Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order

Lindsay Blair

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780948462498
• eBook ISBN: 9781780231600
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The "boxes" and collages constructed by Joseph Cornell (1903–72) are among the most intriguing and beguiling works of art made this century. Old toys, photos, magazine illustrations, bits of electrical wiring – anything in fact more usually left to molder in lumber rooms or junkshops – were hoarded by him as the elemental materials he needed for his constructions. The finished works are visually entrancing, but the intensely personal webs of reverie and association that determined their content make these boxes at once both oddly familiar yet ineluctably strange. Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material – virtually all Cornell's scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries – supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist's family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell's ultimate subject was the mind itself.

1 The Self Observed

‘GC 44’ AND THE DOSSIER

‘GC 44’ is Cornell’s most highly personal and most important working dossier, one of the ‘high tides of inspiration’.³⁴ Its title is an abbeviation for ‘Garden Center 1944’, for the dossier is built around Cornell’s thoughts and observations while he was working in the summer of 1944 at a garden centre in Flushing run by a Christian Science Practitioner. An important issue at this time was the work that the Practitioner was doing with Joseph’s younger brother. (Both Robert and Betty were also Christian Scientists.) The Practitioner and Robert were studying hard together to achieve a healing, and according to Betty, Robert was free from epileptic fits that year. The spate of good health Robert enjoyed, and the brothers’ shared enthusiasm for Christian Science, naturally affected Cornell’s frame of mind in that year.

The background to ‘GC 44’ is of relevance here. Cornell had given up working for Traphagen Commercial Textile Studio in 1940, and in ‘GC 44’ he looks back to those days when he worked as a travelling salesman as a ‘miserable phase’ of ‘business routine’.³⁵ He recognized that, in August 1944, he was now able to enjoy what previously he had been forced to save up for weekends (his ‘weekendy’ feeling was a ‘strong anticipatory pleasure associated with departure to the country to new places’³⁶). He loved to be working nearer to home and travelling to and fro on a bicycle, getting to know the rural routes and quiet passageways. In addition, since 1941 he had his own workroom/studio in the cellar beneath the family home, a place in which he could work in private and store his materials. (It had previously been a point of contention that Cornell was taking over the house with his bits and pieces, for when his mother wished to organize tea for visitors she had always to deal with his ephemera piled on the dining-room table.) Thus there was a sense of new-found freedom in the summer of 1944, a spiritual resurgence, and a third element (not yet fully brought out) – his revitalized feeling for nature. ‘GC 44’ is Cornell’s tribute to nature, his arcadian vision articulated. In a significant entry in his dossier he includes a quotation from Jean Renoir: ‘I believe that during the past 50 yrs. man has been losing contact with his physical senses and is becoming too intellectual-ized. The artist’s mission today, he noted elsewhere, is to recreate a direct contact between man and nature’,³⁷ and Cornell goes on to discuss exact times and places where he experienced direct contact with nature. These moments he described as ‘mystical dream episodes of bicycle rides through lonesome landscapes’.

The dossier itself shows how concerned Cornell was to develop a conception of himself as an artist with a certain kind of consciousness. Let us look first at the overall shape and aims of the dossier, and then at an individual episode, where Cornell catalogues the stages of the creative process (‘The Floral Still-life’). I will then illustrate how Cornell sifted nostalgically through his own past by his strategy of parallel narrative, in this instance with a fictional character from Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), first published in English in the USA as The Wanderer in the translation by Françoise Delisle (1928). The spiritual and mystical elements of the dossier, especially the connection with Christian Science, follows, after which I turn to Cornell’s obsession with dreams. Finally, I present two boxes that are linked thematic-ally with the ‘GC 44’ dossier: Untitled: American Rabbit (1945–6) and Untitled: Paul and Virginia (1946–8).

Donald Windham has described the basic physical characteristics of ‘GC 44’ as it appeared in the late 1960s (more than twenty years after it was begun): ‘two grey cardboard boxes . . . hundreds of scraps of paper with things written on them and hundreds of mounted illustrations’ (illus. 26).³⁸ If this dossier had begun, like others, in a loose-leaf folder, then by the end of the 1960s it needed box containers, for ‘GC 44’ was not only Cornell’s most important dossier, it was also his largest, containing over one thousand pages. The references and diary notations pertaining to ‘GC 44’ extend even beyond this huge compilation: other dossiers and ‘explorations’ discuss it, and contain cross-references (Cornell comments on the ‘rich cross-indexing’ with this project). It is difficult to overstate the importance of this dossier to Cornell; as his sister Betty recalls, ‘That was a big, big, experience in his life, “GC 44”!’.

‘GC 44’ is a ‘bulging chaos’ because of Cornell’s compulsive habit of collecting.³⁹ David Hare was puzzled by Cornell’s collecting habit; Susan Sontag thought it ‘incredulous’; and even Cornell warned himself about it: ‘A discipline will have to be acquired against the piling up of diverse material’.⁴⁰ Of further relevance to ‘GC 44’ was Cornell’s notetaking. He was an inveterate notetaker. Whether on buses, in train stations, in the library, over his danish pastry in the automat, on the telephone, while enjoying the backyard sunshine, while sharing the company of visitors, Cornell was always to be seen with his yellow legal pad and a pencil, making notes.⁴¹ He was as acutely fascinated by an anonymous face in the crowd as he might be by a poem he encountered or an Old Master painting he had just studied. He was constantly noting the ordinary, the everyday, as well as the eventful or the out-of-the-ordinary The ordinary, of course, was promptly transfigured: a neighbourhood girl chasing her dog is a ‘young Diana on the lawn with her hounds’, for the local in Cornell’s mind was transformed effortlessly into myth.⁴²

While Cornell was watching outward passings-by he was also watching himself. He had a capacity to look at himself with a kind of objective interest, and in fact he had the same ‘onlooker’ attitude towards himself that he had towards life in general. He observed and described his dreams and his emotions, as well as cataloguing changes in his moods:

Reaction rest of day after lingering by water. Naively poetic feeling evoked by Mother telling me to go out into the garden to say ‘shoo’ to the rabbit which would keep him away from the plants all night.⁴³

He constantly qualified things, and endlessly expanded on his ideas. He was on occasion prolix, unfocused, but at times he displayed a determination to try and close in on a subject when he sought to be precise or needed to define a feeling or a mood.

We can see that as a ‘museum without walls’, ‘GC 44’ could have gone on forever. There is something about ‘GC 44’ and this period when Cornell was making notes for his art, something about his acute receptivity to things, that suggests he was at the height of his artistic powers. He seemed to be in a constant visionary state. ‘GC 44’ has many references to his awareness of an overflow:

rapid overflow of experience . . . overcrowding of incident and experience ever opening paths leading ever farther afield. Unbelievably rich cross-indexing (of experience) the ceaseless flow and interlacing of original experience.⁴⁴

But Cornell, having decided to open up a ‘museum without walls’, had to find some clear-cut boundaries: ‘undecipherable records desperately attempt to hold fast’.⁴⁵ Donald Windham has described what it was like when Cornell turned to him for help: ‘It seemed to be that I, or somebody else, was to make the magical transition from this chaos to what was in his mind . . . I could never figure out what was in his mind’.⁴⁶ Cornell struggled to communicate his wishes. The difficulty lay in the very nature of what he wanted to speak about – visions, revelations, moments of inspiration, the ‘rarified and spiritual’, the ‘sense’ of things (‘the sense of things set off in or against a field’), the metaphysical aspect (‘the metaphysical aspect of this “expectancy”, the “something” that might have happened’).⁴⁷ As well as dealing with any number of complex associations, Cornell also sought to communicate what he called ‘abstract associations’.⁴⁸ ‘There are things in GC 44’, Cornell wrote, ‘which cannot be explained’.⁴⁹ And yet, throughout his life, he returned again and again to this dossier in his search for a way of explaining. In a diary entry for 9 September 1968, for example, he noted that ‘GC 44 in the air today . . . 24 yrs now the Floral Still-Life section of GC 44 still unrealized’.⁵⁰ He experienced a religious awe in front of experiences, in the face of nature: ‘the miracles of life and beauty. . . cannot be explained’. Later, he decided that some distancing from ‘GC 44’ was needed, having found himself too close, emotionally, to the material: ‘some proper detachment may be felt but which nonetheless is indispensable to a proper evaluation of original experiences’.⁵¹ His hopes for this dossier had been so high that his continuing failure to shape anything from it that satisfied him led to a sense of despair:

an engulfing futility at the thought of formulation, a hopelessness of adequate expression. . . And so an emotion akin to that felt by the oriental poet which led him to burn all his works with the exception of a single haikai which is only an exclamation: (example)

Ah, Ah

Is all that one can say Before the flowers of Yoshino

. . . a cry which has meaning only from the depths of the feeling out of which it rises, and only for the sensibility of the ear which hears it.⁵²

Cornell felt that if only he could work through the ‘GC 44’ material satisfactorily then it would help him with all his work as an artist, with his whole corpus of working material: ‘GC 44 realized successfully can become a “method” for crystallizing experience’, he jotted down on one occasion.⁵³ Cornell had hoped to work out a way of moving from the mass of source-material to the artwork. He strove for a ‘final distillation wherein the subject is almost lost sight of in a literal sense or glimpsed briefly in a doorway by de Chirico or a window by Apollinaire’.⁵⁴ ‘GC 44’ epitomizes his obsession with collecting, but also with his twin obsessions of trying to order his collections while somehow controlling the urge.

One way in which Cornell attempted to order his thoughts was by undertaking an odd kind of correspondence: he wrote letters ostensibly to others but that were ultimately intended to serve him. Their purpose was to help clarify to himself the moment of inspiration. ‘GC 44’ contains a letter to Mina Loy about an inspirational episode of 1944 that he refers to as ‘The Floral Still-Life’.⁵⁵

‘THE FLORAL STILL-LIFE’: LETTERS OF SELF-BELIEF

The clearest explanation Cornell gives of the moment of inspiration and the way the imagination works on experience is supplied in the journey/chapter labelled ‘The Floral Still-Life’ in the ‘GC 44’ dossier. The ‘journey’ is not separated out but is inserted chronologically among the dossier’s other materials, yet certain distinct stages in Cornell’s process are clear. There is the initial glimpse – the basis for a journey; a period of research and meditation on the subject; an initial articulation of the subject by letter; then finally an extension is made to the original inspiration. The following is a record of the dates and basic nature of each entry:

Summer 1944: original inspiration – ‘Floral Still-Life’ logo seen on goods wagon in fields near Flushing.
30 May 1946: associated image – snails seen near Lawrence Farm.

July 1946: ‘extension’ in church.

November 1946: moment of disillusionment when logo is seen divested of its visionary aspect.

21 November 1946: letter to Mina Loy articulating ‘Floral Still-Life’ episode.

5 May 1949: further ‘extension’ – image potentially associated with goods wagon logo found in a reproduction of van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.

27 February 1950: letter to Mina Loy revised – contents of the 1946 letter reworded and news of van Eyck reproduction ‘extension’ added.

Cornell was on his bicycle in the summer of 1944 riding in the direction of a house he refers to as ‘Malba House’. He was cycling through fields beyond Flushing. Passing him on the road was a small goods truck with a logo or trademark on its side that advertised the meat and fish the company sold. Because of the rural scene – fields, grasses, flowers – in which the meat and fish logo was glimpsed; because of the fact that Cornell was in the vicinity of ‘Malba House’; and because he was riding his bicycle and therefore ‘in motion’, there was a ‘metamorphosis of the sign into the more poetical’.⁵⁶ He saw a connection between the logo and still-life paintings by the Dutch masters that display ‘flowers and edibles’.

All the various elements compounded to make the ‘metamorphosis’ into the ‘poetical’. ‘Malba House’ was included because he could see in his mind’s eye a still-life by one of the Dutch masters hanging there: ‘a painting in the old house on the hill in an earlier day or dream’.⁵⁷ A number of his day-dreams and visions around 1944 had centred on this building, while Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849) served as a reference point highlighting the excitement of travelling.⁵⁸ Cornell noted ‘wagons and vehicles in motion, vehicles of fantasy’.⁵⁹ The weather conditions were also significant, and became more so on Cornell’s second sighting of the truck (the moment of disillusionment in November 1946). However, in the summer (or perhaps it was the autumn⁶⁰) of 1944 he noted the ‘dew on the side of the truck in cloudy weather etc, the sign thought of at a different time of day. Early morning going through fields and becoming part of the scene’.⁶¹

The account of the moment of disillusionment is given in Cornell’s letter to Mina Loy, which opens with a description of the weather:

Autumn seems to be in such a quandary this year. . . And why am I writing to you about the weather? BECAUSE yesterday afternoon, hung about with mist, a really ambiguous afternoon for Fall; I came across a smoked-fish delivery truck parked on the shabby fringe of a shopping center near us. On the side of this small vehicle . . . painted an enseigne in the form of a still life of various stock, fat pieces of meat surmounted by whole fish in colors that make one think it might at one time have been a bright decalcomania, silvery whites and greys . . . Viewed close the background sky blue betrayed beneath black lettering of a former, less picturesque, version of a trade-mark. The effect as shabby and uninspired as the afternoon. What I am leading up to is the lesson in INSPIRATION that shabby little enseigne held for me. For I glimpsed that in MOTION exactly two years ago for the first time on a beautifully clear shining day on a ride on my bicycle to an unfamiliar section near the water wonderfully evocative of the American past in the unfolding panorama, rural, creative in its...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 The Self Observed
• 2 Origins of Selfhood
• 3 The Self in Others
• 4 The Cosmological Search
• Conclusion
• References
• Select Bibliography
• List of Illustrations