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Enigmatic Bachelor of Utopia Parkway
by David Bourdon

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In a photograph he asked a friend to take, Cornell rescues a fragile relic from impending destruction.

Utopia Parkway in Queens is a pleasant tree-lined street of old but kempt homes, each with a narrow concrete driveway at one side. Joseph Cornell's house is a little smaller and older than its neighbors. Its doorbell is a black button with a crescent moon on it.

Mr. Cornell, who had "set aside the day" for my visit, came slowly from the back of the house to answer the door. He didn't look at all wizardly, as I had expected. Tall and gaunt, he wore an old gray sweater, slacks and black mocassins. His steely gray hair seemed electrically charged, his nose regally aquiline, his eyes pale blue and startling. 

Inside, the house appeared immensely cluttered. There were six of his boxes on the sun porch, three or four more in the living room, and a couple more in the dining room. In doorways and the hallway, framed collages were stacked against the wall.

Cornell asked me to set my things down on a blanket chest. I happened to be carrying Wind, Sand and Stars, by the late French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry. At the precise moment that I set the book down, Cornell opened the bottom drawer of a file cabinet beside the chest and pulled out a manila envelope. Carrying it, he led the way out to the backyard, sat down at a round table under a gnarled old quince tree, reached into the envelope and casually handed me Saint Exupéry's autograph, dated 1942. He followed it with a flattened paper box that had contained the writer's ink bottle, then an 8x10-inch photo of the author's wife and finally two or three of the original drawings for his book The Little Prince. "I couldn't help but notice what you were reading," he said.

I had heard for years about Cornell's archives in which he keeps dossiers filled with newspaper clippings, photos and memorabilia on all the esoteric subjects that interest him. In 1943 Cornell listed some of these enduring interests: Mozart, sunbursts, Baedeker, Piero di Cosimo, Hans Christian Andersen, daguerreotypes, balloons, Edgar Allan Poe, shooting stars, soap bubbles, solariums, snow, Gulliver, Carpaccio, tropical plumage, Liszt, barometers, owls, magic lanterns, Milky Way, Vermeer, camera obscura, Seurat, Erik Satie, calliopes, cycloramas, Rimbaud.

Lying on the grass was a newly begun box. He had just given the interior of the empty wooden shell a coat of white paint and set it out in the sun to dry. This was the first of many coats of paint which he would apply to get a density that eventually would take on the texture of an aged surface. He ran his finger over the paint. "It's a shame," he said, "to put so much work into a box that will only be owned by one person." He is loathe to part with his boxes and, when he does, he tries to make sure they go to people who will appreciate them. An average box now sells for about $5,000 and an outstanding one for $15,000. Since 1956, he has kept his best boxes for himself. He regrets having let "prime pieces get away from me."

Ten years ago, when he sold a box, he included detailed instructions on its care and upkeep, but he no longer does this. Though his work is soundly constructed, he pessimistically believes that his boxes are doomed to perish, that his papers will peel, his paint fade, his carefully glued objects come undone. "In a better world," he says, "things would last." I ventured that the ephemeral quality of his work was part of its appeal and he sighed, "Ah, yes."

Getting Cornell to talk about himself is difficult. Biographical details, he feels, are unimportant and he prefers to leave them, like the details of his working methods, "in the realm of lore and legend."

It is known, however, that Cornell was born on Christmas Eve, 1903 in Nyack, N.Y., descended on both sides from old New York Dutch families. He attended Andover but never went on to college. 

His father was an executive in a textile factory and Cornell became a salesman of fabrics and yard goods in New York. Though he never studied art, Cornell became interested in surrealism when he saw samples of it at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1931. He returned to the gallery in a few weeks, bearing a small package. He left it on Levy's desk, saying nothing. The package contained a half-dozen collages in which Cornell had cut up and rearranged old engravings to create visionary scenes. A few months later Levy staged the first major showing of surrealist art in New York and he included several of these works. 

In 1932 Cornell exhibited his first boxes, small shadow boxes containing sequins, pins, cut-up engravings, colored sand and brass springs. The idea of assembling objects in a box came to Cornell one day as he was making his rounds of the city. He passed an antique shop one day and saw a pile of compasses in the window. "I thought, everything can be used in a lifetime, can't it, and went on walking. I'd scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes, all different kinds.... Halfway home on the train that night, I thought again of the compasses and the boxes. It occurred to me to put the two together."

Today he buys most of his objects--sometimes in quantity. At the 1939 World's Fair, he saw some fanciful Dutch clay pipes, the stems of which were claws, a hand holding a cup or a twig with an acorn bowl. Cornell bought a gross of them. "I collect anything of human interest. There are no elite kinds of things in my work." Though he stores up for future needs he dislikes being called a squirrel. "Something may catch your interest but you'll pass it up," he explains. "But when you want it, it won't be there. Sometimes you go back and even the shop is gone."

Cornell used to haunt second-hand bookstores, browsing for first editions and purchasing old encyclopedias for their illustrations. He has prowled through back-number magazine stores and thumbed through the picture collection of the New York Public Library, looking for materials to put in his boxes and information that might be useful in his archives. When he particularly likes a print or picture, he will have photographic copies made in order to incorporate it in several thematically related works.

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