Probably his biography is not the most curious in 20th-century American art, but Joseph Cornell's is the one I've been reading about, and it's plenty curious. He was born in 1903, at Nyack, New York, which is on the west bank of the Hudson River about 20 miles north of Manhattan's northern tip—despite a population of only about 7,000, Nyack is the birthplace of Edward Hopper, too. Cornell's father earned a good living in the textile industry, first as a salesman and then as a designer, but in 1917 he died of leukemia, leaving behind his wife, Joseph, and Joseph's three younger siblings, one of whom, Robert, was afflicted with cerebral palsy. The mother went to work but for years the family lived in poverty's inner-ring suburbs. Joseph nevertheless was sent to Phillips Academy, a prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, through the largesse of his deceased father's former employer. He was a terrible student and left school without graduating. Upon returning home, which on account of strained finances was now a modest house in Queens, he got a textile sales job through one of his father's connections and went to work supporting the family. We are now up to 1921, the year he turned 18. Cornell spent the rest of his life in the house in Queens, with his mother and Robert, who was disabled by his disease. Robert died 44 years later, in 1965, followed by the mother in 1966, and then Cornell himself, age 69, in 1972.
My introduction to Cornell was an essay, "Stargazing in the Cinema: On Joseph Cornell," by Charles Simic, the author also of an unusual book called Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. The essay includes the following paragraph:
"A gourmet art by a man who ate junk food" is how Robert Motherwell described [Cornell's] work. Even to people who saw him fairly often he was a complete enigma. They remember him as drab looking, always preoccupied, speaking in monologues, oblivious to other people, an eccentric and a loner. Unmarried and with no sexual experience till the very last years of his life, he lived with his mother and an invalid brother who suffered from cerebral palsy in a small house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, whose basement he had turned into his studio. He ate little, never touched alcohol or set foot in the famous bars the painters and writers then frequented. He made appearances at art shows and gallery openings, greeting acquaintances and making a speedy departure. Cornell, who roamed the streets of Manhattan for almost fifty years, was usually to be found at home in Queens by eight o'clock in the evening. Except for time spent at boarding school in Massachusetts, this strange man never traveled beyond the five boroughs and their environs.
One of the somewhat comical aspects of the story is that this man should have fallen into work in the sales field. Despite his manifest unfitness, he pounded the Manhattan pavement, presenting samples to manufacturers and between appointments killing time in thrift shops and junk stores, for another of his quiddities was that he collected what "normal" people would call "trinkets" or "cheap souveniers"—Simic catalogues these objects as "old books, movie magazines, silent-film postcards, nineteenth-century toys, engravings, theatrical memorabilia, dolls, maps, and much else that anyone else would regard as nothing but trash." Another word that recurs in critical commentary is "ephemera." All this stuff, whatever you call it, came home to Queens. Sounds like mental illness, right? Maybe, but Cornell was also interested in New York's contemporary art scene and was much taken with, for example, the surrealistic collages of Max Ernst. In the basement of the house in Queens, he began tinkering endlessly with all his "junk," arranging and substituting and rearranging the found pieces until he had an "image" that pleased him. He would then mount them in a box—at first, in pill boxes purchased at drug stores and then emptied of their contents, though sometimes with the advertising (like Sure cure for that tired feeling) intact, and then later in the larger shadow boxes that made him famous.
It wouldn't be exactly right to say that Cornell labored on anonymously and became a hero of modern art when his boxes were discovered in the basement of the little house in Queens after he died. He showed some of his first assemblages to Julien Levy, the owner of the gallery where he'd seen Ernst's collages. Simic reports that Levy, in his memoirs, says his first reaction was that Cornell was showing him some lost works of Ernst. When persuaded that it was Cornell's own work, he offered to include some of the boxes in an exhibit of surrealist art his gallery was putting on that winter—this was the winter of 1931-32—and the young textile salesman thus became a member of the New York art world just when the Great Depression was making it impossible to peddle his wares. Cornell occasionally had to return to regular work in order to keep his odd little family going, but he was able to exhibit his boxes, and to sell many of them (for a fraction of what they'd command today). He also made avant-garde movies, like one called Rose Hobart, which was constructed by cutting and splicing together, out of sequence, the found footage of an early talkie called East of Borneo. As you can imagine, the entire plot was gone: instead, Cornell's radically abridged version highlights the movements, expressions, and tics of the female lead, Rose Hobart.
Simic doesn't think much of Cornell's experimental films, and I trust his judgment, but I think he might have mentioned that Rose Hobart is connected to the boxes in the respect that it was made from a lost print that fell into Cornell's hands, just as the boxes are made of objects he found at flea-markets, second-hand stores, junk shops, etc. It's like he meant always to rescue lost things and turn them into art. I haven't mentioned that he was a convert to Christian Science, a consequence probably of having rested up in their reading rooms during his peregrinations around Manhattan. In a way that may seem at once creepy and moving, his weird religion ties in with the rescue theme and his repressed sexuality. As a middle-aged man, he formed platonic friendships with young New York ballerinas, and some of his best known boxes depict famous and unattainable women, such as Lauren Bacall, in a way calculated to lift them out of sexualized publicity stills and fix them forever in a box as something more like religious icons. You get the feeling, or I do, that he could have been a dangerous person if he hadn't been able to transmute his stunted personality into art made of these discordant and discarded pieces of "junk" he collected and painstakingly arranged inside a glassed box into which the viewer gazes, a little like at the movies, though with no storytelling, only the 3-dimensional image of discarded things brought together. His first inspiration was drawn from the surrealists, and he is still sometimes regarded as one, but his purpose or intention—the effect, anyway, of his art—lies in the exact opposite direction: whereas the discordant objects and absurdist subjects of surrealism evoke anger and nihilism, Cornell's boxes are more apt to elicit nostalgia, or something like stifled yearning. "Somewhere on the island of Manhattan," writes Simic, "there were, [Cornell] believed, a few objects, dispersed in unknown locations, that rightly belonged together despite being seemingly incompatible in appearance"—harmony, in other words, out of garbage and dissonance. I think Christian Science is ridiculous, but (if an outsider dare speak) one senses behind Cornell's art a religious sensibility. I'm thinking mainly of the way in which ordinary objects, in his hand, become charged with mystery and significance, like a sacrament.
Cornell is a fairly popular YouTube subject. The below is a short introductory video, but there are a lot more, some quite lengthy and detailed. I just discovered that if you google "images of Joseph Cornell" you get the above picture of him, taken the year before he died, and lots of pictures of his boxes.
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