SALEM, Mass., July 7 — “Star-light, what is star-light, star-light is a little light that is not always mentioned with the sun, it is mentioned with the moon and the sun, it is mixed up with the rest of the time.” That’s Gertrude Stein in the “Rooms” section of “Tender Buttons,” her great, splintered portrait of interior space evoked through light, emotions and memory.
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination "Untitled (Tilly Losch)," a Cornell shadow box (dated 1935-38) is one of the works in this exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. More Photos »
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Her portrait might easily be of a person, the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72), a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms; a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise. He was an archivist of time, immersed in it, buoyed up and pulled down. All of this comes through in the dusky retrospective of his collages and shadow boxes at the Peabody Essex Museum here.
Much of Cornell’s art is spun from the past, a past that was arcane even in his day. The names Rose Hobart, Henriette Sontag and Fanny Cerrito — B-movie actress, 19th-century soprano and Romantic danseuse — mean little or nothing now. But they meant the world to this intensely shy artist, who lived on sweets, worshiped forgotten divas and made portable shrines to them — his version of spiritual art — in the basement of the small house he shared with his mother and disabled brother in Flushing, Queens.
He was also an artist alive to modern culture. His contemporaries saw him as America’s first surrealist, and self-taught at that. He was passionate about automats, New York City pigeons, Balanchine, Mallarmé and Hollywood. A born fan, his idols included Geraldine Farrar, Mary Baker Eddy, Lauren Bacall, Susan Sontag and Yvette Mimieux. Although he created his work in isolation, it had a popular following and influenced generations of American artists.
Cornell still inspires affection. But maybe affection is not quite the word. Curiosity is more like it, shading into voyeurism. His work gives off provocatively contradictory signals: it is guileless but sophisticated, occult but self-revealing, sweet and corrupt.
The Peabody Essex show, “Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination,” is a full survey of his career. The sunk-in-darkness installation plays up the underground, lunar aspects of Cornell’s art and life, but there was sunlight in the picture too. The oldest of four children, he was born to a family of means in Nyack, N.Y. He was a bookish, daydreamy boy. The family home was a house to dream in: a rambling, turreted Queen Anne pile overlooking the Hudson. He could see the river from his bedroom, and birds, and a sky full of stars at night.
This idyll ended when Cornell’s father died in 1917, leaving Cornell’s mother in debt. She sold the Nyack home and moved the children to a succession of small houses in Queens, the last being at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Cornell spent his life there, in the company of his mother and his younger brother Robert, who was born with cerebral palsy.
Feeling responsible for his family, Cornell took a full-time job straight out of high school in his father’s trade, the textile business, starting as a sample salesman in Manhattan. He hated it; the social interaction was agony for him, and he developed punishing migraines. As an antidote he became a convert to Christian Science and spent his work lunch hours alone in the used-book shops that lined Fourth Avenue below Union Square and in art galleries. At one, the Julien Levy Gallery, he came across collages by Max Ernst, zany cut-and-paste things combining high art and popular images.
By this time, in 1931, Cornell had accumulated a stash of comparable images: advertisements, fashion shots, antique prints, art-history reproductions, photo spreads of singers and starlets. After seeing the Ernst pieces he made collages of his own, working at night on the kitchen table. Then, in a convulsive gesture of self-assertion, he showed them to Mr. Levy, who at first saw Ernst knockoffs. Then he realized how different Cornell’s work was: romantic, not sardonic; sensual but not overtly sexual; sophisticated but unearthly. The gallery was about to open a survey of new Surrealist art from Europe. Levy added Cornell to the mix, and with that began a 40-year career.
A few years later, in 1936, Cornell made the first of many shadow boxes, his “poetic theaters.” Alfred H. Barr Jr. was looking for American artists for his exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art. He consulted Mr. Levy about Cornell. And Mr. Levy, who had taken to promoting the work as toys for adults, advised Cornell to make something uncharacteristically large and eye-holding for the occasion.
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