In New York, the eccentric, poetic boxes of Joseph Cornell
After the queues, the scalpers and the heaviest mortaring of publicity ever aimed at an exhibition of modern art, the Pablo Picasso show left New York's Museum of Modern Art Sept. 30; and what could MOMA do for an encore? Very sensibly, it has gone to the other end of the scale, returning to normal institutional life with a retrospective of an artist so unlike Picasso as to be his polar opposite: the American Joseph Cornell. Cornell died in 1972, at 69, but his association with the museum went back a long way (he was one of the few Americans included in MOMA'S introductory show of Dada and surrealism in 1936) and he has now been commemorated with full honors. Organized with exemplary finesse by Kynaston McShine, elegantly installed in rooms whose white arches and tinted ceilings distantly echo the internal world of Cornell's boxes, and supported by a catalogue which now becomes the standard work on the artist, this is the most revealing Cornell exhibition ever held. Having had four months of the Big P's aggressions and Nietzschean sublimities, we may now relax—after a fashion, since Cornell was by no means a consoling eccentric—with the last artist who believed in fairies and owls' grottoes.
Joseph Cornell was not merely American; he was obsessively and essentially so, resembling Edgar Allan Poe in his fixation on a dream Europe that he could never bring himself to visit. He spent most of his working life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y., which he shared with his mother and his brother Robert, who had been crippled in childhood by cerebral palsy. It was a distinct comedown from his earlier years, when his father (also Joseph), who died in 1917, supported his family in elegance by buying and designing textiles. From that domestic seclusion, the gray and long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery: to Central Park in the snow, to Times Square (in the days before it became a rats' alley of pimps and porn), to the now disappearing bric-a-brac shops and bookstalls that used to line Fourth Avenue from the Bowery to Union Square. He spent these sojourns sorting through boxes of old embrowned photos, picking over trays of shells or handless watches, haunting the penny arcades, gazing mildly through shop windows at working girls whom he would never approach —a flaneur, not of self-display but of urban reverie.
If the French surrealist Louis Aragon could call himself, in the title of one of his books, Paysan de Paris, Joseph Cornell was certainly the Peasant of New York, incessantly tilling and raking its cultural deposits and suppressed memories. They presented themselves to him as a vast, intriguing jumble of components, waiting to be grafted onto one another, fitted together, married and mated. He once wrote about seeing a collection of compasses in the window of a shop: "I thought, everything can be used in a life time, can't it, and went on walking. I'd scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes ... Halfway home on the train that night, I thought of the compasses and boxes, it occurred to me to put the two together."