Enchantments

Joseph Cornell and American Modernism

Marci Kwon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691215020
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der Moderne

The first major work to examine Joseph Cornell's relationship to American modernism Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is best known for his exquisite and alluring box constructions, in which he transformed found objects—such as celestial charts, glass ice cubes, and feathers—into enchanted worlds that blur the boundaries between fantasy and the commonplace. Situating Cornell within the broader artistic, cultural, and political debates of midcentury America, this innovative and interdisciplinary account reveals enchantment's relevance to the history of American modernism.In this beautifully illustrated book, Marci Kwon explores Cornell's attempts to convey enchantment—an ephemeral experience that exceeds rational explanation—in material form. Examining his box constructions, graphic design projects, and cinematic experiments, she shows how he turned to formal strategies drawn from movements like Transcendentalism and Romanticism to figure the immaterial. Kwon provides new perspectives on Cornell's artistic and graphic design career, bringing vividly to life a wide circle of acquaintances that included artists, poets, writers, and filmmakers such as Mina Loy, Lincoln Kirstein, Frank O'Hara, and Stan Brakhage. Cornell's participation in these varied milieus elucidates enchantment's centrality to midcentury conversations about art's potential for power and moral authority, and reveals how enchantment and modernity came to be understood as opposing forces. Leading contemporary artists such as Betye Saar and Carolee Schneemann turned to Cornell's enchantment as a resource for their own anti-racist, feminist projects.Spanning four decades of the artist's career, Enchantments sheds critical light on Cornell's engagement with many key episodes in American modernism, from Abstract Expressionism, 1930s "folk art, " and the emergence of New York School poetry and experimental cinema to the transatlantic migration of Symbolism, Surrealism, and ballet.

CHAPTER ONE Parts of a World

FIG. 1.1 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Schooner), 1931. Collage of photomechanical reproductions on paperboard mounted to paperboard, 4¼ × 5

inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

Particularity is all-decisive.
Erich Auerbach, “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante”

One November day in 1931, a young man walked into Julien Levy Gallery. Although he had likely visited the gallery before, during those previous trips he kept to himself. This time, however, he was not so timid. This time he had something to show the gallerist. In his memoirs, Levy recalled his astonishment as this “gray young man” produced a handful of collages from his coat pocket.¹ In material and composition, Joseph Cornell’s collages bore a striking resemblance to the work of Max Ernst, a Surrealist whom Levy just happened to be featuring in an upcoming exhibition.² While Levy’s written account compressed several visits by Cornell into a single narrative, at some point, the gallery purchased several works from the artist for display in the upcoming show, Surréalisme, only the second exhibition of Surrealism in the United States.

Untitled (Schooner) (1931, fig. 1.1), Cornell’s first dated work of art, was likely among the collages purchased by Levy. Measuring just four by five inches, the little collage is pieced together from three distinct prints. The picture shows a schooner adrift on a black sea. Wind fills the ship’s sails, pulling its riggings taut; yet only a hint of waves ruffle the ocean’s surface. The rippling petals of the enormous rose blooming from the ship’s stern lends the scene a drama the sea does not. The ship’s delicate riggings twist, at the blossom’s center, into the spiral of a spiderweb, whose architect is perched at its center. The work shows a world of spiders the size of men and flowers the size of ships—a world in which the conventional laws of nature do not apply, a world where dreams become reality.

Yet this reading, temptingly surreal as it may be, fails to capture the complexity of this little collage. For this we must look to Cornell’s annotated copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which he acquired in the early 1920s. On page 399, he marks two consecutive poems with graphite checks (fig. 1.2):

Here, Sailor!

What ship, puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?

Or, coming in, to avoid the bars, and follow the channel, a perfect pilot needs?

Here, sailor! Here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot,

Whom, in a little boat, putting off, and rowing, I, hailing you, offer.

A Noiseless, Patient Spider

A noiseless, patient spider,

I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;

Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Carelessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.³

As in Cornell’s collage, Whitman places ship and spider alongside one another.⁴ In the first poem, a maritime pilot hails a passing ship. His opening address asks the “puzzled” vessel if it might require a “reckoning,” implying his ability to steer a true course.⁵ He boasts of himself as a “perfect pilot.” Only at the end of the poem do we realize that this “perfect” navigator is in fact “in a little boat, putting off, and rowing,” casting his lofty ambitions in an ironic light. Whitman’s description of the pilot’s skiff draws our attention to the rowboat trailing behind Cornell’s fantastical schooner. Cloaked in the shadow of the marvelous ship, the tiny boat is steered by a hunched figure, whose presence underscores the schooner’s eerie emptiness.

“A Noiseless, Patient Spider” nuances the prior poem’s desire for connection. The speaker watches a spider weave its web. Unlike the vocalized ambitions of the pilot in the prior poem, the spider is silent, for it seeks something altogether more ambiguous. When the time is right, it sends “filament, filament, filament,” out of itself, throwing these shining ropes into “the vacant, vast surrounding.” The speaker finds existential weight in these actions, likening the spider’s spinning to her soul’s search for a place in the “measureless oceans of space.” She, too, flings her metaphorical threads into an unknown void, hoping for a connection, hoping something will catch.

Considered alongside Whitman’s poems, Cornell’s collage emerges as a meditation on creation as a means of connection, on the multitudes contained by tiny things. Just as Whitman’s placement of these poems upon the same page transforms them into a single narrative, Cornell’s collage unites ship and spider. The unexpected scalar relationships among ship, spider, and rose are mediated by his meticulous matching of their physical sizes. Cornell’s canny play of size and scale, of actual and relational, infuses the fantastic scene with an air of organic continuity. Within the world of the work, the world created by Cornell, enchantment is rendered material, present.

This deceptively modest collage raises many questions about Cornell’s early artistic practice. While it stands as his first documented work, it displays none of the tentativeness that usually characterizes an artist’s youthful career. The formal economy with which it conveys the insight and force of Whitman’s poetry instead suggests a confident, even mature artist. Following Levy, scholars have discussed this little collage as evidence of Cornell’s debt to Surrealism.⁶ Yet the work’s reference to Whitman suggests that at this early date, Cornell’s artistic and intellectual interests extended beyond the European movement. Because of the absence of extant objects by Cornell before 1931, scholarship on the artist’s life during the 1920s remains scant, a lacuna that has reinforced Levy’s mythic story of Cornell’s origins and contributed to the view of his practice as purely instinctive.⁷

FIG. 1.2 Joseph Cornell’s annotated copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, pp. 398–99. Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

By placing Cornell’s recollections of the 1920s alongside later works of art, this chapter instead approaches Cornell’s visit to Levy and engagement with Surrealism as the culmination of a decade of artistic and spiritual exploration. During the 1920s, Cornell began an intensive study of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Transcendentalism; converted to Christian Science; and began to amass a collection of objects and ephemera that would serve as the basis for his subsequent work. Romanticism, Symbolism, and Transcendentalism are cruxes of enchantment and disenchantment, seeking religion’s numinous power in imagination, art, and nature rather than the divine. They are at once rejoinders to Enlightenment rationalism and attempts to express the metaphysical without recourse to an overtly religious power. Alfred Stieglitz’s ironic description of himself as “a transcendentalist without God” encapsulates this idea, while also suggesting that Cornell was not alone in his preoccupations during the 1920s, although of course he did so from the position of a believer rather than a skeptic.⁸ For Transcendentalist-inspired writers such as Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld, enchantment was no solipsistic escape but a means to combat the Gilded Age’s cult of individual achievement and material acquisition.

Although Cornell felt a deep kinship with these movements, he did not simply align himself with them. Rather, he wove their most salient lessons into a distinctive formal grammar of fragmentation, correspondence, and montage, which became the foundation for his nascent artistic practice. Cornell turned to these devices to condense his vast collections of material into discrete works of art, which in turn drew connections among an eclectic array objects, experiences, and historical moments. Cornell’s deployment of these formal strategies made him particularly well-suited to Julien Levy’s attempts to promote Surrealism in the United States. Conversely, Surrealism’s engagement with Romanticism and Symbolism, as well its deployment of found objects, also offered the artist a ready-made discourse through which to present his work as fine art. Cornell’s artistic formation, however, preceded his encounter with Surrealism.

COLLECTING

Writing in the 1960s, Cornell described his collecting during the 1920s as initiating a “life-long preoccupation with things.”⁹ Around the same time that Cornell wrote this entry, Hans Namuth photographed the artist’s basement studio (figs. 1.3, 1.4). Namuth’s pictures show the result of Cornell’s four-decade “preoccupation with things”: a room crammed with half-finished works and source materials, sorted into white boxes labeled with cerulean paint. If Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock visualized artmaking as a virile physical act (fig. 1.5), here artistic process is instead pictured as material accumulation. Any co...