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Art in America
Sept-Oct '73

Cornell: The Enchanted Wanderer

JOHN BERNARD MYERS

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Is this a good title for an homage to the recently deceased Joseph Cornell? It was used by Cornell for a piece written for View Magazine in 1941 with the subtitle, "Excerpt from a Journey Album for Hedy Lamarr." A footnote explains that the title is borrowed from a biography of Carl Maria von Weber who wrote in the horn quartet of the overture to "Der Freischutz" a musical signature, "The Enchanted Wanderer."1 In the middle of this one-page article is a reproduction of a Giorgione portrait with the face of Hedy Lamarr replacing the original face, but so artfully substituted that one cannot quite perceive this is a collage. Cornell quotes a poem by Parker Tyler: "She will walk only when not bid to, arising from her bed of nothing, her hair of time falling to the shoulder of space." The last sentence of the "excerpt" finishes: "out of he fullness of the heart the eyes speak; are alert as the eye of the camera to ensnare the subtleties and legendary loveliness of the world."

In the April 1942 issue of View one comes across another collage entitled "Story Without Name for Max Ernst."2 In sixteen interrelated images Cornell sounds a warning to the world which is outside childhood, which menaces it. The images are fire, natural eruptions, disaster. It is a nightmarish presentiment of what children may expect once they enter the so-called reality of the adults.

Cornell's final contribution to View (January 1943) has a cover design which tells us the story of Blondin, the famous tightrope walker who crossed the gorge of Niagara Falls on a cable. Vast crowds congregated to see this amazing feat, and when he had done it, skeptics said it was done with mirrors. Blondin repeated his stunt, this time wheeling out on the cable a stove upon which he flipped pancakes in midair. Again the press declared the whole thing a fake, an illusion. In desperation, Blondin advertised for a stunt man to sit on his shoulders while he walked his rope across the great gorge. The partner was found; Blondin began for a third time his "perilous journey." When the two men were nearly two-thirds across, a strong wind began to blow. Blondin had to rest; the man sitting on his shoulders had to remain utterly still. Blondin sat down, got up, and continued. Security lines at one end of the cable began to give way. The crowds could hear the snap of these auxiliary ropes as they gave way under the impact of the wind. Just before the last rope snapped Blondin arrived safely at the other end of the cable; he had achieved the impossible. He had convinced the world that he had done what he set out to do. Soon after that Blondin disappeared in obscurity. We are in what Cornell called The Crystal Cage. On page fifteen of this same issue of View we see Blondin in a nineteenth-century landscape. It is a put-together of a little boy practicing on a rope, high above a benign nineteenth-century expanse of river, fields and woods.

But what is The Crystal Cage? A subtitle informs us it is a "Portrait of Bernice." Who is Bernice? Cornell tells us: "From newspaper clippings dated 1871 and printed as curiosa we learn of an American child becoming so attached to an abandoned