The Compulsive Cabinetmaker

In one sense, the manufacture of art is packaging the world. In the process, landscape, bric-a-brac and dreams may end up bundled together like tiny attics whose contents are reminiscent of the character of mankind. Joseph Cornell is just such an archivist, boxing trinkets that Huckleberry Finn might have put in his pockets, together with talismans as portentous as astronomical charts.

As hermetic in his life as he is in his art, Cornell has kept himself and his work so aloof from the world for so long that he has become more a subject for intellectual quarterlies than for public display. But a lately revived interest in surrealism and the reappearance of nonabstract art are drawing attention back to him. Lawrence Alloway, former curator of New York's Guggenheim Museum, originally picked him as one of four artists to represent the U.S. at this year's Venice Biennale. California's forward-looking Pasadena Art Museum plans a survey of his work for this coming autumn.

Treasured Junk. Cornell's works were first shown in a New York gallery in 1932, exhibited with constructions by other artists under the general label "Toys for Adults." He has always used the visual vocabulary of surrealist collages: cut-up newspapers, pillboxes, corks, postage stamps, piston rings, things usually dug out of pantry drawers. Much of it is deliberately absurd: witness a board embedded with hand compasses; a cubbyholed compartment with cork balls, alphabet blocks and a seashell; or a case containing 15 shot glasses called Petite Musee. They are all symbols shorn of obvious symbolism, junk treasured to jangle the imagination. The work has roots in the cubism of Braque, where newspaper clippings were glued amid the oils, and branches embracing the Dada of Marcel Duchamp. But Cornell's intent is neither to fracture space nor make satire.

"My boxes are life's experiences esthetically expressed," says Cornell. They are self-inventories, cabinets into which he stuffs his own life. Now 62, he has always boxed himself into his own world. He has never been overseas, hardly ever wanders far from his white-shingled, blue-trimmed family house near the end of the Utopia Parkway in a quiet area of Queens in New York City. There he has lived since 1917, when, says he, "it was still Arcadia."

Touching Dossiers. The sixth in a long line of Joseph Cornells, he is the son of a textile manufacturer. He never studied art formally; indeed, the closest he came to any form of the arts was watching Francis X. Bushman and Pearl White star in pre-Hollywood films made in open lots in Nyack, N.Y., before World War I. As a young man he followed in his father's footsteps for a while, selling mostly woolens. But the Depression wiped out his job, and he began filling his boxes.

As his works hint and his home reveals, Cornell is a passionate squirrel. Filed in folders that he calls his "dossiers" are news clips, old photographs, and letters relating to people he knows or events that touch him. He made avant-garde movies in the 1950s, still has about 15,000 movie stills tucked away. Within his house are stored dozens of finished boxes that he intends to use as the endowment for a medical-research program to discover and cure the mysterious disease that killed his invalid brother Robert, who made naive drawings himself.

Behind Cornell's house is a knobby backyard quince tree that started life as a 79-c- sprig from Bloomingdale's department store in 1930. In its youth, the tree yielded up to 25 jars of jelly a year. It now produces only a useless dozen or so of fruit each season. "It is the story of our life here," says the sixth Joseph Cornell, seated beneath the family portraits that hang about his home. It is not, however, the story of his art. Like cupboard Rembrandts chock-full of memorabilia, Cornell's works suggest man's timelessness by collecting and preserving man's shreds and tatters.

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