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Lot Essay
One of the most seminal works to emerge from Joseph Cornell’s most important series, Untitled (Medici Princess) encapsulates the essential position Cornell held in the postwar New York art world, his idiosyncratic style bridging the formal elements of Surrealism with the improvisational qualities, flair, and sublimity of the Abstract Expressionists. Cornell’s utterly singular output would have a profound impact on succeeding generations of artists, with his radical innovations translating the semantics of European Surrealism into a digestible American vernacular. With Untitled (Medici Princess), Cornell offers his most highly developed poetics to date, achieving a formal rigor and emotional depth which would go on to be hallmarks of his mature career. The present work is one of the most recognizable from the artist’s Medici series, a critical body of work with a renewed focus on texture, color, and structure, “which represents Cornell’s coming of age as an artist,” according to the scholar and curator Diane Waldman (Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams, New York, 2002 p. 77). Conveying a precious piece of the wonder and whimsy which Cornell found in his daily life, Untitled (Medici Princess) dwells on the abiding concerns of the artist’s oeuvre—the mysteries of time, matter, motion, and space—which unfurl within the compartmentalized constraints of the box. Confounding the traditional boundaries of art history—between Surrealism and abstraction, situated at the intersection of collage, sculpture, and painting—Untitled (Medici Princess) serves as a window into the insatiable curiosity of Cornell’s exceptional mind.
Recessed into the wooden box which comprises the present work’s structure is a tripartite division partitioned by two pilasters faced with maps. The central, and largest, portal ensconces a photostat image taken after a Renaissance portrait by Agnolo Bronzino. This sepia vision of a girl seems to inhabit the construction like a relic in a reliquary, breathing life into the work. Now known as Portrait of Bia de’ Medici, Bronzino’s portrait was until the 1950s thought to represent Maria de’ Medici, the first daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany. Cornell enshrines an arcane cosmology of found objects around her visage in a fusion of high art and pop culture. The image is flanked by the two pilasters, the left embossed with a 19th-century Baedeker map of Trier, while the right is of Volterra, a medieval city within the Medici domains. The other found ephemera which Cornell populates within the composition—the opaque orange wooden ball before the portrait, metal jacks and springs, marbles and knacks as well as wooden blocks—proffer the childhood toys which for Cornell symbolize complete innocence. On the right panel, the artist includes five altered versions of the Bronzino portrait in miniature, anticipating the replicative Pop strategies employed decades later by Andy Warhol.
Maria’s many repeated portraits are intertwined with another painting from the Florentine Renaissance: Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy. The interplay of these two visages within the box operate like scenes from an intimate, imagined play; Cornell fantasized an intimate connection between these two youths, drawing upon his admiration for Renaissance literature to fabricate a love story contained within his box. The historical Maria de’ Medici was reputed to have drawn the ire of her powerful father for falling in love with a commoner at court, purported to be Malatesta de' Malatesti. Cornell was enraptured by renaissance romances, having made a work celebrating another tragic love story told by Dante in his contemporaneous work Paolo and Francesca (1943-1948, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Here, as Diane Waldman observes, “Cornell’s doomed lovers appear to be sharing a tranquil moment before they are discovered, sitting quietly reading in a garden underneath skies glittering with rhinestone constellations” (ibid., p. 48). Ill-fated lovers had long appealed to Cornell, who first saw an operatic staging of Gabriele D'Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini, based on Paolo and Francesca’s story, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, soon after his father’s premature passing. It is thought that Cornell saw his own parents in stories like Paolo and Francesca, and thus the pair of portraits in Untitled (Medici) recapitulate the artist’s recollection of his parents’ love for each other.
"Cornell’s doomed lovers appear to be sharing a tranquil moment before they are discovered, sitting quietly reading in a garden underneath skies glittering with rhinestone constellations." - Diane Waldman
A solitary and enigmatic figure, Joseph Cornell’s biography is full of contradictions. His rare excursions out from his modest home on Utopia Parkway in Queens into Manhattan unearthed for him boundless treasures, ranging from unremarkable ephemera found along the bookstores astride Fourth Avenue to exceptionally rare discoveries. He assiduously collected, categorized, and catalogued the fruits of his urban wanderings, creating an idiosyncratic organizing system of labeled folders and dossiers which amassed almost the entirety of his basement studio. After reconsidering, reordering, and recalling his many objects over the course of decades, Cornell slowly built his boxes. His arcane associations between media, ranging from the material to the thematic, recall the visual systems or mnemosyne atlas of the German art historian Aby Warburg. In spite of Cornell’s noted shyness and solitary existence at the margins of New York, he simultaneously penetrated deeply within the two most important artistic movements of the time. In 1931, his wanderings led him into Julien Levy’s recently opened gallery, where the most important European Surrealists, including André Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte, would be first presented to an American audience. Cornell began showing with this illustrious stable of artists, soon exhibiting his first box at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Among the Surrealists, Cornell found Marcel Duchamp to be among the most brilliant men he’d ever met. The American artist’s Duchamp Dossier, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an artistic archive preserving more than a decade of objects and ephemera which Cornell collected for Duchamp. The admiration was not just one-sided—Duchamp owned many of Cornell’s works, including two important boxes.
"I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and about what they do. But I do want to tell you I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make." - Mark Rothko, Letter to Joseph Cornell
Remarkably, Cornell also developed close and lasting friendships with the leading figures of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. The artist was particularly close to Mark Rothko, who praised in a letter to him how “I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and about what they do. But I do want to tell you that I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make” (Letter to Joseph Cornell, 12 February 1959, Joseph Cornell papers, 1804-1986, 2.1: General Correspondence, 1909-1982, Box 3, Folder 34, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute). Fellow outsiders to the art world, Rothko and Cornell found solace in their similar attempts at attaining the sublime and their belief in art’s spiritual essence. Robert Motherwell, another leading light and unofficial spokesman for the Abstract Expressionists, became a lasting correspondent and friend to Cornell, a fellow aficionado of avant-garde poetry. Motherwell later wrote of Cornell how “his true parallels are not to be found among the painters and sculptors, but among our best poets” quoted in S. Lea, “Jospeh Cornell: Wanderlust,” in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, exh. cat., Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 2015, p. 47).
Cornell’s Medici series inaugurated a seminal shift in the artist’s style towards his celebrated mature aesthetic. Foregrounding identity and sexuality over his earlier interest in music and dance, Cornell here confronts the drama and tragedy of the famed Italian dynasty. As Diane Waldman writes, “His Renaissance prince and princess are more flesh and blood, and the Medici boxes are more assured and assertive. The power of his Medici narrative is made more poignant by the inclusion of objects—the toy blocks and the jacks—that occupy such an important place in Cornell’s own memory. The toys render the bloody history and tragedy of the Medicis obsolete; in its place is a history that is part invention and part reality. Cornell superimposed memories of his own happy childhood upon that of the Medici prince and princess, with the recognition that these happy times were lost to them and him” (op. cit., p. 69).
Compositionally, boxes such as Untitled (Medici Princess) were the first where Cornell pursues a strategy of compartmentalization. The artist was inspired by his visits to Piet Mondrian’s New York studio in the early 1940s, and the vertical and horizontal divisions included in the present work are witness to his branching out from his earlier Surrealist influences toward the Dutch artist’s more formal structure. The two-dimensional maps which adorn these divisions testify to Cornell’s supreme interest in European geography. He spent years pouring over maps of the old continent and also consulted train timetables and hotel pamphlets collected over the course of his wanderings. The juxtaposition of these maps with the princess, in combination with real, three-dimensional objects, allows Cornell’s central figure to become “a real and contemporary child, alive and very much in the present. Cornell contrasted the three-dimensional toys and the two-dimensional images and heightened the impact of the objects with color or sheen” (D. Waldman, op. cit., p. 70).
Untitled (Medici Princess) endures as a cornerstone of Cornell’s oeuvre. Its synthesis of Surrealist poetics, Renaissance iconography, and the formal discipline inspired by Mondrian speaks to the breadth of Cornell’s intellectual landscape, as well as to his significance to generations of succeeding artists. Like Arshile Gorky, Cornell pathed a path between the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist circles to create an innovative new vocabulary of artistic expression. His impact would be felt immediately, first inspiring Robert Rauschenberg’s early collages, and then Andy Warhol’s later silkscreens. Yet it is the tenderness with which he reconstitutes a world of lost innocence that gives the work its lasting poignancy. In the luminous stillness of this box, Cornell offers viewers a moment of suspended time, a space in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the past whispers gently into the present.
Recessed into the wooden box which comprises the present work’s structure is a tripartite division partitioned by two pilasters faced with maps. The central, and largest, portal ensconces a photostat image taken after a Renaissance portrait by Agnolo Bronzino. This sepia vision of a girl seems to inhabit the construction like a relic in a reliquary, breathing life into the work. Now known as Portrait of Bia de’ Medici, Bronzino’s portrait was until the 1950s thought to represent Maria de’ Medici, the first daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany. Cornell enshrines an arcane cosmology of found objects around her visage in a fusion of high art and pop culture. The image is flanked by the two pilasters, the left embossed with a 19th-century Baedeker map of Trier, while the right is of Volterra, a medieval city within the Medici domains. The other found ephemera which Cornell populates within the composition—the opaque orange wooden ball before the portrait, metal jacks and springs, marbles and knacks as well as wooden blocks—proffer the childhood toys which for Cornell symbolize complete innocence. On the right panel, the artist includes five altered versions of the Bronzino portrait in miniature, anticipating the replicative Pop strategies employed decades later by Andy Warhol.
Maria’s many repeated portraits are intertwined with another painting from the Florentine Renaissance: Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy. The interplay of these two visages within the box operate like scenes from an intimate, imagined play; Cornell fantasized an intimate connection between these two youths, drawing upon his admiration for Renaissance literature to fabricate a love story contained within his box. The historical Maria de’ Medici was reputed to have drawn the ire of her powerful father for falling in love with a commoner at court, purported to be Malatesta de' Malatesti. Cornell was enraptured by renaissance romances, having made a work celebrating another tragic love story told by Dante in his contemporaneous work Paolo and Francesca (1943-1948, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Here, as Diane Waldman observes, “Cornell’s doomed lovers appear to be sharing a tranquil moment before they are discovered, sitting quietly reading in a garden underneath skies glittering with rhinestone constellations” (ibid., p. 48). Ill-fated lovers had long appealed to Cornell, who first saw an operatic staging of Gabriele D'Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini, based on Paolo and Francesca’s story, at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, soon after his father’s premature passing. It is thought that Cornell saw his own parents in stories like Paolo and Francesca, and thus the pair of portraits in Untitled (Medici) recapitulate the artist’s recollection of his parents’ love for each other.
"Cornell’s doomed lovers appear to be sharing a tranquil moment before they are discovered, sitting quietly reading in a garden underneath skies glittering with rhinestone constellations." - Diane Waldman
A solitary and enigmatic figure, Joseph Cornell’s biography is full of contradictions. His rare excursions out from his modest home on Utopia Parkway in Queens into Manhattan unearthed for him boundless treasures, ranging from unremarkable ephemera found along the bookstores astride Fourth Avenue to exceptionally rare discoveries. He assiduously collected, categorized, and catalogued the fruits of his urban wanderings, creating an idiosyncratic organizing system of labeled folders and dossiers which amassed almost the entirety of his basement studio. After reconsidering, reordering, and recalling his many objects over the course of decades, Cornell slowly built his boxes. His arcane associations between media, ranging from the material to the thematic, recall the visual systems or mnemosyne atlas of the German art historian Aby Warburg. In spite of Cornell’s noted shyness and solitary existence at the margins of New York, he simultaneously penetrated deeply within the two most important artistic movements of the time. In 1931, his wanderings led him into Julien Levy’s recently opened gallery, where the most important European Surrealists, including André Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Rene Magritte, would be first presented to an American audience. Cornell began showing with this illustrious stable of artists, soon exhibiting his first box at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Among the Surrealists, Cornell found Marcel Duchamp to be among the most brilliant men he’d ever met. The American artist’s Duchamp Dossier, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an artistic archive preserving more than a decade of objects and ephemera which Cornell collected for Duchamp. The admiration was not just one-sided—Duchamp owned many of Cornell’s works, including two important boxes.
"I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and about what they do. But I do want to tell you I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make." - Mark Rothko, Letter to Joseph Cornell
Remarkably, Cornell also developed close and lasting friendships with the leading figures of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. The artist was particularly close to Mark Rothko, who praised in a letter to him how “I wish I could approach your genius for expressing to people how you think about them and about what they do. But I do want to tell you that I think of you and the uncanny magic of the things you make” (Letter to Joseph Cornell, 12 February 1959, Joseph Cornell papers, 1804-1986, 2.1: General Correspondence, 1909-1982, Box 3, Folder 34, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute). Fellow outsiders to the art world, Rothko and Cornell found solace in their similar attempts at attaining the sublime and their belief in art’s spiritual essence. Robert Motherwell, another leading light and unofficial spokesman for the Abstract Expressionists, became a lasting correspondent and friend to Cornell, a fellow aficionado of avant-garde poetry. Motherwell later wrote of Cornell how “his true parallels are not to be found among the painters and sculptors, but among our best poets” quoted in S. Lea, “Jospeh Cornell: Wanderlust,” in Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, exh. cat., Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 2015, p. 47).
Cornell’s Medici series inaugurated a seminal shift in the artist’s style towards his celebrated mature aesthetic. Foregrounding identity and sexuality over his earlier interest in music and dance, Cornell here confronts the drama and tragedy of the famed Italian dynasty. As Diane Waldman writes, “His Renaissance prince and princess are more flesh and blood, and the Medici boxes are more assured and assertive. The power of his Medici narrative is made more poignant by the inclusion of objects—the toy blocks and the jacks—that occupy such an important place in Cornell’s own memory. The toys render the bloody history and tragedy of the Medicis obsolete; in its place is a history that is part invention and part reality. Cornell superimposed memories of his own happy childhood upon that of the Medici prince and princess, with the recognition that these happy times were lost to them and him” (op. cit., p. 69).
Compositionally, boxes such as Untitled (Medici Princess) were the first where Cornell pursues a strategy of compartmentalization. The artist was inspired by his visits to Piet Mondrian’s New York studio in the early 1940s, and the vertical and horizontal divisions included in the present work are witness to his branching out from his earlier Surrealist influences toward the Dutch artist’s more formal structure. The two-dimensional maps which adorn these divisions testify to Cornell’s supreme interest in European geography. He spent years pouring over maps of the old continent and also consulted train timetables and hotel pamphlets collected over the course of his wanderings. The juxtaposition of these maps with the princess, in combination with real, three-dimensional objects, allows Cornell’s central figure to become “a real and contemporary child, alive and very much in the present. Cornell contrasted the three-dimensional toys and the two-dimensional images and heightened the impact of the objects with color or sheen” (D. Waldman, op. cit., p. 70).
Untitled (Medici Princess) endures as a cornerstone of Cornell’s oeuvre. Its synthesis of Surrealist poetics, Renaissance iconography, and the formal discipline inspired by Mondrian speaks to the breadth of Cornell’s intellectual landscape, as well as to his significance to generations of succeeding artists. Like Arshile Gorky, Cornell pathed a path between the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist circles to create an innovative new vocabulary of artistic expression. His impact would be felt immediately, first inspiring Robert Rauschenberg’s early collages, and then Andy Warhol’s later silkscreens. Yet it is the tenderness with which he reconstitutes a world of lost innocence that gives the work its lasting poignancy. In the luminous stillness of this box, Cornell offers viewers a moment of suspended time, a space in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the past whispers gently into the present.