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December 1957
Volume 56, Number 8

ART NEWS

Auriga, Andromeda, Cameoleopardalis

By Howard Griffin

Joseph Cornell always has been a lonely and self-consistent experimenter, bearing "mid snow and ice, his banner with a strange device." In 1936, Julien Levy spoke of him as "one of the few Americans at the present time who understands the Surrealist point of view." But it is difficult to fit such magical work into categories; in fact, if it can be said that Cornell's imagery was born in the Surrealists' dream, the artist's integrity gave his work a greater reality, and a far greater means for development. Cornell's constructions show directness and humor of the prankish variety - two characteristics not foreign to Dada. But his work seems to contain no desire to shock: particularly no wish to dwell upon the brutal or disturbing side of the erotic. As an artist, he is devoted to what might be called the detachment of the imagination, patiently building his world out of the daily wreckage of real life.

Among its contributions, Levy's book, Surrealism, included an extremely fanciful scenario, Monsieur Phot, by Joseph Cornell. It opens in the winter of 1870 in a New York park, the action revolving around a photographer and a group of urchins. Eventually an eccentric pianist and a housemaid with a feather duster are added to the cast of characters.

More important are the props which unpredictably assume a fierce energy and impelling force of their own: a basket of laundry, a large mirror, a Victorian horse-car and several life-size marble statues. These cliches of Surrealist doctrine are juggled about in various combinations. The action is spasmodic (usually accompanied by music from Tschaikovsky, Couperin, Hahn or Richard Strauss.)  A final scene of considerable dream power occurs in a glass and china establishment. Suddenly a rare Asiatic pheasant darts into view and flies with terrific speed above and beneath the chandeliers, as if they are the branches of an icy forest. At times the gorgeous bird swoops gracefully past the store-counters, grazing the pieces by a hair's breadth. All at once "several deafening reports of a gun are heard in rapid succession," followed by the falling of a thousand crystal fragments. From another room the pianist with an old fashioned gun has tried to shoot the pheasant. What seems to attract this artist most is this ambiance of light, of brilliance. He is interested in the shining surface, the inhuman quality of glass, snow, space. How much - or how little - does the human element matter in these constructions? If people are present, they are seen askance, or at a moving distance, or as if down a historical perspective. The young Medici prince [fig. 1] is closed off by tinted glass, like a store-dummy in an Atget photograph. The great Taglioni herself is to be glimpsed nowhere near her jewel-case [fig. 10]. In Homage to Lucille Grahn we are allowed to look upon broken goblets, a tattered piece of gauze and a picture cut from the Daily Mirror the date she disappeared. If the human being is present, he is likely to be either a child, an archetypal figure or someone enshrined among the dead.

The Surrealist, according to Paul Nouge, "paints the bewildering object and the accidental encounter. The method consists in isolating the object by breaking its ties with the rest of the world. We may cut off a hand and place it on the table or we may paint the image of a cut-off hand on the wall." To achieve this desired isolation, Cornell employs the box and the frame, in more subtle ways than any other American artist.

Made of wood salvaged from an old Long Island mansion, these constructions are often recessed, applique-ed with formal advertisements or lists, inhabited by butterflies or birds perched 


Using the dreamlike juxtaposition of the Surrealists for his own ends, Joseph Cornell's boxes in the 1940s often contained bits of art history, such as the Moroni and Botticelli details in fig. 1. In the 1950s, his controlled sense of space and texture [fig. 2] relate his work in their evocations and idea of purity to avant-garde painting.

2 Cornell: Hotel du Nord, detail about 1/2 actual size, 1950.
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