Cornell’s beautiful bric-a-brac

By Marion Coutts

The artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) was what you might call a homebody. His working environment was at first his kitchen table and, later, the basement under his house. His career was unusual in that collecting, collage and assemblage of found material was the basis of everything he did. He did not draw or paint. In his basement, he assembled a gigantic archive of paper ephemera and found objects relating to a vast range of interests: opera, ballet, cinema, geography, astronomy, ornithology, European culture and art history. Even without formal art training he quickly became involved in the changing New York scene around him from the 1940s onwards. Some artists acquire a reputation as artist’s artists, and retain the respect of their peers separate from any commercial success. Cornell had it both ways. He started exhibiting in 1931 and by 1940 he was able to give up his job as a textile salesman. Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Motherwell, Lee Miller and Mark Rothko were friends or admirers. Many visited him at his house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Cornell rarely left New York. He never left America.

The shadow box was the format Cornell made his own. Essentially these are sealed arrangements of objects and images in glass-fronted, shallow, wooden boxes (“Untitled (Celestial Navigation)”, 1956-58). These ensembles—scenes, fictions, dreamscapes, theatres—are characteristically small, not much more than 40cm high. They make up the bulk of the Cornell show now on at the Royal Academy in London, and their collective effect is peculiar. Some hark back to a 19th-century idea of keepsakes and mementoes arranged under glass, some are straight-down-the-line surrealist whimsy, while others hold out the promise of gaming, slot machines and sci-fi. Looking at them is like flitting between relics of the past and motherboards of the future. This sense of straddling worlds was apparent to Cornell. In a letter to the artist Dorothea Tanning from 1947, he describes one of his works that he thinks she would like: “It is too much on the Victorian side (at present) to be a bona fide ‘object’, and yet this is what I like about it.” Many of his boxes were dedicated to artists, dancers and writers he admired and often he gave them to the person in question.