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Joseph Cornell [[image]] Joseph Cornell, Cassiopeia, No.3 (1954); courtesy Allan Stone Galleries, New York. touches of translucent color. The frames and backs of the boxes are frequently covered with pages of old books through which one reads tantalizing bits of text in a foreign language. Cut out of context and robbed of identity, these veiled phrases further encase Cornell's boxes in mystery. The sand moving over layers of glass in some of his "tray" boxes in tinted blue or pink like the exotic shores of Tahiti in Gauguin's paintings. But Cornell has a more basic affinity with Gauguin in that both artists deal in the realm of feeling which poetry evokes. In its reliance on metaphor and enigma Cornell's work is equally a fulfillment of the Symbolist poet's aims. One of Cornell's most enigmatic works, the Medici Slot Macine (1942)-- composed of parts of reproductions and photoengravings of paintings, fragments of maps (the Palatine Hill and other areas of Rome and a section of Sicily), a compass, a child's block, jacks and marbles multiplied by mirrors-stands behind Rauschenberg's combines. Certainly there are many other ancestors of Rauschenberg's work, and his rich and raucous painting is entirely different in spirit from Cornell's slightly melancholy, aristocratic and quietly symmetrical image withdrawn behind glass. Like the cabalistic texts on many of Cornell's boxes, the fragments of reproduced paintings in Medici Slot Machine are not intended to be precisely "read"; but rcohnizing such details as the head of Botticell's Giuliano de' Medici and Pegasus or the dancing figures from Mantegna's Parnassus makes the whole work, including the title, that much more piquant. A metaphorical coin in a magical machine sets in motion before us all the wonders of the court of Apollo and the muses preserved in the Renaissance. In the compartmented space of Medici Slot Machine the details from paintings are repeated with slight shifts in their placement behind the vertical bands like the moving frames of a film. Twenty years before Andy Warhol and other younger artists, Cornell used this cinematic technique in his constructions, and he too made films. But in spite of this interest and in spite of the actual motion of rolling balls and gliding rings, an effect of stillness prevails in all of Cornell's boxes--as it does in the application he wrote of Hedy Lamarr, which begins with significant statement : "Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light." Cornell pays tribute to "the enchanted wanderer, who again speaks the poetic and evocative language of the silent film" and whose "depth and dignity enable her to enter this world of expressive silence." Each box by Cornell is a "garden inclosed," suspended in a timeless silence. The boxes themselves, as the individual objects within them, exist so intensely that they create their own inaccessible and motionless space around them. Theirs is an Arcadian calm stirred only by such sound and motion as The rising of the sun And the running of the deer... Sweet singing in the choir. 37