Gothic France Art History

Joseph Cornell: One Of The Most Recognized Collage Artists Worldwide

Joseph Cornell was one of the numerous American collage artists yet may better possibly be described as a homebody painter. Cornell, a thin, grey wraith of a gentleman, was like one of the odd-duck daydreamers in an Anne Tyler book. Day in and day out, he would sat home on Utopia Parkway and sipping tea in his tiny kitchen area while he wrote in his journals and mused on ballet dancers who had been around a century earlier. He spent most of his life inside a frame home in New York, with his mother and his disabled brother. He had no existence to speak of, simply no friends as well as very little in the way of actual physical interactions. Just what he did possess was his art, box assemblages. This reclusive, long-beaked person will sally out on small expeditions of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past throughout New York junk merchants and flea markets. To Cornell they were the strata of repressed recollection, a jumble of elements ready to be grafted and mated to each other.

 

Using bits and pieces of the real world, Joseph Cornell built tiny dreamlike universes. A portion of a zodiacal chart, a fascinating postage stamp, a cracked wine goblet, a remnant of clay bubble pipe, a colored ball or two: he sorted parts such as these right behind the glass front of a timber case to create a whole which embodied his compulsive yet often enchanting nostalgias. He would sort his discoveries into their peculiar categories and file them with boxes of his own souvenirs, like movie stars or ballet dancers he had never became acquainted with; and from all of them he made boxes. He will tinker with mixed media paintings for years. It is full of insignias of expeditions Cornell never had taken, a little container of mummified waves and shrunken exotic coasts, peninsulas, planets, items set in chambers. Even the map inside the lid, cut from some nineteenth-century German graph publication, represents an excessively distant shoreline. Our planet is displayed not only as our every day habitat but as one strange planet among others.

 

Cornell was especially stricken by the collages of Victorian metal engravings in Max Ernst's collection La Femme 100 tetes. Yet exactly nowhere in Surrealism is there imagery quite like his. Cornell's imagery had to do with childhood infancy with no anger or desire. Often he would crack the glass pane that shielded the contents of the box which implies that the haven of imagination has been invaded. That glass, the 'fourth wall' of his miniature theater, is likewise the diaphragm between a pair of contrasting realms. It depicts outside, chaos, catastrophe, as well as the stuff of unprotected existence; inside, sublimation, recollection, and peace.

 

Cornell's imagination appears to be fey or precious. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality. Yet his gothic dreams and fussily reverential evocations of dead Victorian ballerinas are usually drawn back from the edge by Cornell's rigor as being a conventional artist. Cornell has been intensely Francophile, although he had never ever been to France - see his numerous personal references to French provincial lodges, and even by the worn, cozy French colors of his box decorations, the ivory whites and pinks and faded blue-grays.

 

With his renowned shadow boxes, Joseph Cornell, one of the greatest collage artists, took the flotsam of everyday life - inexpensive wine cups, broken toys, tiny medicine bottles, rusting thimbles, old cork stoppers and paper cutouts - and invested all of them with the lustrous permanence of fine art. In artworks such as ''Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall,'' ''Medici Princess,'' ''Roses des Vents'' and ''The Hotel Eden,'' the real is without a doubt transformed into the unique, the mundane directly into enchanting: movie stars as well as paper birds turn out to be legendary deities in Cornell's personal world.

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