Copyright 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
The
New Yorker
February 17, 2003
SECTION: THE CRITICS; A Critic at Large; Pg. 184
LENGTH: 4308 words
HEADLINE: SPARKINGS;
Joseph Cornell and the art of nostalgia.
BYLINE: ADAM GOPNIK
BODY:
The monosyllables of condescension form at the back of the throat and hover in
the staging space just before the lips:
"twee,"
"fey,"
"camp," even
"cute." The art under inspection, after all, has that form technically called mushy
stuff in syrup: old French hotel ads and stuffed birds and soap-bubble pipes
hermetically sealed behind glass, evoking vanished Victorian worlds of
Curiosity Shops and steamer trunks and natural-history-museum displays of
long-refuted principles. They ought to have dated; they ought to date; they
are, in a way, about being dated. And yet something keeps the visitor locked in
place, looking, and turns his mind to the warmer, though still not quite
satisfying, words of romantic praise:
"haunting,"
"mysterious,"
"dreamy,"
"sublime."
The objects that cause this odd rhythm of stop and look and stop to think again
are the shadow boxes that the American artist Joseph Cornell constructed for
forty years in the basement of his mother's house on Utopia Parkway, in Queens.
This year is the centenary of Cornell's birth, and his boxes continue to hold
their own in the American imagination. Since his death, in 1972, it is not so
much that Cornell's fame has grown, which is what happens when critics water a
reputation, as that his work has become part of the living body of art, which
is what happens when artists eat it. It was strange to find how big a part
Cornell played in the imaginations of young artists during the
nineteen-eighties, when the Abstract Expressionist painters, for so long more
central and cosmopolitan, seemed irrelevant, stagy, and stuffy, and when even
the autistic genius of Warhol seemed to belong to a Beaux-Arts past, with its
faith in painted things stuck on a wall.
Only Pollock, of the artists of the great or big generation, seems today as
large as Cornell. The Cornell literature, which can get very literary (a clue,
perhaps, to his popularity), continues to grow: he has already been the subject
of a fine biography, Deborah Solomon's 1997
"Utopia Parkway," and in the past two years there has been a new, illustrated life, by Diane
Waldman, and an elaborately produced collection of literary tributes, edited by
the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and called
"A Convergence of Birds." (Last year, there were two gallery shows, one of collages at C
& M Arts, and one, extended through this winter, at the Allan Stone Gallery.)
Cornell's small art looms so large, in fact, that one is occasionally inclined
to take the side of the big boys against the recluse, just as there must still
be a Longfellow fan out there who has heard quite enough about Emily Dickinson,
thank you. It does look twee, or at least awfully easy. Cornell, like his
beloved Saint-Exupery, gets the mushy-stuff pass that only one or two artists
per generation are permitted. Art critics and historians try to solve this
problem by searching for the conventional signs of avant-garde reassurance-you
see, his boxes are really boxes, you know, primary structures, with, like,
appropriated ironies inside-and by making his art into yet another
mock-in-the-box. Yet no one has ever really looked at it as anything but
desperately sincere. The mushy bits, the parrots and constellations, are,
beyond all argument, the potent bits.
It is in the biographies and, particularly, in the diaries and letters that
have been published in the past decade that a sense of the man emerges. When
you read Cornell while staring at his art, two words eventually come to mind
and stick there to help explain what makes the art last, makes it matter:
"weird" and
"real." For weird he was, weirder than we like to admit. A sweetened Cornell has grown
up in our memory: an innocent outsider who made his boxes from his reveries
about ballerinas, and whose poetic art exists in a state of
"childlike wonder." This is not false, exactly, but it is incomplete. The ballerinas and actresses
he worshipped, sometimes from very close up, were often freaked out by the
attentions of this shy, gaunt man offering them a box filled with . . . them.
(Some of his devotional objects, like the box he made for Lauren Bacall in the
forties-smoldering femme fatale surmounted by a predella of dagger-shaped
skyscraper turrets-look like props in the last reel of a Hitchcock film.)
Cornell's art occupies a special place between the spooky and the sappy, and it
is the spookiness that gives the sappiness its power.
But Cornell's art was also
real, in ways that are easy to miss. Reading his diaries and letters, you are
struck by how outward-turning and observant this reclusive dreamer was. Cornell
knew more people than Cholly Knickerbocker, from Allegra Kent to Tennessee
Williams and Marcel Duchamp-it's hard to name any artist of that generation
whose circle was as wide. More important, his life looked like the art he made.
He sat in cafeterias drinking coffee and eating pie and staring at girls and
going to the movies and reading Mallarme, and he managed to find funny and
affecting coordinates (they were too casual to be called symbols) of these
things to put in his boxes. To call Cornell a realist may seem to play with
words, but, in the root sense that a realist is an artist preoccupied with the
world he finds rather than with the world he wants, Cornell is on the side of
the real. He is an artist of longings, but his longings are for things known
and seen and hard to keep. He didn't long to go to France; he longed to build
memorials to the feeling of wanting to go to France while riding the Third
Avenue El. He preferred the ticket to the trip, the postcard to the place, the
fragment to the whole. Cornell's boxes look like dreams to us, but the mind
that made them was always wide awake.
Some American lives roll in mythical shapes-a Presidential aspirant gets born
in a place called Hope, and a budding rhapsodic novelist is named after Francis
Scott Key-and none more than Cornell's. He was born on Christmas Eve (in 1903),
he was employed by a company named Whitman, he spent his life on Utopia
Parkway. And Edward Hopper peered over his sister's shoulder, teaching her
drawing as the young Cornells grew. He came from an old and distinguished and
once rich Yankee family-a background one senses in the long jaw and the
attenuated, aristocratic face, skin drawn tight over pointed features-and had,
he always insisted, a
"happy childhood." It was made from resistant material: his father died of a blood disease when
Joseph was only thirteen, and the family was expelled from their big house on
the river in Nyack and moved to Queens. Queens was a leafier place then, but
the house they bought, and lived in for forty years, was the simplest of
single-family frames. The great tragedy of Cornell's life was the plight of his
younger brother Robert, who came down with a crippling form of cerebral palsy
when he was only one, and whom Cornell took care of for the rest of his life.
Robert lived to be fifty-four, as a wraith surrounded by toy-train sets, but
his brother treated him as a wonder, not as a burden. ("Beautiful smile from Robert leaving house to go in," he writes.
"Stayed with me all afternoon.") Cornell seems to have spent little time in the wilderness of the world before
he retreated to Utopia Parkway. A few unhappy years at prep school (Andover, no
less), where he was remembered for idolizing Harry Houdini; a job as a salesman
for the Whitman textile company. It is said that Robert's condition kept Joseph
at home, filling his work with its conspicuous longings for elsewhere. But
other men with sick siblings have gone to France, and, if you read through his
papers, Joseph seems a self-willed recluse. Frighteningly well read-a list of
his favorite books stretches from Donne to Robbe-Grillet-he had a particular
affection for Emily Dickinson and Rimbaud, both great rejecters, and wanted to
emulate them.
Music was his first love. Mozart, in particular, obsessed him, and at a time
when hearing one of the piano concertos was still a bit of an event. He does
not seem to have responded to visual art in the usual sense; his firsthand
experience of art was mostly secondhand-books and prints and etchings seen on
Fourth Avenue. In his diaries and letters, while he is knocked sideways by
prints and poems and pies and sexy waitresses and melodies, I can't find a
single occasion when he is overwhelmed by a painting, a unique visual thing in
place.
As early as 1931, though, he walked into the Julien Levy gallery, on Madison
Avenue, and began to look at Magritte and Giacometti and, above all, Max Ernst,
whose collages made from nineteenth-century engravings embodied Cornell's own
fascination with the secondhand-and were, in any case, of the kind that even an
untrained draftsman like him could do. He began making collages and
assemblages, first in homage to Ernst, and very quickly in a happier manner,
entirely his own.
Surrealism's influence on Cornell is so plain that it is easy to miss how
fundamentally at odds he was with the Surrealist enterprise. As he said,
memorably and simply, what he wanted in his art was
"white magic," where Surrealism's was all black. The earnest Victoriana that looked to Ernst
like the rotting leftovers of the great bourgeois feast of the European
nineteenth century looked to Cornell like Europe. Cornell wanted to reenchant
his objects, to give the things he loved the permanence of art. Though
Surrealism supplied, in neatly literary form, a vocabulary and a manner for
him, it was not the Surrealists but their predecessors, the Cubists-the last
rhapsodic realist movement, the end point of the nineteenth-century search for
a language light enough to be modern, large enough to own a city-who eventually
won and held his heart. For him, the minor Cubist Juan Gris was, bizarrely,
first among modern artists, and it was the larksome Cubist poet Apollinaire,
not the dour Surrealist Aragon, whom he placed high among modern poets.
He did some early assemblage and collage, but by the end of the thirties he was
fully launched on his boxes: often carefully carpentered from pine, intricately
opaque (many have a bottom drawer, kept permanently shut, with a feather or a
jack inside), many whitewashed or lacquered fifteen or sixteen times. Where did
he get the idea of putting his objects in little boxes under glass? Diane
Waldman, in her book on Cornell, suggests that Victorian toys, of a kind one
still sees in flea markets, were a precursor; others have mentioned images in
Atget's photographs and Victorian shadow boxes, those dainty mantelpiece
ornaments. The most important and most obvious influence, though, is surely the
dominant visual experience of any city dweller in the past two hundred years:
the shopwindow itself. The ordinary objects placed behind glass in
juxtapositions meant to inspire desire (the mannequin and the man, the hat and
the holly tree)-what was new in Cornell was familiar on the street. Oblique
Cornell may be, but no more oblique than a druggist's window. He is at his best
when he is working with resistant or very objectlike material, rather than with
material already loaded with sentiment. His pharmacies, of the early forties,
are probably his first masterpieces, exactly because they look like pharmacies:
inventories of small stoppered bottles filled with feathers and balls and
liquids. But they also look like a child's idea of science, order imposed on
beads and lemonade. They are as clear and as mysterious as a shopwindow you see
on the first morning in a strange town.
Though Cornell was isolated neither in his work (more people came out to
Flushing than visited Max Beerbohm in Rapallo) nor in his art (he had galleries
and collectors from early on), he was isolated in another sense, by choice. He
had discovered the joys of solitary wandering. Beginning in the early
nineteen-forties, his life was structured by a simple rhythm: from Queens via
the subway to Manhattan, where he walked and ate and watched and collected, and
then back home to the basement and back yard in Queens, where he built his
boxes, talked to his mother, and cared for his brother. The flaneur and the
recluse were equally intense. Cornell chose to be that classic New York thing:
a walker in the city. He was an unambitious walker, though, in that he wanted
to see the city, not conquer it. His favorite places took him up and down and
all over town: F. A. O. Schwarz and the Bigelow pharmacy and Bickford's and the
cast-iron district. Woolworth's was his chapel and Wanamaker's his cathedral.
Cornell's appetite and discerning eye for the street around him appears
everywhere in the diaries he kept in the forties and fifties, many of which
were beautifully annotated and illustrated in Mary Ann Caws's 1993 anthology
"Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind," a really golden book. He lovingly evokes a time when there was a scarcity
economy of culture and a surplus culture of everything else: a time when,
though you could eat lunch for fifty cents, Beethoven's Ninth was a sacrament
and the Budapest Quartet a revelation and a cappuccino as exotic as a French
stripper-a time before Warhol and cheap air travel. The dominant note is of
humming happiness, and outward-turning observation. One entry reads:
Glass of weak iced tea and liverwurst sandwich on the balcony about 4 o' clock
overlooking 42 and 3rd Ave. with its typical stream of motley N.Y. humanity
this sunny afternoon-right against the window with a ledge where I could open
the RILKE in unhurried leisure and enjoy it along with all the minutiae of
commonplace spectacle that at times like this takes on so much
"festivity"-a real
"happiness" here in the sun, although too nervous to do justice to the Rilke text-a real
glow in the lines of
"the Paris of Gerard de Nerval" . . . the preoccupation with the crowds below formerly a morbid obsession in
the infinity of faces and heterogeneity- in particular a black robed nun with a
rope or chain conspicuous for lack of usual immaculateness and a real type of
uniquely unusual encountered only in a city like N.Y.- as usual a significant
kind of happiness is difficult to get into this
"cataloging" but there it was none the less-"this on-the-edgeness" of something apocalyptic, something really satisfying.
People used to say that visiting Cornell at his house was like stepping into
one of his boxes, and, reading his diaries, one senses that what fills the
boxes is what filled his life, a constant running in and out of the mind of
sweets and children and memories and French poems.
He called his best New York moments-when the cafeteria pie and the light in the
window and the knowledge of having found the right old print on Fourth Avenue
all came together-"sparkings," a
"conspiracy of events to produce this miracle of grace." Often, the
"sparkings" center on a beautiful young girl he sees briefly on his travels. He called
these girls his
"
fees," his
filles, his faeries. He could come across them even in Flushing:
"just now; 'le retour de la fee,' just now the teener-a long moving picture
portrait-seen crossing Roosevelt
& Main-autumn sunlight-went into Woolworth-wandered all over store daydream
shopping without buying-hair (chestnut) worn down back-light blue sweater-high
cheek bones-boney frame-emaciated-wan-but real fee." There is something rapt and winsome in his appreciation of his
fees; and something just a little creepy about his following them into Woolworth's.
He captured them in the reproduction of a Medici princess by Bronzino, whose
work he had seen once in one of the few
"fine arts" shows that moved him, a catch-all collection of Great Paintings at the 1939
World's Fair. (It was in Flushing, too, and so, perhaps, unintimidating.) The
emotional force of the Medici-princess boxes, where the image of Bronzino's
grave infanta is repeated over and over, printed in a sad blue twilight or
behind a wall of sepia glass, with children's balls and jacks laid out around
her as offerings, lies in the ennoblement of the
fees. But he could fall in love with almost any woman. His infatuations with the
great ballerinas of the emerging City Ballet are famous; Allegra Kent, who
really was a
fee, and nearly as original as he was, became a friend. But he had the same
feelings about some pretty improbable movie stars. Lauren Bacall and Marilyn
Monroe, O.K., but he was also crazy about Sheree North, a now forgotten
smoky-voiced soubrette of the fifties, and in 1958 he inserted in a book about
French poetry he was reading:
Write Shirley MacLaine-extra measure
& a beautiful tenderness vs. roughneck charm of Dinah Shore who runs the Chevy
Show-Shirley MacLaine even in
"roughneck" dance routines a kind of joie de vivre
& childlike joy that floods the stagnant T-V screen with a flood of cool clear
water-*Shirley MacLaine bless her!
The boxes he made for his favorite actresses are, in their way, better Pop art
than any Pop art properly so called-more connected to the real spell that
popular culture casts on an American mind, which is not detached (an emotion
that the Pop artists had to work for) but overly invested, finding more in
Shirley MacLaine than Shirley MacLaine can quite supply. (His obsessive
infatuations were not quite as
"innocent" as is sometimes claimed. His friends recall that he would, with any
encouragement, send lurid erotic fantasies to his
fees; according to Caws, he even sent one a tracing of a string he had put around
his penis to show its size.) The unobtainable appealed to Cornell, not because
it prevented him from having a real emotional life but because it fed his real
emotional life, which was built on longing-commercial, erotic, and romantic.
For Cornell's great subject-announced and taboo-in all his boxes was nostalgia,
and his desire was to vindicate it as an emotion. He wanted to make nostalgia
into one of the big permanent emotions you could put in a box, like lust or
greed, instead of one of the smaller disreputable ones you kept in a drawer.
"Nostalgia ok for Wyeth in isolated New England," he complained once.
"What is the answer for New York City." The nostalgia he felt, though, was not nostalgia for a particular place or
person but a generalized nostalgia for what he called
"time passing." Cornell sensed, and in his art dramatized, the difference between two opposed
kinds of nostalgia. What's nostalgic in Cornell's art is not that it's made of
old things; a lot of the things are so new that no one would have yet thought
of them as potential art-Hollywood stills and penny-arcade chutes. What's
nostalgic is that, behind glass, fixed in place, the new things become old even
as we look at them: it is the fate of everything, each box proposes, to become
part of a vivid and longed-for past, as real and yet as remote from us as the
Paris hotel we never got to. There is, he saw, a kind of nostalgia that posits
a world that never existed and a set of virtues never put into practice-the
kind that idealizes the heroic forties, or the roaring twenties, or the
fabulous fifties-and a kind that finds a bottomless melancholy in the simple
desolation of life by time. The false kind of nostalgia promotes the
superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing.
Cornell's last full decade, the sixties, was sad, and not just in retrospect.
The rising generation of Pop artists admired him. But, by an irony he could not
have envisioned, instead of seeing him as New York's Cubist they gave him
exactly the role that the Douanier Rousseau had occupied before the First World
War for the Cubists themselves, the
"innocent" outsider who had stumbled on a method wiser than he was. In June of 1963,
Warhol and Indiana and Rosenquist all came together on an impulse to call on
the Old Master, in a kind of cheerful parody of the famous Banquet Rousseau,
where Picasso and his friends called on the aging Douanier. But Cornell's
longings had no more to do with Pop po-facedness than Rousseau's sobrieties had
to do with the Cubists' syncopations. Art historians, who see what they expect
to see, usually say that the difference between the use of the repetitive image
that Cornell invented-twenty-four princesses in one box-and the way Warhol took
it up lies in their touch: Warhol's repetition is said to be affectless and
mechanical while Cornell's is romantic. But in fact Warhol's silk-screen method
allows for far more variation in feeling than anything that Cornell, a true
appropriator, could achieve. (Though conservative art critics have a soft spot
for Cornell, he was the first entirely camera-and-object-driven artist to enter
the museums. Even Duchamp could draw, and Johns, by comparison, was Poussin.)
The real difference between them lies in the orchestration of effects:
Cornell's repetitions, enforced by handmade frame and blue glass, are as
vulnerable as those of an anxious lover over-stamping a love letter. Warhol's
are impervious as a dandy, delighted to be impersonating a stamp machine.
The Medici boxes are the most
"haunting" of all Cornell's works, and they haunt us because we are not sure if the
princess is imprisoned or on display, or if there is really a difference. The
grave and overburdened princess, surrounded by children's blocks and stencilled
numbers and pinballs and pinball chutes, is allowed back into the childhood
that her position kept her from so many centuries ago. At the same time, the
balls and blocks and jacks become accessories of aristocracy; they suddenly
have the weary dignity of court art. She is locked up and looking out. What the
Medici boxes deny is any kind of conventional warmth, the manic affection for
popular objects that enlivened Stuart Davis's crazy lines, or even Gerald
Murphy's heraldic razor, and it is this lack of warmth, and its replacement by
deeper and more sober emotions, that is new in Cornell. Warhol and Cornell
worked from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, indifference and
infatuation, but they both ended in the realm of the Snow Queen. Warhol showed
that it is possible to be truly in love with the frozen, Cornell that it is
possible to be frozen in true love.
And Cornell's loves made him vulnerable, as vulnerable as any hermit who comes
to believe his visions. In a denouement that belongs in a movie or an opera, in
1962 he finally reached out to one of his
fees. Her name was Joyce Hunter, and she was an aspiring actress whom he found
waiting on tables in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue. He gave her the
fee name Tina, made many boxes and collages in her honor, and eventually,
tremulously, invited her to live on Utopia Parkway. (They don't seem to have
slept together, and he probably died a virgin.) Predictably, she and a
boyfriend ended up stealing nine boxes from him. A dealer put the police onto
them, and she was arrested in the fall of 1964, which forced Cornell, gallantly
but miserably, to spend his time trying to keep her safe from the police and
prosecutors. A few months later, she was found murdered in a West Side hotel
room, probably for unrelated reasons. Cornell was heartbroken. Like Swann or
Seymour Glass, he mistook emptiness for innocence, and paid for it. Then, in
1965, Robert died-
"at 1:30 in the afternoon my blessed brother looked at his wall of celestial toy
trains, out on the saffron feeding grounds of the ring-necked pheasants,
glanced back and without a sigh was released from his frail frame"-and Joseph was alone. A friend who visited found the once warm house
unbearably cold. Cornell said that he couldn't endure the sound of the furnace
going on and off in the basement below.
Since his own death, Cornell has suffered from being too narrowly placed within
the apostolic succession of American avant-garde art, which makes him look more
of an outsider than he was. Anyone reading the New York poets, Hart Crane and
Frank O' Hara-or, for that matter, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop-would
expect a companion visual art that looked exactly like this, rather than like
the vast exclusions of Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman. The balance of the
metaphysical and the quotidian, the intimate address and the popular symbols,
the private mythologizing of mass culture, the singing New York street and the
oblique references, a dream of France dotting the work like raisins in a
pudding-all these things are far closer to American modernist poetry than to
its art. To call Cornell a poetic artist is in this sense just a flat taxonomic
fact.
And it is not meant entirely in his praise. The best of his contemporaries were
not content with an art that worked like poetry, with its natural bent for a
mixed rhetoric, for a little of this and a little of that. The visual arts, for
good or ill, tend toward the absolute, the
"iconic"-the blue of Chartres would be no better for a little yellow-and the absolutism
of the high American modernists is what connects them to the monumental
tradition. Cornell's art was smaller, and more particular. In a curious way,
what we miss most about his work is its embrace of the city; we miss the city
that was there to embrace. (It would not be the least irony of an art of
purposeful nostalgia that we end up being nostalgic for it.) For all its
sadness, there is still in Cornell's work the hum of a secure and
many-chambered civilization, one that was roomy enough for Gerard De Nerval, so
to speak, to dine on Boston cream pie, roomy enough for Cornell. It is hard not
to long for Cornell's longings, imagining him, in a city now largely vanished,
collecting his prints and magazines and poems and wandering in somewhere to eat
his doughnuts and noting the exact look on the face of a
fee waitress and knowing all the while that, if he could just get back on the El
to Flushing by five-thirty, he was home free.
LOAD-DATE: February 25, 2003