Marie ‘we feel we are also looking in on the troubled inner life of its creator, a grown man who is overly invested emotionally in a doll’.82 This could certainly be the case, particularly as the doll seems to stay with him throughout his career; a version of Bébé Marie reappears in an untitled collage made in 1960, for instance, sitting on the inside ledge of a circular window, high above a city by a river bathed in sunlight. Bébé Marie, in her upright box, could be seen to be trapped behind her silver fence, peeking out through the restrictive branches, and trapped equally behind the layer of glass that forms the invisible fourth wall of the box, the captive of a man who loves her too much to let her go. She is perhaps a manifestation of the unattainable dancers and movie actresses to whom Cornell was so attached, for whom he made numerous collages and box constructions,83 and from whom, ultimately, he found himself kept at a distance by the unassailable silver fence of stardom and showbiz. In a scrawled, half-illegible note written on a scrap of notepaper taken from Madison Avenue’s Bodley Gallery by Cornell in 1965, almost twenty-five years after he made the box, it is possible to discern the words ‘childhood doll’, ‘French import’, ‘kidnapped’, and ‘this doll encased’.84 Bébé Marie is also, to a degree, on the outside looking in, gazing back at the man so emotionally invested in her and in the trappings of childhood: she is both hostage and hostage-taker, symbolic of Cornell’s awareness that he is as much encased as she. She is also, in part, a recreation of one of Cornell’s fleeting city apparitions, ‘a movie cashier in an Art Deco box’,85 or a girl seen through the window of an inner city train. She is part of the story of Cornell, indicative of Hugh Stevens’s observation that his work can ‘be thought of both in narrative terms, as offering a fragment of a tale, and in material terms, as the souvenir of an event’.86 Further, she embodies Hauptman’s evocative assertion that Cornell’s works ‘propose that identity is a doorway, opening onto ever-expanding worlds, that identity is not an end in itself but leads to myriad and multiple explorations: chains of allusions, webs of references, halls of mirrors. A single clue always leads to multiple nexts’.87
In a world of doorways and mirrors, then, it is insufficiently inquiring to assert, as Solomon does, that ‘Bébé Marie is all about sex, even though nothing about it is specifically sexual’.88 Perhaps the construction is about sex, but in the same way that Rapunzel or Pocahontas are about sex, rather than in terms of the more Sadeian connotations of Surrealist art. It is important to note, however, following on from Hauptman’s observation, that the viewer’s interpretation of an artwork such as this is, to a very great degree, informed not just by what we know of the artist, but by the cultural associations that we ourselves bring with us. For example, depending on their tastes, a twenty-first-century viewer may well see not a fairy tale china doll gazing through a hoary fence but, instead, a long-lost sister or bride of the murderous Chucky doll, from the Child’s Play films (1988–2004), waiting to ambush an unsuspecting victim.89 Harold Rosenberg observed in 1969 that ‘Cornell’s ties with Surrealism are biographical rather than aesthetic or ideological’;90 similarly, the viewer’s ties with Cornell may be little more than autobiographical, rather than necessarily aesthetic or ideological. Just as Cornell may once have seemed to be a Surrealist, by individuals surrounded by Surrealist art and influence, when taken out of that context, his work can in fact appear to be anything the viewer would like it to be, which is, of course, part of its power.
His life’s work is, ultimately, as his friend the poet Marianne Moore asserted, an ‘initiation in originality’.91 His hundreds of wooden boxes, collages, and journals constitute a rare act of serial ventriloquism in which Cornell constructed a fragmentary visual narrative already half-imagined, communing simultaneously with the past and with a bittersweet and always retreating future, from the vantage point of a hyper-real present. In collages like Story without a Name (for Max Ernst) (1942) and the cut-out Theatre of Hans Christian Andersen (1945), we can see him developing ways of telling stories without using words; in other words, inventing a new kind of narrative. His collage letters to Parker Tyler, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Tilly Losch, among others, also demonstrate this, showing that it was never enough for him merely to write down what was on his mind; he wanted his thoughts to be manifested visually as well, and for his correspondents, if they wished, to be able to add their own meaning or interpretation to his missives. Collage enabled Cornell to be both a poet and an artist simultaneously; like a writer, he kept notebooks and journals, forever jotting down his thoughts and ideas on whatever scraps of paper he had to hand. These ideas were then transformed and represented visually, rather than in writing, in order to evoke more strongly the sensations that had initially provoked them. ‘One can almost feel the chilly breeze of the Channel at Dieppe or some other outmoded, out-of-season French resort’, John Ashbery wrote, about the experience of looking at Cornell’s Hotel boxes from the 1950s. Ashbery identifies ‘the secret of [Cornell’s] eloquence’ in his subtle figuring not of ‘the country itself but the impression we have of it before going there, gleaned from Perrault’s fairy tales or old copies of L’Illustration, or whatever people have told us about it’.92
We are not given France in a box, or Italy, or even the stars, but these places as they are imagined by an individual who has never been there, and who knows he will never go, projected into an unattainable future from the crystallized state in which they already exist, and always have, in the form of old maps, sheet music, picture postcards, and books of poetry. The viewer of Cornell’s Hotel boxes remains, like the implied hotel guest, and like Cornell himself, trapped within the box, and within the dream of travel. Equally, the dream of knowing a woman like Tamara Toumanova or Lauren Bacall, or a poet such as Gérard de Nerval, or of being a significant part of the drifting tide of the New York streets, was always one that partly came true and yet always somehow eluded Cornell, trapping him within the unremitting cycle of his delicate attempts to reincarnate something that had never fully existed. An artistic procedure, modelled on an inherent Symbolist confidence in private visions and contemplated objects,93 and using the urban treasure-map of the flâneur, was carefully developed by Cornell in order to create what Julia Kelly identifies as ‘a solitary poetic place of reverie … permeated with the ambivalence of a nostalgia for places never seen’,94 for women never met, skyscrapers never ascended, centuries never lived in. Ultimately the viewer comes to recognise that this poetic place is Cornell’s only destination, that by its very nature it rejects any pretence at external discovery or exploration, and that it is what the collages evoke and the boxed constructions hold. The fragmented hotel advertisements, foreign stamps, and exotic maps have all been found by Cornell in the junkshops of his home city: as opposed to being personal plunder from innumerable trips abroad, they are in fact personal plunder from innumerable trips into Manhattan and its surrounds. Furthermore, if, as Hopps notes, Cornell ‘responded to signs in the world – on buildings, shops, stores or theatres’, it was not on account of a desire to ape another culture, but rather because ‘he liked the language’. Hopps adds that, as in the flyer for Levy’s Surréalisme exhibition, designed by Cornell, ‘the words and phrases in Cornell’s work float alone, rather than being built into the composition as they are in the work of Braque or Schwitters’.95 Unanchored, dislocated, these collage elements operate as a form of misdirection closely related to Hauptman’s image of the hall of mirrors. Artistic sleight of hand on Cornell’s part initially evokes the expansive illusion of a foreign place or distant universe. However, as in a hall of mirrors, the evocative, mysterious profusion of never-ending images is in fact self-conscious and internal, rooted by necessity in a kernel of reality; in other words, the place in which the reflected object is located, and which the mirrors cannot help but show. In the end, all Cornell’s collages and boxes point to the same place – the reflected object is always himself, and his New York.
Similarities have been drawn between Cornell and Raymond Roussel, a writer who, albeit in a manner less ingenuous than Cornell, also chose to present his elaborate imaginative fabrications in the false guise of factual travel narratives. It is therefore interesting to note a quotation copied into Cornell’s diary from 1968, from an essay by Alain Robbe-Grillet on Roussel, which Rayner Heppenstall had featured in his 1966 monograph on the writer. The quotation includes the vague, almost contradictory, yet highly telling remark: ‘it is a world from which we discover we can never get out. Everything has stopped, everything goes on reproducing itself’.96 What this enunciates about Cornell’s work is the function of his boxes according to the principle of Schrödinger’s Cat.97 At their heart is an undeniable constant, but for as long as the boxes remain closed, both the real and the imaginary may exist simultaneously, fully formed in the mind of the viewer, a quantum structure functioning as a repeated superimposition of states that is neither quite one thing nor another. This effect is one that Cornell seems to have felt could not be achieved solely in the practice of pure, two-dimensional, paper collage: he needed the box constructions, rooted in and continually informed by the principles of collage, in order to express the sense of containment thrown up both by the Manhattan skyscrapers and by his stifling life in the house in Flushing. Travelling, meeting people, or even accepting his fame, necessarily remained an unrealised dream because he felt himself, one way or another, at all times to be trapped within a box construction, within a constructed world, whether by the Iroquois skyscraper builders in New York, or by his overbearing mother and dependent brother on Utopia Parkway. It is a world in which Cornell seems to have existed uncomplainingly, and in which, following his entry into the world of art, his state of confinement was a positive one. Whilst his ‘wonderful, irrational discovery’ of collage liberated him from his previously mundane and frustrated existence as a cloth salesman, his subsequent move from collage to box construction was almost like discovering that the world was round or seeing in colour for the first time. Not only were the boxes more closely representative of the dreamlike affinities which Cornell saw in everyday life, but they also permitted manifestations of sound and movement that were unavailable to pure collage, such as balls that roll around and sands that shift (which, incidentally, was an aspect of Cornell’s work by which Frank O’Hara was particularly captivated).98 Like many of O’Hara’s poems, Cornell’s box constructions were often ‘for’ someone – a ballerina, a writer, an artist, a friend – and embody his gift compulsion (a character trait O’Hara also shared), or, as Cornell once jotted down, the ‘necessity of approaching own work in a spontaneous spirit of giving first’.99 They exemplify his appreciation for the passing on of things, for bartering and for sharing, revealing affinities between and giving form and purpose to the otherwise useless, recycled objects with which the boxes are filled. Finally, the boxes, and the items selectively collaged within them, can been seen as acts of reciprocal gift-exchange between Cornell’s past, present, and future, charting his life, rarefying and representing in microcosm all that he experienced in New York City. As he said to David Bourdon, ‘everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it? … How does one know what a certain object will tell another?’100
1 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1993), 5.
2 Howard Hussey, ‘Collaging the Moment’, in Joseph Cornell: Collages 1931–1972, ed. Ronald Feigen, Howard Hussey and Donald Windham (New York: Castelli Feigen Corcoran, 1978), 24.
3 Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (London: Pimlico, 1998), 33. Unlike Man Ray and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, two other successful collage artists who had realised their first abstract compositions ‘with the aid of cloth swatches from a tailor’s sample book’ (Wescher, 124), Cornell appears to have found his initial profession deeply uninspiring and not conducive to creativity.
4 Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 77.
5 Cornell, journal, November 1955, Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 46.
6 Cornell, journal, February 1949 (scrawled on the back of torn poster for the Egan Gallery), Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 6.
7 Solomon, 91.
8 John Ashbery, Reported Sightings, ed. David Bergman (New York: Knopf, 1989), 14.
9 Solomon, 373; Brian O’Doherty, The Voice and the Myth: American Masters (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 257.
10 Jed Perl, New Art City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 304.
11 Dickran Tashjian, Joseph Cornell: Gifts of Desire (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1992), 43–4.
12 Tashjian, 61.
13 Geertz, 5, 13, 20, 5.
14 T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ II, Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1944).
15 Perl, 290.
16 Diary Entry, 28 March 1950, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 7.
17 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 255.
18 O’Doherty, 257.
19 Geertz, 14, 17.
20 See Cynthia Houng, ‘Art Review: Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination’, KQED Arts, 5 November 2007, http://www.kqed.org/arts/visualarts/article.jsp?essid=20183 [Accessed 1 December 2009].
21 For instance, both Jason Edwards (‘Coming Out as a Cornellian’, in Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box, ed. Edwards/Taylor, 25–44) and Wayne Koestenbaum (Review of Caws, Joseph Cornell: Theater of the Mind, in Artforum/Bookforum [Summer 1994], 2–3) discuss what they view to be Cornell’s ‘paedophilic’ tendencies.
22 Krauss, 19–20.
23 Krauss, 20.
24 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Spatial Cubism’, 60; Motherwell, ‘Beyond the Aesthetic’, 38–9; Carrà quoted in Poggi, 185–6; Belgrad, 135.
25 Schwitters, ‘Die Merzmalerei’, Der Sturm (Berlin: July 1919).
26 Digby, 15.
27 Quoted in Simic, 16.
28 Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (London: Penguin, 1973), 169.
29 Undated card, ‘a Tuesday in 1950’, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 7. Journal, February 1949, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 6. Note found on scrap of brown paper in Cornell files, November 1955, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 46.
30 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 255.
31 Dimakopoulou, 215.
32 Jodi Hauptman, Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 150–51.
33 Mary Ann Caws, Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters and Files (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 37.
34 Cornell, quoted in Hautpman, 4.
35 Solomon, 55.
36 On 27 December 1926, The Brooklyn Museum issued a press release stating: ‘Because of the unusual interest in the International Exhibition of Modern Art arranged by the Société Anonyme and now current at the Brooklyn Museum (the attendance at the Museum from November 19th through December 26th has reached forty-eight thousand), it has been decided to extend the closing date from January 3rd to January 10th’ (Brooklyn Museum Archives, Exhibitions: International Exhibition of Modern Art assembled by Société Anonyme, 19 November 1926–10 January 1927).
37 Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2007), 21.
38 Hartigan, 25.
39 Sawin, 79.
40 Levy, 77.
41 Solomon, 58.
42 Quoted in Lindsay Blair, Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 38.
43 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 249.
44 Hartigan, 47.
45 Michel Leiris, ‘Le Voyageur et son Ombre’, La Bête noire 1 (1 April 1935).
46 Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, James Gaiger, and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 452.
47 Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, eds, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 1.
48 Hughes and Lund, 5.
49 Noted in Julia Kelly, ‘Sights Unseen: Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, Joseph Cornell and the Art of Travel’, in Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box, ed. Edwards and Taylor, 77.
50 Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: the Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. John William Gabriel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 11.
51 Quoted in Hauptman, 28.
52 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 257.
53 http://dictionary.oed.com (Oxford English Dictionary): obsolete definition of the word ‘fiction’ [Accessed 5 May 2010].
54 O’Doherty, 257–8.
55 Levy, 77.
56 Breton, Mad Love (L’Amour fou), 28.
57 Georges Hugnet, ‘In the Light of Surrealism’, in Fantastic Art Dada Surrealism, ed. Barr, 52.
58 Louis Aragon, La peinture au défi: exposition de collages (Paris: Galerie Goemans, 1930), quoted in Fantastic Art Dada Surrealism, 44.
59 Hugnet, 51.
60 O’Doherty, 274.
61 A further link between Cornell and Magritte is Cornell’s 1963 collage Mica Magritte II, which uses the image of the train from Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938).
62 Hauptman, Stargazing in the Cinema, 31.
63 Mina Loy, ‘Phenomenon in American Art’ (typescript), Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 9, Box 19, fol. 12.
64 Ashbery, ‘Joseph Cornell’, in Reported Sightings, 17.
65 5 January 1949, Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 6.
66 Diary Entry, Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 22.
67 Diary Entry, Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 46.
68 Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 4.
69 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 225.
70 Diary Entry, 14 October 1950 (recorded 16th), Cornell papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 7.
71 Hauptman, 178.
72 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 227.
73 Walter Hopps, ‘Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered’, in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp … In Resonance, ed. Polly Koch (Houston: The Menil Foundation, 1998), 76.
74 Ronald Feigen, Introduction to Joseph Cornell: Collages 1931–1972, 9.
75 Hartigan, ‘Joseph Cornell’s Dance with Duality’, in Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, ed. Hartigan, Richard Vine, and Robert Lehrman (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 12.
76 Cornell, in a telephone conversation with Brian O’Doherty, recorded in The Voice and the Myth, 279. O’Doherty notes that the conversation took place at some point between 1965 and 1972.
77 Picasso was also fascinated by Velázquez’s little Spanish princess, producing, in 1957, fifty-eight of his own variations on the painting.
78 Solomon, 365.
79 Hilton Kramer, ‘The Enigmatic Collages of Joseph Cornell’, Review of Robert Cornell: Memorial Exhibition (4–29 January 1966, at Robert Schoelkopf’s gallery, Madison Avenue), New York Times, 23 January 1966, 107. The exhibition was in memory of Cornell’s disabled brother Robert, who had died in 1965.
80 Kramer, 107.
81 Dimakopolou, 210.
82 Solomon, 153.
83 A series of collages made for the ballerina Tamara Toumanova is particularly striking: in each, Toumanova is portrayed as a fantastical creature of myth or fairy tale, seeming to fly toward a suspended red heart in one, appearing as a beautiful deep-sea witch in another, and as a colourful, carefree mermaid in a third. The implication of all three is that in Cornell’s eyes Toumanova was so sublime and so unattainable that she might well have been a latter-day fairy princess.
84 Cornell, ‘Notes on Bébé Marie Doll circa 1965’, Cornell papers, AAA, Series 1, Box 1, fol. 1.
85 O’Doherty, 259.
86 Stevens, 104.
87 Hauptman, 4.
88 Solomon, 155.
89 Don Mancini’s film franchise consists of Child’s Play (1988) and five other films. The protagonist is a serial killer who uses a voodoo ritual to incarcerate his soul inside a ‘Good Guy’ doll (Chucky), in order to escape death.
90 Harold Rosenberg, Artworks and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 79.
91 Marianne Moore, in a letter of recommendation for the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, for which Cornell applied on 19 September 1945, quoted in Tashjian, 72.
92 Ashbery, Reported Sightings, 15.
93 ‘La contemplation des objets, l’image s’envolant des rêveries suscitées par eux, sont le chant’ (‘the contemplation of objects, the images that soar from the reveries they have induced, constitutes the song’). Stéphane Mallarmé in an interview with Jules Huret, ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’ (Paris: Fasquelle, 55–65); originally published in L’Echo de Paris, 3 March–5 July 1891.
94 Kelly, 85.
95 Hopps, 71.
96 8 April 1968, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 9, fol. 4.
97 Schrödinger’s Cat, formulated by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a thought experiment related to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. It presents a situation in which a cat may be dead or alive, depending upon an arbitrary sequence of events. However because the sequence of events takes place within a sealed box, the implication is that until the box is opened, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.
98 ‘Reviews and Previews: Joseph Cornell and Landes Lewitin’, Artnews 54, no. 5 (September 1955), 50.
99 Diary Entry, 1 September 1953, Cornell Papers, AAA, Series 3, Box 6, fol. 22.
100 David Bourdon, ‘The Boxed Art of Joseph Cornell’, Life, 15 December 1967, 63–66a.
