The Last Symbolist Poet

By ROBERT HUGHES

FOR SALE. Old chateau--cozy rooms--observatory turrets--bird's-eye view of countryside--moss-lined alcoves containing sparkling gems looted from best jewel caskets of European nobility--occupants ready to leave at moment's notice--agent on premises.

So runs a sticker, barely legible in tiny print, fixed below an owl's nest in one of Joseph Cornell's boxes. Who could doubt that the white owl staring from its cave of bark is the artist himself, or that the mock prospectus is a kind of manifesto?

Right up to his death at the age of 69 in 1972, Cornell was the most reclusive, subtle and fugitive of American artists. "So long as he lives and works," the painter Robert Motherwell wrote of him in 1953, "Europe cannot snub our native art." But when the imperial hegemony of American taste clamped down in the 1960s, Cornell was virtually left out. His delicate boxes, filled with tableaux made of everything from bark to butterfly wings, seemed too small and in fact too "European" to fit the current standards for major art.

He was, moreover, immovably eccentric: a gray whisper of a man who lived for 54 years with his crippled brother in a house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y.-- an exile more singular than any expatriation to Tahiti. Cornell loved the idea of Europe but never went there. The house was crammed with cartons, dossiers, packets of old photos, clippings, hoarded books, gewgaws and boxes; these constituted the world in which he traveled. His only public gestures were occasional exhibitions and cover designs for the ballet magazine Dance Index. Self-promotion was unthinkable to him. Cornell always seemed an emissary from a different world, today more so than ever.

Private Activity. Recently the Cornell estate, consisting of hundreds of unsold boxes and collages, passed into the hands of a consortium of dealers--Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen and James Corcoran. Last week a show of 43 Cornell boxes went on view at the Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. Until the inevitable retrospective--for a whole Cornell industry is now tooling up--one could not wish for a better introduction to this singular artist.

Cornell's imagination was allusive, delicate and, in a liberated way, reserved. He had no interest in the erotic, scatological and sadistic images that were basic to French surrealism: the Comte de Lautreamont and the Marquis de Sade did not preside over the house on Utopia Parkway. French surrealism was to a great extent defined by its indispensable enemy, French bourgeois Catholicism. Surrealism's whole mode of attack--the manifestoes, shock treatment and sacerdotal gesticulation--was based on an idea of the artist as public figure, the Anti-Priest, to which Cornell did not subscribe.

To Cornell, making art was the most private activity imaginable. It set him free, but the freedom was that of the puritan aristocrat, not the anticlerical rebel. He was the exquisite ruler of little boxes, an incomparably more gifted Ludwig II who constructed his Neuschwanstein--swans, grottoes, secret chambers, opera house and permanent twilight--in the space of half a cubic foot.

Maps, analemmas, collaged owls and jigsawed parrots, mirrors, watchsprings, scraps of tulle, cones and cork balls, wine glasses, sodium-browned photographs of long-dead dancers, tiny drawers filled with red sand--there is no apparent limit to the variety that found its way into Cornell's boxes, and any list of them begins to sound more like incantation than description.

Cornell's boxes are not random, and they have an exquisitely ordered syntax. But Cornell rarely supplied a narrative. We do not know what the green Amazonian parrot is doing in Untitled (Parrot Habitat), 1956-57, sitting there in a box lined with mirrors and scraps of print; we have no idea what the white ball and the metal hoops mean to it. But it could not matter less, for these precise, mild, irrational encounters remain the stuff of poetry.

In that sense, Cornell's work is very much part of the history of surrealism. It grows from the same stem: a fascination with dreams, nuances, fugitive image-clusters, arcane fragments of memory and culture--an outgrowth of romanticism that, by the end of the 19th century, had accumulated a formidable literature. Cornell, who worshiped Mallarme for his exactitude of feeling, was the last symbolist poet--a pretty symmetry, for the symbolists were much inspired by another American, Edgar Allan Poe.

Like Poe, Cornell was obsessed with a dream Europe. Cornell's Europe, however, ended with World War I and perpetuated itself in hotel letterheads from French spas, fragments of Baedeker maps and reverent evocations of ballerinas, from Marie Taglioni to Loie Fuller. It lasted from the 15th century to la Belle Epoque; his boxes preserve it like microscope slides.

Enraptured Paris. The space is never real. Cornell's L 'Egypte de Mile, Cleo de Merode, 1940, is not the Egypt seen by Flaubert, detachedly noting the gleam of his white socks at midnight on the Nile. Cornell had never been, or wished to go, to that Egypt. But in his mind the image of Cleo de Merode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cleo!" when she walked into Maxim's, fused with those of Cleopatra and the Sphinx. So what could be more natural than to make her a votive cosmetic box, filled with souvenirs of Egypt?

There are moments when Cornell's imagination meanders off into whimsy. But they are rare. Most of the boxes offer the spectacle of a man drenched in memory and association, reinventing the past in the full light of what modernism entailed: a formal strictness, a banishment of rhetoric and an almost unequaled power to slip down through the mind's strata.

Robert Hughes

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