Joseph Cornell's 'Poetic Theaters'

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 24, 2006; Page WE24

As the artist John Baldessari once said, "As soon as you put two things together, you have a story."

That line has been rattling around in my head recently, thanks to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which had quoted it in connection with Baldessari's hand-picked reinstallation of works from that museum's permanent collection. Yet it's equally apt in reference to another exhibition, "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Take Cornell's "Home, Poor Heart, You Cannot Rediscover If the Dream Alone Does Not Suffice, Holderlin," for instance. The collage from about 1963 -- Cornell rarely dated his work -- consists of two images: the first, apparently, a slightly cheesy, embossed Christmas card depicting a snow-covered woodland scene with two white birds; the second, a print of a Victorian-looking woman, cut out with great care and superimposed atop the wintry landscape.

Cornell's work doesn't get much simpler than that.

Known for his sometimes intricate found-object box constructions and collages, the artist was a notorious pack rat, as evidenced by the show's "Wonderland" section, a display of the artist's source material that aims not to re-create but give a little taste of Cornell's home/studio. My favorite thing? A box of soft, gray and vaguely dust-bunny-ish fluff labeled "mouse material." "Everything," the artist liked to say, "can be used in a lifetime."

Still, there's something about "Home, Poor Heart" that belies its simplicity. There's an implied narrative -- and all the power and mystery of the storyteller's art -- that doesn't exist in either of its component parts. A flavor of longing, of sadness, of ineffable loss and the struggle to replace something gone forever. For that reason, Cornell's collages, along with his even more famous boxes, often feel more like trajectories than static things. They don't sit still, but rather travel through, or "navigate," the imagination, as the show's title suggests. You don't so much look at them as read them.

Or maybe watch them perform. Cornell himself described his work from the 1930s and 1940s as "poetic theaters."

Two of the boxes on display even offer a tiny light show: "Renee Jeanmaire in 'La Belle au Bois Dormant' " is illuminated every hour on the half-hour for one minute, while "Untitled [Owl Habitat]" glows for a similar interval at the top of every hour. Although you can't touch anything here, many of these works were made to be handled. To be browsed through, as with "GC 44," "Portrait of Ondine" and other portfolios of loose papers, photos and cards. Even, occasionally, to be upended like an hourglass, as with Cornell's "Untitled [Blue Sand Fountain]," or listened to, as Cornell collector Robert Lehrman demonstrates with the jingle-bell-like marbles and cordial glasses of "An Image for Two Emil(y)ies." That performance can be viewed in a film clip included on the multimedia DVD-ROM that comes with the book "Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay . . . Eterniday." Computer stations in the gallery allow visitors to virtually play with some of the artist's other, equally interactive objects, opening drawers, removing and replacing vials, etc.

The point is that you don't just engage with Cornell's art with your eyes. There is a sense of wonder, a mental/emotional connection that makes moving through this show slow going (that is, if you give each of the 177 artworks, including several short films, its due). As you do, you may come to understand why curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan uses words and phrases such as "improbability," "dislocation" and "tributes to the open-ended" to describe Cornell's art. Like magic, the show startles and confounds in equal measure.

If it does one thing, it is to dispel the notion -- and pretty quickly, at that -- that Cornell's art was something accessible or trivial, like a collection of toys for grown-ups. For the record, the artist strongly objected to that characterization (despite his fondness for twee, doll-size silverware). Sure, there's an intimacy to his work, but it's sometimes one that borders on the creepy, as with the artist's almost obsessional tributes to performers such as actress Lauren Bacall and dancer Tamara Toumanova. Or his collages focusing on the female nude, which, in their attitude of slightly fevered reverence -- the artist never married, and his relations with the opposite sex are a matter of speculation -- lie somewhere between religious devotion and raw lust.

As suggested by a companion exhibition, organized by the Archives of American Art and including correspondence with other celebrities, Cornell was fascinated by celebrity, if not quite in the manner of a stalker, according to Liza Kirwin, curator of "Exquisite Surprise: The Papers of Joseph Cornell." Intensely private, the artist also got along famously with children, creating little presents he would leave for the neighborhood kids -- a la "To Kill a Mockingbird's" Boo Radley -- under bushes.

That combination of the gentle and the intense, of non-goal-oriented play and almost scary fixation, is what characterizes the work in "Navigating the Imagination." (According to Hartigan, those who knew Cornell described his gaze as alternately penetrating and focused upon his own lap.)

Perhaps Cornell's assessment that one could use everything in a lifetime was overly optimistic. He certainly left enough boxes of trinkets and gewgaws behind that he never got around to incorporating into his art (property now of the museum's Joseph Cornell Study Center). But on a less literal level, nothing was off limits.

In his voyage through life, Cornell rarely ventured far from his home on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y., where he lived for much of his life with his mother and infirm brother, only vicariously traveling the world through the picture postcards sent to him by globe-trotting friends. At the same time, no corner of his vast imagination was left unexplored, no matter how reminiscent of sunny childhood -- or how dark and lonely.

Cornell's Boxing Day
How An Artist Outside the Mainstream Made Presents of the Past

By Glenn Dixon
Express
Thursday, Dec. 28, 2006

A dangling chorus line of mesh-skirted plastic lobsters, hoofing for Jacques Offenbach. An elegant winter palace with mirrored windows, like a dollhouse with impregnable walls. Decoupaged owls and parrots, broken cordials filled with sand, clock springs sprung -- each a tiny rabbit hole into a private world.

The dreamlike shadowbox constructions lining the twilit temporary-exhibition galleries of the Smithsonian American Art Museum set the mind awhirl. What kind of fellow created such objects? A cracked European dandy, raised on a diet of ambrosia, Sachertorte and the dying exhalations of faeries?

Actually, the man behind "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" led an outwardly ordinary life. He was a devout Christian Scientist who cared for and doted on his mentally impaired brother at their modest home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. But Joseph had a hobby. He collected old things. And he built new things out of them.

Outward appearances, in fact, mattered little to Cornell. Fantasy was his life, the only realm in which he truly felt at home.

Keeping the real world at arm's length, he exalted the unattainable. He pined for ballerinas and opera singers who'd withered before he was born. That he could never have seen Fanny Cerrito dance "Ondine" made her all the more appealing.

Cornell was embraced by the art stars of his day. Marcel Duchamp was a friend; some of their correspondence is on display. But Cornell's "Duchamp" box lacks the resonance of such minor, commercial work as the photomontages commissioned by Harper's Bazaar for "What Is Your Element?" a 1942 spread that used Hollywood beauties to illustrate elemental astrological nonsense (Joan Crawford is Fire, etc.).

Even these contemporary actresses were, to Cornell, mere shadows on the screen. The air of repressed sexuality hangs over his art. It comes as little surprise to learn that he held a monkish devotion to chastity until late in life. Cornell was more comfortable worshipping the mysterious, the merely glimpsed.

Putting the World in a Box: Joseph Cornell's Inside Stories

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006

In Joseph Cornell's boxes you meet two kinds of artist, the last of the romantics and a New York avant-gardist, an unlikely combination. Ingenious Cornell (1903-1972) was both at the same time.

How unlikely? If you took two works of art about as far apart as possible -- say Walt Disney's "Snow White" and the famous bottle rack that cunning Marcel Duchamp didn't make but merely found -- you'd find Cornell's aesthetic about halfway in between. "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is his first inclusive retrospective exhibition in a quarter of a century. His elaborate little constructions used to baffle. They don't baffle anymore. Now they just enchant.

They baffled in the '30s because their curious narratives composed of scavenged pieces looked like nothing seen before. Very few artists got them then (though lots have gotten them since), and of the few who did, most were boggled by the stories that Cornell chose to tell. Fairy-tale princesses? Jack Frost on the windowpane? Coaches stopped by bandits? This stuff made art folk gag.

Cornell couldn't help it. He glimpsed such beauty everywhere, in ballet books and Central Park, in old maps and new movies. He glimpsed it in the starry night, in soap bubbles and seashells, but especially in women. The innocent young women (at least he thought them innocent) whom he saw on New York's streets (but seldom dared to talk to) were as beautiful to Cornell as those he saw in magazines or on the silver screen.

He wrote that "unexpected floods of music" poured over him the moment he glimpsed Hedy Lamarr's "countenance in its prison of silver light."

The trouble with glimpses is that they're fleeting. Cornell couldn't bear to lose them, couldn't bear to feel them fading. To preserve them from "the dust heap" and the "ruthlessness of time," to give their evanescent sweetness a presence in the present, is one reason he made art.

This purpose is apparent throughout his 177-object show, but in some things more than others. "Taglioni's Jewel Casket," a wooden box he altered in 1940, comes midway through the exhibition, but midway through Cornell's non-sequential wanderings is a good place to begin.

About a foot wide and five inches high, Taglioni's casket might have been a humidor for a gentleman's cigars before Cornell got his hands on it. Then this is what he did: He lined it with brown velvet. He floored its inside with a mirror, on which he scattered fragments of glittering costume jewelry. Held above the jewels in a gridded velvet tray are a dozen "ice cubes" made from clear glass. Above them, on the inside of the box's hinged lid, appears this poignant paragraph, which explains what you see:

On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie TAGLIONI was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory . . . TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket . . . where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint . . . of the starlit heavens, over the ice-covered landscape.

It helps to know her story, well known to all balletomanes. Marie Taglioni (1804-1884) was the first ballerina to dance en pointe , in toeshoes. Her picture, and her memory, recur often in the show. The ballet was "Les Sylphides" ("The Sylphs"). She wore transparent fairy's wings. It must have seemed she floated. No wonder she appealed.

The mental perfume rising from Taglioni's casket is characteristically Cornellian. So, too, is the box's references to 19th-century history and the strictness of its grid. (By the choices she has made, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the exhibition's curator, rightly calls attention to geometrical formalities often missed in Cornell's art.) Also characteristic is the way the casket's paragraph cites "the starlit heavens."

"Navigating the Imagination" is full of constellations and of hints at constellations. Its bangles, balls and soap bubbles, its marbles and ball bearings, cogs and spiral watch-springs -- all of these evoke, more or less abstractly, the music of the spheres. Cornell's forebears were Dutch, and lots of them were sailing folk, and this, perhaps, explains why he offers us so many compasses and star charts. Celestial navigation is a key theme in his art.

"Enchanted Wanderer" is what he called the beautiful Lamarr. Cornell was one himself. But he seldom wandered far. Despite his many references to Paris, Rome, Bavaria and the chateaux of the Loire, despite his guidebooks and his atlases, he never went to Europe. The boroughs of New York were big enough for him.

The small frame house the artist shared with his distant mother and disabled younger brother was on Utopia Parkway, Flushing. Each day he would venture out and walk the city's streets, prepared for the beauty stab that he knew would come. When it struck him, as it often did, he would mark that "sublime moment," that "intangible visitation," by taking from the street whatsoever caught his eye -- a shiny penny on the pavement, a scrap of thread, a leaf.

His basement studio is lovingly re-created in Hartigan's exhibition. "Wonderland," he called it. Part library, part workshop, part personal museum, it became a kind of treasure chest for those resonant souvenirs.

One day while he was walking through Long Island's autumn woods, an owl suddenly hooted overhead. The encounter thrilled the artist. The construction that resulted (owned by Washington's Robert Lehrman) is in the exhibition. In it is a great horned owl, silhouetted grandly against an orange moon. The owl is not the one he saw. It is, instead, a cutout from an antique picture book, Alexander Wilson's "American Ornithology" from the early 1800s. But the bark chips underneath the bird were probably picked up on the spot.

"I rejoice that there are owls," he said.

Similar conjunctions -- of personal experience and art-historical citation -- flicker often in his art. The personal is often mute, and resists explication. The Old Master reproductions (of Pontormos, Caravaggios, Vermeers and Leonardos) that he puts into his boxes are, in contrast, dense with historical allusions. Cornell's eye for antique paintings, like his eye for timeless beauties (Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo), is clearly highly trained.

Cornell never married. That gray and private artist, that searcher of the streets, that ardent Christian Scientist, may have been a bit eccentric, but this should not be overstressed. Cornell was no recluse. He was well known about town. The great ballet dancers knew him. He showed in the best galleries. He befriended Duchamp. (And worked with him as well; when Duchamp manufactured miniature examples of his best-known works of art for his multiple-edition portable museum, the "Box in a Valise," Cornell was his aide.) At a time when New York's modern artists couldn't sell their pictures (Willem de Kooning, for example, wouldn't answer the door when you knocked, lest you'd come to get the rent), Cornell earned a steady living and supported his whole family. He was for more than 30 years a New York art world pro.

His influence on others grows more apparent every day. His assemblages anticipate many thousand yet to come. His passion for things high and low, for movie stars from Hollywood and Leonardos from the Louvre, foreshadows Andy Warhol's. In making works of art from useless stuff discarded on the street, he predicted Robert Rauschenberg. By making private visions, and putting them in boxes, he anticipated Jasper Johns.

One piece in the Cornell show is called "The Crystal Cage." Closed, it looks like a briefcase. Opened, it presents a pile of loose papers -- pages torn from calendars, snapshots, maps, engravings. On one such sheet one reads: "A gigantic fantastic bird cage? A light house out of the Arabian Nights? A playhouse for a little girl of six to transform into a miraculous observatory? A place for experiments." That description of "The Crystal Cage" well describes his mind.