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Surrealism and Collages

45 Recent Works by Joseph Cornell Are Shown at Metropolitan Museum

by HILTON KRAMER

An unusual exhibition of 45 recent collages by the American Artist Joseph Cornell opened yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Henry Geldzahler, the museum's curator of 20th-century art, the show consists entirely of works on loans from the artist himself. It is installed in Gallery 12 on the second floor of the museum, and the installation is, for a happy change, modest, straightforward, and entirely sympathetic to the art itself.

Mr. Cornell is better known for his boxes—highly poetic constructions in a more or less surrealist manner—than for his collages, but a number of the latter have been exhibited in recent years. He actually made his artistic debut nearly 40 years ago as a maker of collage—the year was 1931; the occasion, an exhibition of surrealist art at Julien Levy's—and he is, apparently, much occupied with this medium once again. The current show is drawn from his production—said to be prolific—during the last eight years.

Every Cornell exhibition has a certain quality—of emotion even more than style—which sets it apart. We are in a realm of memory, reverie and nostalgia, of delicate perceptions and magical dreamlike associations. This is a realm in which all the coarser emotions of life, all sense of struggle, conflict and growth are suppressed, a world in which time and history are dissolved into pure art, and art itself becomes a self-enclosed poetic myth. It is a private world only in the sense in which all art that refuses to traffic in the collective symbols of society remains private, reserving a margin of mystery to which only the artist-dreamer himself has complete access.

The iconography of this world is drawn from a wide variety of sources: motifs from the Old Masters, images of heavenly bodies, photographs of certain flora and fauna, coins and lettering, to name only the most obvious and most frequently repeated. The actual materials are mostly cut and pasted from old magazine reproductions and book illustrations.  Often these are painted or otherwise embellished; always the final work is enclosed within one or more frames that are also painted, thus providing the collage with a boxlike outer structure that effectively separates it from the "real" non-Cornellian world of the spectator.

The dominant color in these collages (in most, if not all) is an unearthly blue, which fills the dream space of Mr. Cornell's structures very much the way a romantic ballet production, say, might be lighted. Indeed, the best way to "see" Mr. Cornell's work is, perhaps, to think of him as a kind of metteur en scene filling imaginary stages with a décor and a cast of characters spawned entirely in the poetry of his own dreamlike associations. The entire scenario is never fully disclosed, but each collage is a "scene" that gives us an enigmatic clue to the private myth.

It is, all in all, very beautiful work. Visually, it is endlessly absorbing, yet the interest in Mr. Cornell's art has never been entirely visual. The artist's own personal esthetic culture is bonded by symbolist poetry, romantic ballet and grand opera quite as much as it is by the visual arts, and the appeal of his art is, in part at least, an appeal to tastes and emotions nurtured on esthetic associations that lie beyond the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Mr. Cornell's art is distillation of such esthetic associations, and a private celebration of them.