Lot Essay
An air of childlike innocence pervades the work of Joseph Cornell. This atmosphere of the imaginative interior mindscape of a child leads critics to inevitably associate him with the Surrealists, something that Cornell would not deny, he being a great admirer of the movement. But rather than trafficking in enigma, as Magritte or Ernst did, Cornell utilized the techniques of Surrealism to become, with Odilon Redon, one of the last great Symbolist poets. His materials and techniques--the shadow boxes filled with found objects, the colored sand and glass balls of childhood games--become a sprirtualist guidebook to the fantasies of the mind.
'Cornell's sympathies, like his work, remind us that he was both a Symbolist and a Victorian. Victorian association was, of course, one of Surrealism's primary materials...Many Surrealist and Victorian clichés overlap--driftwood, postcards, shells, starfish, butterflies, reliquaries--all used, incidentally, by Cornell. Surrealism found much of its material in the bourgeois French parlor, and it seems as if that parlor--with its memorabilia, toys, theatrics, games--was the nub of the Cornellian universe. But the toys and games of the Victorian parlor are one of that era's most fascinating accomplishments. Science had opened up wonders which quickly became recreations infused with "the mystery of the universe"...The mystery of science and the mystery of religion intersect in the Victorian parlor, giving a kind of halo to miniature exemplars of natural phenomena. That parlor, with its ornaments and oddments, often under bell jars, its mementos and photographs, was the arena of games that trip the apparatus of Cornell's cosmology' (B. O'Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York 1974, pp. 141-142).
This box could be a kind of miniature travelling version of the Victorian parlor, a sort of magical pharmacy to cure the ills of the modern soul. Its corked bottles contain various colored sands, perhaps indicating different locales where the objects--the glass balls, the driftwood, the crumpled note of a message in a bottle--might have been found, duly kept and recorded with the care and fondness of the devoted diarist or slightly mad scientist. To look upon them is to invite the mind to drift into the memory of distant times.
Cornell typically worked in a series, not like other artists, but returning to a theme over long periods of time when some encounter or dream conjured a need to revisit it. Pharmacies, and the related series of Museums, composed of rows of glass bottles with small objects, notes, bits of glass and sand entombed as curiosities, seem to elucidate the science of Victorian times, or the pseudo-science of Surrealism, especially Duchamp, who had a tremendous influence on Cornell. Pharmacies and Museums are in the collections of The Menil Collection, Houston, and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
'Cornell's sympathies, like his work, remind us that he was both a Symbolist and a Victorian. Victorian association was, of course, one of Surrealism's primary materials...Many Surrealist and Victorian clichés overlap--driftwood, postcards, shells, starfish, butterflies, reliquaries--all used, incidentally, by Cornell. Surrealism found much of its material in the bourgeois French parlor, and it seems as if that parlor--with its memorabilia, toys, theatrics, games--was the nub of the Cornellian universe. But the toys and games of the Victorian parlor are one of that era's most fascinating accomplishments. Science had opened up wonders which quickly became recreations infused with "the mystery of the universe"...The mystery of science and the mystery of religion intersect in the Victorian parlor, giving a kind of halo to miniature exemplars of natural phenomena. That parlor, with its ornaments and oddments, often under bell jars, its mementos and photographs, was the arena of games that trip the apparatus of Cornell's cosmology' (B. O'Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York 1974, pp. 141-142).
This box could be a kind of miniature travelling version of the Victorian parlor, a sort of magical pharmacy to cure the ills of the modern soul. Its corked bottles contain various colored sands, perhaps indicating different locales where the objects--the glass balls, the driftwood, the crumpled note of a message in a bottle--might have been found, duly kept and recorded with the care and fondness of the devoted diarist or slightly mad scientist. To look upon them is to invite the mind to drift into the memory of distant times.
Cornell typically worked in a series, not like other artists, but returning to a theme over long periods of time when some encounter or dream conjured a need to revisit it. Pharmacies, and the related series of Museums, composed of rows of glass bottles with small objects, notes, bits of glass and sand entombed as curiosities, seem to elucidate the science of Victorian times, or the pseudo-science of Surrealism, especially Duchamp, who had a tremendous influence on Cornell. Pharmacies and Museums are in the collections of The Menil Collection, Houston, and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.