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Cornell had many modes, and they ran from the white abstract grids of his "Dovecotes," filled with one repeated geo metrical motif—a ball, a wooden cube —to his lush romantic tree grottoes filled with exotic birds. But to see him as a reclusive American eccentric, a man working solely out of private fantasy, is to miss one major point of his art: its continual dialogue with the work of other artists, not only the Renaissance and mannerist painters whose images he selectively filched (as in his Medici Prince and Medici Princess boxes), but also those of the 20th century.
There are debts to Max Ernst in the early collages of the '30s, and more subtle references—as in a dialogue between equals—to Marcel Duchamp in the boxes; sometimes Cornell would crack the glass panes that protected his images, in homage to the cracks in Duchamp's Large Glass. But the effect was much more violent, since—in a piece like Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, 1943—it suggested the rupture of a sanctuary, an attack upon Eden. The glass pane of Cornell's boxes, the "fourth wall" of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two absolutely opposite worlds. Outside, chaos, accident and libido; inside, order, sublimation, memory and peace.
Cornell's modernity as an artist expressed itself in other ways too, especially in his use of secondary, filtered material from print, reproduction and photography. A good deal of the future of Pop art nestles quietly in those boxes, and even Andy Warhol's use of the same image repeated over and over was pre figured, ten years ahead, by Cornell. In his rustling, fiddling way, he was a far more inventive artist than is commonly thought.
But in the end it is, and must be, Cornell the poet who engages and holds one's attention. Nowhere in surrealism is there a world quite parallel to his. Cornell had no interest in the revolutionary desires of surrealism, in its Sadean heritage or its dandified will to overthrow the bourgeois state. There is no sexual content in his boxes; he wanted his art to return its viewers to childhood, but a pre- Freudian childhood, an infancy without rage or desire.
Yet what artist of his generation could inject more evocative intensity into his work, or fix it with such deft, concise images?
There was nothing silly or pulpy about Cornell's pursuit of innocence. As Ratcliff argues in his catalogue essay, it had much more to do with the need for redemption than with any fancies about the artist-as-Alice-in-Wonderland. That need could never, by its nature, be satisfied: no guilt, no culture. Cornell was a wholly urban artist, cultivated to his fingertips, and the peace he sought was not pastoral. It was a sense of cultural tranquillity, where all images are equally artificial and equally lucid, permeable to the slightest breath of poetic association, linking memory and reality in a seamless web.
He wanted, in short, to get to heaven in a box.