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Lot Essay
Executed circa 1952, Untitled (Medici Princess) dates from the highpoint of Cornell's career, when his abilities, confidence and fame had all combined to propel him at last onto the international stage. This lyrical box reveals the myriad influences, autobiographical and artistic, that came together to create his most striking works, not least his contact with the European artists in exile during the 1940s and 1950s, especially his hero Marcel Duchamp.
Legend has it that on his first meeting with Duchamp, Cornell was so nervous that he locked himself in a bathroom for an hour, only briefly reemerging. Later, though, these spiritual cousins of sorts, became friends, and Duchamp relished the mentor-like position in which Cornell held him. Cornell's Medici Slot Machines are celebrated as the most clearly and classically Surreal of all his works. All of Cornell's boxes are filled with a myriad of 'readymade' objects, revealing the collage origins of his work, as well as the later and increasing influence of the veteran French Dadaist.
The boxes of Cornell and the art of Duchamp were made with very different intentions, but in their use of the readymade, in their reverence and elevation of the objet trouvé, they share an all-important common ground. The difference in the use of readymades by the artists is in the anarchic flair of Duchamp, with his deliberate and self-professed espousal of objects to which he was aesthetically indifferent, as compared to the reverence and love of the fragments of reality, the shards of everyday existence, so treasured by Cornell.
Untitled (Medici Princess) reveals another similarity between the artists in the use of an Old Master painting. Where Duchamp's iconic abuse of an icon in his classic 1919 mustachioed Mona Lisa L.H.O.O.Q. was an assault on taste, Cornell's use of Bronzino's portrait of Bia de' Medici from Florence's Uffizi evokes the world of taste, connoisseurship, travel and luxury implied by the painting. However, both artists, in their own ways, tampered with their images, being as interested in reproduction as they were in the relics themselves. The many images of Bia reveal Cornell's use of Photostat images, which Cornell would sometimes tamper with and adjust, sometimes reversing pictures, as visible in photographs showing multiple versions of Pinturicchio's Portrait of a Boy tacked to the walls of Cornell's studio (see next lot). Even the lines that appear in front of Bia are optical tricks designed to give the sense of a window and of a structure, to make the viewer believe that we have momentarily caught a glimpse of a young girl outside.
By the early 1950s, when Untitled (Medici Princess) was executed, Cornell had encountered in person many of the greatest European proponents of Surrealism, and had been largely espoused by them. His famous boxes were perfectly suited to the Surrealist cult of the object, in their own rights and through the reverence with which they presented the flotsam of existence: the relics and the reliquary gained admiration alike.
Certainly, there is a surreal quality to Untitled (Medici Princess), the refracted and multiplied image of Bia de' Medici staring from us again and again. The apparently logical and mechanical construction of the box speaks of an internal and deliberate logic that is beyond the grasp of the viewer, displaying Cornell's interest in alternative understandings of the world around us. Eleanor Ward, one of his dealers, summed this up by saying that Cornell belonged 'to a romantic world that only he knew and we were privileged to enter, (Cornell, quoted in Solomon, op.cit., 1997, p. 237).
The idea of games, especially antique games with obscure and obsolete rules, fascinated the Surrealists (especially Breton) and Cornell alike, and is clearly evident in (Untitled) Medici Princess. Presented with this repeated image of a princess frozen in a distant past and a distant nation, the viewer cannot guess the rules, cannot guess how precisely the moving parts move, or to what end. The viewer is aware that (Untitled) Medici Princess requires use and interaction with its ball and die-like block, and yet the inability to comprehend the manner in which the box is activated results in the ineffable world of Bia de' Medici lying even more tantalizingly and poignantly beyond our grasp. Cornell himself discussed this in his notes when he mused that 'perhaps a definition of a box could be as a kind of 'forgotten game', a philosophical toy of the Victorian era, with poetic or magical 'moving parts', achieving even slight measure of this poetry or magic... that golden age of the toy alone should justify the 'box's' existence' (Cornell, quoted in D. Ades, 'The Transcendental Surrealism of Joseph Cornell', pp. 15-41, Joseph Cornell, exh.cat., New York, 1980, p. 29).
Legend has it that on his first meeting with Duchamp, Cornell was so nervous that he locked himself in a bathroom for an hour, only briefly reemerging. Later, though, these spiritual cousins of sorts, became friends, and Duchamp relished the mentor-like position in which Cornell held him. Cornell's Medici Slot Machines are celebrated as the most clearly and classically Surreal of all his works. All of Cornell's boxes are filled with a myriad of 'readymade' objects, revealing the collage origins of his work, as well as the later and increasing influence of the veteran French Dadaist.
The boxes of Cornell and the art of Duchamp were made with very different intentions, but in their use of the readymade, in their reverence and elevation of the objet trouvé, they share an all-important common ground. The difference in the use of readymades by the artists is in the anarchic flair of Duchamp, with his deliberate and self-professed espousal of objects to which he was aesthetically indifferent, as compared to the reverence and love of the fragments of reality, the shards of everyday existence, so treasured by Cornell.
Untitled (Medici Princess) reveals another similarity between the artists in the use of an Old Master painting. Where Duchamp's iconic abuse of an icon in his classic 1919 mustachioed Mona Lisa L.H.O.O.Q. was an assault on taste, Cornell's use of Bronzino's portrait of Bia de' Medici from Florence's Uffizi evokes the world of taste, connoisseurship, travel and luxury implied by the painting. However, both artists, in their own ways, tampered with their images, being as interested in reproduction as they were in the relics themselves. The many images of Bia reveal Cornell's use of Photostat images, which Cornell would sometimes tamper with and adjust, sometimes reversing pictures, as visible in photographs showing multiple versions of Pinturicchio's Portrait of a Boy tacked to the walls of Cornell's studio (see next lot). Even the lines that appear in front of Bia are optical tricks designed to give the sense of a window and of a structure, to make the viewer believe that we have momentarily caught a glimpse of a young girl outside.
By the early 1950s, when Untitled (Medici Princess) was executed, Cornell had encountered in person many of the greatest European proponents of Surrealism, and had been largely espoused by them. His famous boxes were perfectly suited to the Surrealist cult of the object, in their own rights and through the reverence with which they presented the flotsam of existence: the relics and the reliquary gained admiration alike.
Certainly, there is a surreal quality to Untitled (Medici Princess), the refracted and multiplied image of Bia de' Medici staring from us again and again. The apparently logical and mechanical construction of the box speaks of an internal and deliberate logic that is beyond the grasp of the viewer, displaying Cornell's interest in alternative understandings of the world around us. Eleanor Ward, one of his dealers, summed this up by saying that Cornell belonged 'to a romantic world that only he knew and we were privileged to enter, (Cornell, quoted in Solomon, op.cit., 1997, p. 237).
The idea of games, especially antique games with obscure and obsolete rules, fascinated the Surrealists (especially Breton) and Cornell alike, and is clearly evident in (Untitled) Medici Princess. Presented with this repeated image of a princess frozen in a distant past and a distant nation, the viewer cannot guess the rules, cannot guess how precisely the moving parts move, or to what end. The viewer is aware that (Untitled) Medici Princess requires use and interaction with its ball and die-like block, and yet the inability to comprehend the manner in which the box is activated results in the ineffable world of Bia de' Medici lying even more tantalizingly and poignantly beyond our grasp. Cornell himself discussed this in his notes when he mused that 'perhaps a definition of a box could be as a kind of 'forgotten game', a philosophical toy of the Victorian era, with poetic or magical 'moving parts', achieving even slight measure of this poetry or magic... that golden age of the toy alone should justify the 'box's' existence' (Cornell, quoted in D. Ades, 'The Transcendental Surrealism of Joseph Cornell', pp. 15-41, Joseph Cornell, exh.cat., New York, 1980, p. 29).