Viewing page 3 of 80

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Joseph Cornell's Baudelairean 'Voyage'
By HILTON KRAMER

There is a passage in Baudelaire's prose poem called "L'Invitation au Voyage," written in 1857-60--not to be confused with the more familiar poem of the same title, written in verse a few years earlier--which, it has sometimes occurred to me, sums up the peculiar poignancy, lyricism and yearning we find in certain forms of modern art. This is the passage as it has been translated by Francis Scarfe:
"Do you know that fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for some land we have never seen, that anguish of curiosity? There is a land that resembles you, where everything is beautiful, sumptuous, quiet, and authentic, where Fancy has built and adorned a Cathay of the West, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence. There we must go to live; there we must go to die." 
Further on in the same poem, the poet speaks of "A unique land, superior to other lads, as art is superior to Nature, where nature is reshaped by reverie, where it is corrected, beautified, remolded." I thought of this poem again the other day going around the new exhibition of collages by Joseph Cornell, which Henry Geldzahler has organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Mr. Cornell was not, among the American artists of his generation, out most authentic French poet.
In terms of the art history of his career, of course, Mr. Cornell comes out as a later development in the line of French poetry that begins with Baudelaire. He comes out of Surrealism, which transformed the collage and the collage-like construction into a species of visual poetry. Surrealism provides the syntax of Mr. Cornell's style--that structure of juxtaposition, repetition and unexpected personal conjunction which the Surrealists effected in wedding the methods of Cubist collage to the metaphors of Symbolist poetry. This creation--the Surrealist visual poem--was, perhaps, a more fateful event in the history of modern art than anyone has yet acknowledged. 
It created a viable visual form for the intricate and often hermetic metaphorical flight of the Symbolist imagination, the means whereby the subjective materials of the mind--memory, reverie and involuntary association--might be given an objective visual existence without recourse to the outworn conventions of academic esthetics.
Yet if Mr. Cornell's art comes out of this Surrealist background, there is no mistaking it for an orthodox Surrealist performance. True, he shares with the Surrealists their interest in a dreamlike fantasy world in which the laws of reason are under permanent suspension. But beyond that, he has followed a path all his own, and in so doing has revealed an affinity for a realm of feeling closer to the Baudelairean "voyage" to a paradise of the imagination than to the vatic ambitions of the Surrealists themselves. From the two impulses that combined to ignite the Surrealist movement and give it its special energy--political revolution and erotic transcendence--Mr. Cornell's art stands very far removed. He has helped himself to Surrealist methods in order to garner the fruits of his own imagination.
For the materials of Mr. Cornell's dreamworld are derived, above all, from the realm of esthetic sensation, from esthetic memory and association. His collages, no less than his celebrated "boxes," are pure distillations of esthetic reverie, ruminations on esthetic experience miraculously endowed with a flawless pictorial structure. They are a highly personal, autobiographical form of discourse about art in their own right. And And it is a very particular view of art that we find delineated in Mr. Cornell's art--art exempted from the normal pressures of experience, art quintessentialized into a mythology of its own. This takes us very far from the ethos of Surrealism, with its programatic[sic] anti-art prejudices--takes us, in fact, not only into a private version of the Baudelairean voyage "where nature is reshaped by reverie, where it is corrected, beautified, remolded," but also into one of the purest creations to come out of this Baudelairean quest, the unblemished estheticism of Mallarmé. 
The exhibition that Mr. Geldzahler has mounted at the Metropolitan Museum consists of 45 collages from Mr. Cornell's copious production furing the last eight years. The work here is mainly untitled, but those familiar with the Cornellian mise en scène will recognize some familiar motifs--children and beautiful women out of Old Master paintings, balletic constellations of heavenly bodies, flowers, angels, birds, coins, and common objects as well as passages of pure color (especially the ubiquitous blue and white that have so often functioned as Mr. Cornell's Mallarméan signature) and certain lines and shapes that have acquired an extraordinary poetic resonance through their repeated appearances in his oeuvre. I see little difference, myself, between the boxes and the collages. The former may sometimes--but not invariably--be more complex, a shade more mysterious (since three dimensions are nearly always more mysterious than two), but the latter are executed with the same finical fidelity to the precision of the artist's imagination.

Not enough, I think, has been said about the scale of Mr. Cornell's work. He works small. His boxes are rarely larger than 18 by 12 inches in size, and many are smaller. His collages conform to these general dimensions--the dimensions of intimacy. It is no more conceivable for Mr. Cornell to produce a work the size, say, of a painting by Rothko or Newman than it would have been for Baudelaire or Mallarmé to write a poem the length of "Paradise Lost" or "The Prelude." It was Edgar Allan Poe who first wrote: "I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain the fact that the phrase, 'a long poem,' is simply a flat contradiction in terms," and the French Symbolist poets ratified this esthetic philosophy both in theory and in practice. Not for them--or for Mr. Cornell--what Poe called "the epic mania."
Mr. Cornell's work rigorously observes the Symbolist notion of a work of art as something highly concentrated, distilled, and brief, something hermetic and enigmatic, an utterance at once deeply personal and yet infinitely mysterious. Poe said of poetry: "Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth," and this--while surely not the last word on everything we might want to demand of a work of art, or of some works of art--is a perfectly accurate way of defining the kind of art Mr. Cornell has perfected. Yes, he is indeed our most authentic French poet, if we think of French poetry as consisting primarily of the Symbolist followers of Poe. 
Three years ago the Guggenheim Museum gave us a sizable review of Mr. Cornell's accomplishment. (Diane Waldman's essay for the catalogue of that exhibition remains, incidentally, the single best account of this accomplishment I know.) And we have had other, briefer glimpses of Mr. Cornell's work in other exhibitions during the last decade. The current show at the Metropolitan adds to our pleasure and out knowledge of this very singular artist, but it also makes one impatient for a really large, definitive exhibition. The history of art in our time will not be complete without it.

Joseph Cornell's "How to Make a Rainbow," at the Met
"A unique land, superior to other lands"
Sy Friedman from Zodiac
[[image]]