Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Juan Gris Series, Black Cockatoo Silhouette), c. 1954–1965; via The University of Virginia
Was Joseph Cornell a surrealist? He has been described as a “lone star within the surrealist constellation,” a turn of phrase that might have pleased the avid stargazer of Flushing, New York, but one that leaves an incomplete picture of Cornell the artist.
The Fralin Museum of Art recently posed this question with a finely focused exhibition in which Cornell’s work appeared alongside that of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray, Mina Loy, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, among others. In a way, this show, which closed at the beginning of June, recreated the 1932 lineup seen at Julien Levy’s gallery, when Cornell’s work first appeared. But Cornell was uneasy about this association, and later wrote to Alfred Barr before MOMA’s 1936 show “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”: “In the event that you are saying a word or two about my work in the catalogue, I would appreciate your saying that I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories of the surrealists. While fervently admiring much of their work I have never been an official surrealist, and I believe that surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been developed.” Without a doubt, Cornell’s pervasive nostalgia and penchant for hoarding have Freudian connotations, but it is remarkable that he would see in the surrealists’ obsession the subconscious signs of mental imbalance.
Still, the Fralin show made clear surrealism’s impact, influencing Cornell’s use of recurring motifs, his unconventional approach to technique, and his approach to pictorial arrangements. For example, Magritte’s bleak Composition on a Sea Shore (1935–37) incorporates two of the artist’s most well-known symbols: the bilboquet and the gray curtain with slotted balls. Dalí revisits his favorite obsessions in Paranoiac-Astral Image (1934), a sun-blasted beach populated with meticulously rendered figures from the artist’s past. (In his diary, Cornell noted cursorily “Met Dalí,” keeping his distance from that most unhealthy of surrealists.) Mina Loy’s Moon I (ca. 1932) kindled Cornell’s affection for celestial blue. Red Sun and Forest (1927–28) by Max Ernst includes a red ring on a heavily-painted row of schematic trees, while the collage Butterflies (1931) emphasizes texture in a different way, this time with printed, painted, and marbled paper and cellophane. Both the ring—a loaded symbol and a popular toy—and an awareness of textures would become Cornell hallmarks.
Ernst, in fact, had a singularly formative role in Cornell’s artistic development. Cornell was working as a textile designer when he visited Levy’s gallery and saw Ernst’s 1929 collage-novel La Femme 100 têtes. These cunningly altered Victorian steel engravings inspired Cornell to create his own set of manipulated printed images. Around this time, Cornell also encountered Kurt Schwitters’s collages of urban detritus and his box constructions, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.
In Duchamp, Cornell discovered an unlikely friend and artistic collaborator. While the Frenchman was in New York in the 1940s, he enlisted Cornell to help assemble editions of Boîte-en-Valise (1941–66). Duchamp envisioned the Box in a Valise as a miniature museum of his work and the Fralin show included an edition assembled in 1958. Among the ephemera are artifacts like a Monte Carlo roulette card and pages from a penmanship book as well as small reproductions of Duchamp’s own The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). Cornell made his own “valise” experiment with The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice) (1943–60), a treasure box devoted to the idyllic childhood of an imaginary girl. Where Duchamp aimed at self-promotion, Cornell seemed to be contemplating the ingredients of a happy childhood, a theme explored more deeply in the later Medici series.
Cornell is best known for his box constructions that first appeared in the mid-1930s. Most of the boxes were square or rectangular presentation cases or caskets, but he also delighted in round pill boxes, pocket watchcases, and cheese boxes, using the latter for Bel Echo Gruyère (ca. 1939), a hilarious piece in which a fake piece of cheese wrapped in tinfoil sits amid paper shreds. The foil has been torn aside just enough to expose the cow-in-a-can noisemaker at the center.
Cornell’s constructions would lose much of their impact if he had been less of a craftsman. Hölderlin Object (1944–46) is a lovely meditation on another favorite Cornell theme: the German romantic poets. A large oak leaf behind blue glass is embedded in the lid of a casket, while a book tied in string, also behind blue glass, rests in the bottom. Blue velvet and delicately applied marbled paper frame these objects in a serene and enigmatic homage. In Object (1940–42), Cornell drilled a circular well through the pages of an eighteenth-century French periodical published by Claude Jombert, who specialized in science and military treatises. Behind blue glass, Cornell suspended a mysterious disk, possibly a part from a radio or a scientific instrument.
One of the most striking aspects of this exhibit was the realization that Cornell’s love of toys and their potential to teach about movement and gravity is thwarted when the constructions become museum pieces. We would never dream of picking up a box to coax a ball through a hole or tilt a pocket object to make the sand inside flow. The soap bubble pipes, tiny chairs, seashells, and rings have all been taken out of children’s hands and sealed up in boxes. Perhaps Cornell enjoyed the melancholy notion of frustrated play.
By the 1950s, the boxes became increasingly simplified and abstract. Anne d’Harnoncourt has noted that this was a reaction to Cornell’s exposure to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. The austere Hôtel de l’Étoile (1950) employs white paint spatters to emulate the night sky (and pun on the hotel’s name), while Grand Hôtel de la Boule d’Or (1950s) allows Cornell—who never went to Europe—to visit exotic hotels in his imagination. The cockatoo, both visible and inferred by a shadow, appears in Homage to Juan Gris (1954) and Untitled (Juan Gris series, Black Cockatoo Silhouette) (1954–65), two outstanding examples from many boxes and collages that Cornell made in homage to the Spanish cubist.
Not surprisingly, Cornell was influenced by the surrealist films of Buñuel and Dalí and went on to make his own, Rose Hobart (1936), adapted from Universal’s 1931 East of Borneo. Resplicing the film’s sequences out of order and using documentary footage of an eclipse, Cornell named his film after the original’s female lead. The Fralin included Rose Hobart as well as shorts by Man Ray and Duchamp.
Describing Cornell as a surrealist has its uses, but as with most labels, it should be a point of departure rather than a final summation. Like the surrealists, Cornell was fascinated with memory, had a childlike sense of wonder, and enjoyed discovering marvelous results from unexpected juxtapositions. But his work never reaches the inevitable staleness of surrealism and the dead-end of dada. Given the sheer volume of his stockpiled oddments, Cornell was engaged in a constant process of filtering, something the surrealists usually ignored. Even though he labeled his inventory containers, I would wager that like most hoarders he had a fairly comprehensive mental idea of his holdings. Thus, a finished box is a rather particular edit, an exquisite distillation, culled with unerring instincts from an imagination as full of ideas as the objects filling the basement of his house on Utopia Parkway.
“Joseph Cornell and Surrealism” opened at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia on March 7 and ran through June 8, 2014.