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4 Cornell: Soap Bubble Set, ca. 1936.
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.

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5 Cornell: Weather Prophet, 1949.

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6 Cornell: Hotel de l'Etoile, 1955.

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on tables, who appear to be making phone-calls. Here the spectator must co-operate, as if in a game, with the artist. Cornell does not paint a bird, but in an instant he tries to make you feel what it is to be a bird. No figurative deception is intended. This art is not trompe-l'oeil but clin d'oeil.

It is important, first of all, that Cornell - who has exhibited regularly since 1932 - has detached himself from city life. To the average city-dweller, the inanimate has become, one might say, hostile. Because of applied and misapplied science, we are surrounded by clever gadgets that, contrary to appearance, do not abet us. At sudden, unpredictable times these devices refuse to function. Without warning they turn on one, mocking, jeering; levers rebel; the ice-crusher pinches one's fingers; locks get jammed.

But somehow Joseph Cornell seems to have escaped this aspect of the modern world. He has taken over such curious inventions as the slot-machine, the peepshow, the primitive movie, the nickelodeon and used them in his own way. He has managed to get the inanimate on his side. He reacts in a special way to surfaces and textures. There is a story on this point. During the encounter between Tchelitchew and Cornell, talk did not flow freely. Finally tea was served. Cornell accepted a cup, and then was seen to be taking from his pocket a package folded in several layers of tissue paper. He untied the string and, bit by bit, began to unwrap it. At last, he took out a piece of purple cloth. "What's that?" Tchelitchew asked. "The last piece of poplin woven before 1898," Cornell said, sadly.

Stories like this tell one something but it is the work which tells more. And, in this case, the oeuvre is of astonishing diversity. It was in a friend's apartment that I first saw several of the animated boxes: one, a pinball Dream of Switzerland in which a series of cowbells were struck tinklingly; the other, a four-act shooting mechanism with its bird jolting out of invisibility to be brought down by the frock-coated, phenakistoscopic huntsman. In 1946 Cornell exhibited a number of portraits of women. These were followed, in close succession, by aviaries [fig. 5], observatories, churneries, shooting-galleries, beehives, aquariums, palaces, prisons and other habitats, many shown at Egan Gallery. The method and the man himself tend to retreat behind the richness of invention. Around 1942, Cornell made a "watch case" [fig. 3] "for" Marcel Duchamp. A friend once mentioned a similar work, and Cornell said: "Oh yes, I was walking along Bleecker Street one day and saw a dark antique shop on the south side. There in the window was a whole pile of compasses. 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."

In the early fall of 1956 Cornell showed, at the Stable Gallery, a large group called Winter Night Skies. The catalogue was prefaced by a quotation from Astronomy with an Opera-Glass by Garrett P. Serviss which described Auriga, the constellations representing the figure of a man carrying a goat and her two kids in his arms. These constructions, more severe in tone, were a departure into a quite new territory.

They delighted me by their balance and imaginative concentration. In Hotel du Nord [fig. 9] I recognized (or seemed to) that burdened man in toga and plumed hat, from whose fingertips a widely-scattered stellar world exploded. Who was he? Towards what did he point? If one looked closely, one

3 Cornell: Appartient a M. Grillon, ca. 1942.
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