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ARIS [[?]]
Sep Oct 1965

Arcadia Enclosed:
The Boxes of Joseph Cornell
BY ELLEN H. JOHNSON

The veteran American artist and his cool, hermetic and enchanted world

Joseph Cornell was born on Christmas Eve in 1903, was his own teacher in art, and lives in a house on Utopia Parkway. For almost thirty-five years he has exhibited boxes which hold the light of the sun, the moon and the stars, the movement of the planets, and sand s and currents of the sea, the fragrance of the lily of the valley, and the solemn innocence of a child. Among the most beautiful of his boxes is a series called "Winter Night Skies" which are like the wondrous, blue-black and white world of silent snow through which processions of sleighs used to glide to early Christmas morning service. Snow is evoked in much of Cornell's work; it fall incessantly in the scenario he wrote in 1936, M. Phot, which reads like a source-book for his subsequent imagery: snow, night, glass (Chandeliers, windows, a glass store, mirrors), "distant harp music . . . caused by the falling drops of water . . . The scene is one of inexpressibly serene and satisfying beauty . . . A street corner at night, at which time it takes on an appearance of supernatural beauty. Enclosed by a low lattice-work fence are two lamp posts placed among life-sized marble statues of women in classical poses. The bluish light from the gas flames gives the statues the appearance of figureheads on old ships, illumined by phosphorescent seas. Snow is falling." 
Surrealist as it may be in unexpected juxtapositions and irrational shifts of time and place, Cornell's scenarios, like his boxes, is closer to Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen or Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad than it is to the shocking, fearful or morbidly sexual world of Breton and Dali. Although changes of speed in action do occur, the over-all tempo of his scenario is that of his boxes: the slow, measured rhythm of a saraband, resting "At the still point of the turning world."
If in some fantasy of an art historian Duchamp, Watteau and Mondrian joined forces to create a single work, it might have something of the quality of a box by Joseph Cornell. Taglioni's Jewel Casket (1940) is visually related to Duchamp's Why Not Sneeze? (1921); but in content it has nothing to do with the Dada master's particular kind of ironical wit. Cornell's construction is a fragile romance, remote and

[[picture right]]
[[caption]] Joseph Cornell, Dove Cote (1950);
Collection E. A. Bergman, Chicago. [[/caption]]

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