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NY TIMES 1/24/66
The Enigmatic Collages of Joseph Cornell

By HILTON KRAMER

JOSEPH CORNELL has stopped making "boxes." He is now making collages. You will not find this new emblazoned in the sky. It will cause no sensation in the auction rooms. The Museum of Modern Art is not likely to organize a symposium on the subject, nor does one expect to hear a learned paper on it at the next meeting of the College Art Association. Yet for devotees of Mr. Cornell's highly accomplished art, this development undoubtedly constitutes an event.

And devotees abound. It is always difficult to gauge the size of the public that follows an art as little written about - and as intrinscially hermetic - as Mr. Cornell's, but it is certainly larger than meets the eye. He is highly thought of by artists of diverse persuasion, and his influence has been greater than anyone has so far acknowledged. For some years now - exactly how many, who can say? - he has been the virtuoso of a visual genre other artists have exploited in more spectacular and more vulgar ways, and often with a more celerious acclaim. But the work of Mr. Cornell's very odd sensibility survives that of his imitators. It retains its innocence and its curious integrity with a tenacity and a strength that belie its apparent fragility and preciosity.

Fantasy

The particular quality that distinguishes Mr. Cornell's imagination - the quality that made his shadow-box constructions so remarkable and that remains no less vivid in his new collages - resists easy description. There is an element of poetry in this work, poetry of a literary as well as a visual sort, that is highly elusive and does not lend itself to formal analysis. This poetic element exists as an emotion rather than as an idea. One feels its effect, one takes pleasure in its images and responds to its symbols, without any certainty that it derives from a very stringent pictorial conception. More than most artists who work in construction or collage, Mr. Cornell projects a vein of private fantasy, endows it with immense charm and polish, and takes no pains to clarify its meaning.

Historically, the work derives from Surrealism. While collage-construction was itself the creation of Picasso and Braque in their Analytical Cubist period, it was not until the Surrealists gave it a distinctly literary and psychological turn that it began to assume an expressive existence independent of painting. Even a great collagist like the Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, adhered very closely to the formal pictorial concerns of Cubism. But Schwitters used certain found materials - paper labels, ticket stubs, post cards, cancelled stamps, etc. - that suggested a freer handling of the collage medium than he himself, with his strict formal rigor, was usually given to. It was the Surrealists who pressed this suggestion, implicit in everything Schwitters produced, to an extreme of poetic invention, making of the collage-construction the visual counterpart of the Surrealist poem, with its radical juxtaposition of incongruous images.

It was the Surrealists, too, who conferred on collage an atmosphere of erotic revery, and thereby established a more openly emotive, less purely pictorial rationale as the governing principle of collage design. By endowing collage with a dreamlike syntax, the Surrealists freed this genre not only from its Cubist origins but from any necessary reliance on pictorial convention.

The shadow-box-constructions that first won Mr. Cornell a small but devoted following almost two decades ago were very close to Surrealist practice. Their air of being at once an imaginative improvisation and a kind of game, or puzzle, followed in the Surrealist tradition of willful enigmas, just as the logistics of their shapes and symbols seemed to reflect the Surrealist obsession with erotic fancy.

Sentimental Revery

But for all his affinity with the Surrealists, Mr. Cornell was an original, not to say an oddity, and remains so. His fantasy seems closer to the world of fairy tale and childhood romance than to the scandalous sexual encounters so much prized by the vatic voices of Surrealism. Not the pathos of experience, but the sentimental revery of an innocent dreaming of experience, has been his particular forte. Psychologically, Mr. Cornell's imagery has always been very knowing, but it is knowing in the manner say, of the children in Henry James's stories - divining things they have never confronted in the flesh. In a way, all Mr. Cornell's work bears the same relation to the specifications of adult experience that a valentine bears to love-making: it exalts a sentimental yearning, and elevates it to the status of an all-consuming passion.

Conviction

These characteristics were true of his boxes, and are true now of his collages. We had occasion to see a few of these collages earlier in the season in an exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery that included work by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky - a company that Mr. Cornell was by no means swamped by. Currently a few more collages, conceived as memorials to the artist's brother Robert, who died last year, are included in a show at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, 825 Madison Avenue (at 69th Street). Once again, one is impressed, even astonished, that a vision so specialized and circumscribed in its emotional concerns can sustain itself with such a steady assurance and conviction.

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"Puzzle of the Reward," a new collage by Joseph Cornell
"an imaginative improvisation and a kind of game"