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In a few pages the artist presented his future audience with all the themes which would obsess him and enable him to clarify his vision in a series of ever-enlarging metaphors. His admirers would imagine that each of them had personally unlocked the mystery of these "miracles of ingenuity and poetry."

chinoiserie while visiting France that her parents arrange for its removal and establishment in her native New England meadows. In the glistening sphere the little proprietress, reared in a severe atmosphere of scientific research, became enamored of the rarefied realms of constellations, balloons and distant panoramas bathed in light and drew upon her background to perform her own experiments, miracles of ingenuity and poetry."

Under a photograph of a gothic folly, a European version of a pagoda, we see the title The Crystal Cage and then we read its name "Pagode de Chanteloup." Cornell warns us that we "will search in vain in the literature of the past for the briefest mention of this neglected phenomenon." Is it a hoax? The little Bernice loves it. On another page we see her, possibly six years old, peering through a window, "gazing into her own past and future." What does Bernice see in the past? In the page preceding (page 15) she sees the child Mozart, a bareback rider, the dance Carlotta Grisi, and survivors of an English lifeboat; this last event-in summer 1942-probably occurred at the very moment Cornell was completing the collage. What does Bernice see in the future? There is no future in these signs and images, only harbingers of possible pain, a word here and there: "police," "war," "star explodes."

Significantly, there are three other pages of this historic issue of View which reveal still more of the Cornellian world: a photograph of Tamara Toumanova in a drift of sparkles or snowflakes; a Medici child placed in what is called a "slot machine," and a photo of an object: a candlelit book, covered with broken glass and debris which is entitled, "Spent Meteor, Night of Feb. 10, 1843 (for E.A. Poe)." In these few pages Cornell presented his future audience with all the themes which would obsess him and enable him to clarify his vision in a series of ever-enlarging metaphors. His admirers would imagine that each of them personally had unlocked the mystery of these "miracles of ingenuity and poetry." they would become "enamored of the rarefied realms of constellations, balloons and distant panoramas." They, in fact, might miss the exquisite transparency of the mystic and clairvoyant. For Joseph Cornell's work, like Pascal's prism, can be seen through.

We can see all sides of Cornell's oeuvre at once. He invites us to imagine anything we like, but carefully divides his world into three parts: a) the bodily world of immediate beauty and pleasure (ballerinas, jewels, the opera, romantic lovers); b) the world of nature (animals, flowers, birds, children); c) the heaven above the world (planets, constellations, the vastness of the "celestial theater"). Neither purgatory nor hell exists for Cornell. In this perpetual Eden, sentimentality, cheap nostalgia, forced emotion are also nonexistent. Cornell, like Kierkegaard in Stages on Life's Way, understood the difference between Recollection and Reminiscence. Every work was a sharply defined and felt experience, but as mysterious and ambiguous as life itself.

The finest works are in boxes because each is a tiny theater, a proscenium through which we look to observe a drama demanding

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