Joseph Cornell, Wanderlust,
Royal Academy of Arts, review: 'spellbinding'
Born on Christmas Eve, 1903, he spent years working in the
textile industry and living for his lunch hour, which offered respite from the
daily grind. He rarely left New York City, did not travel beyond the United
States, and never married – devoting himself instead to his mother and his
wheelchair-bound younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
For most of his adult life he cared for them both in an
ordinary house in an unremarkable suburb of Queens.
And yet, despite masquerading as a wage-slave leading a
humdrum, nine-to-five existence, Cornell – arguably more than any other artist of the 20th century – was
blessed with an interior life so rich and vast that it provided him with all
the sustenance and excitement that he could ever need.
The fruits
of his magical imagination are currently on display in a spellbinding new
survey of his career at the Royal Academy – the first major exhibition of his
work in Europe since a show at the Whitechapel Gallery nearly 35 years ago.
Cornell
was an obsessive hoarder – and during his lunch breaks, as well as over
weekends, he loved roaming New York to seek out junkshops and second-hand
bookstores. One antiquarian bookshop on Lexington Avenue provided him, he said,
with “a sanctuary and retreat of infinite pleasures”.
Like a
magpie drawn to sparkly trinkets, he was forever on the hunt for ephemera and
sundry bits and pieces – feathers, marbles, stamps, seashells, clay pipes,
compasses, balls of twine, antique celestial charts: things, in other words,
which many people might overlook, but which Cornell, who was self-taught,
brought home to be categorised and stored in his studio in the cellar.
These found
objects were the raw materials of his art. With the delicacy and precision of a poet
searching for and then deploying the perfect word, Cornell would select an item
and arrange it alongside others inside the glass-fronted “shadow boxes” for
which he became renowned – in his homeland, at least, if less so on this
side of the Atlantic.
As the
scores of examples at the Royal Academy attest, these shadow boxes were curious,
fascinating, hybrid works
of art: part collage, part “painting”, part sculpted relief.
They
are the visual equivalent of a sonnet or a verse of intricate metaphysical
poetry: evocative, ingenious, and pregnant with complex associations and
meaning. Cornell didn’t need to travel because his “wanderlust” (as the
exhibition’s title puts it) was sated by his own private peregrinations of the
mind.
Since his wooden
boxes are filled with delicate baubles and moving parts, they are fragile – and
consequently, as if in honour of their maker, they rarely travel. Therefore to
see so many of them in the RA’s exhibition, which boasts around 80 works of
art, is special.
This isn’t
to say that Cornell is an unknown – his creations are a staple in textbooks about
20th-century art – but, outside America, it is rare to be able to inspect his
work up close and en masse. As a result, for many people, the RA’s show will
feel like a revelation.
It also offers
an opportunity to consider his achievement. What, as an artist, made him
tick? The clue comes in the first gallery, where we encounter a number of early collages made
using 19th-century engravings that are indebted to Max Ernst. Surrealism (minus the
sex) was always Cornell’s lodestar: in particular, it inspired his use of unexpected juxtapositions to
create poetic effects, which remained a principal technique throughout his
career. The Surrealists, of course, were fascinated by dreams, and Cornell’s
shadow boxes feel like dreams given palpable form.
The
curators at the RA argue that Cornell was a great innovator – but I’m
not sure that’s entirely right. Unlike some Surrealists, as well as other
Modernists, Cornell wasn’t
interested in smashing up form; rather, his art has a reactionary quality, in
the sense that it always had one eye on tradition. He wanted his constructions to have a
sentimental character, evoking 17th-century cabinets of curiosities or dusty
cupboards in an apothecary’s workshop.
The idea
that he was a proto-Abstract Expressionist because he dripped paint across the
glass fronts of one or two boxes is misleading (though it is more persuasive to argue that by
incorporating serial imagery, as well as mass-media photographs of film stars,
he arguably heralded Pop Art).
His response to the Second World War – a “shooting gallery”
of cut-out colour lithographs of tropical birds behind a pane of (neatly) shattered glass – is
timid and impotent.
Even when he channelled wider Modernist concerns – inspired
by Mondrian, for instance, to use a “grid” to structure his compositions – he did so in a way that felt
unique to him. No man is an island, but Cornell was unusually detached and
self-sufficient, all the same.
Moreover, his
Achilles heel as an artist was a tendency to allow some of his shadow boxes to
become overly fey, whimsical, or cutesy.
Still, at his best, Cornell made art that was utterly entrancing. I think of him as a kind of poet who chose to work
with images rather than words. At his command, the banal could become marvellous: his small boxes
leave us with the head-spinning sensation that they contain not throwaway odds
and ends but entire worlds.
The
Royal Academy should be congratulated for gathering together many of them in a
beautiful exhibition. My only gripe is that the show is opening in what feels like the wrong
season. Cornell’s nostalgic
shadow boxes have a magical, Christmassy, wintry-wonderland sort of aspect –
and they should have brightened up the darkest months of the year, and not
appeared during midsummer.
