No Reservations: the Interior World of Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was the kind of fellow that no one noticed. He was quiet and unassuming, seemingly average in every way. Born in Nyack, New York at the turn of last century, the shyest man in America had no intention of becoming an artist at all. Rather, he was an archivist, a collector, a person who documented his bird’s eye view of the world. He found it profoundly soothing to gather visual snippets and ordinary objects, and sort them into categories.
Joseph had learned appreciation of culture from his parents, who lovingly shared ballet, opera and literature with their children. Evenings were spent gathering around the piano or Victrola, or watching magic shows and vaudeville acts. His imagination roamed freely through the universe on the wings of these arts, but Cornell was tethered permanently to the ground. For his beloved younger brother Robert had cerebral palsy, and was confined to a wheelchair. Joseph was only fourteen when he became the man of the family- his father died of pernicious anemia, leaving the boy to care for his disabled sibling, his mother and his sisters.
And so it was that Joseph’s days were long and tiring for as long as he could remember. He had a sort of nostalgia for nostalgia, looking back at his brief youth and bygone eras as if he’d really been a part of them. For these reasons, he would carefully mine his surroundings, books, catalogues, streets, bookstores, thrift shops, for scraps of imagination. Then, after his sick brother was asleep, he would stay awake late, sifting through, sorting, categorizing these objects and images. He had over 150 themed dossiers in which to store his clippings and discarded treasures. Soon, he reportedly began putting together his trinkets in pleasing fashions to entertain his brother.
As his passion for tinkering grew, Joseph began ordering and organizing the images and objects into pleasing assemblies. His groupings would tell quiet stories about the world he imagined. From early on, Joseph was drawn especially to bird motifs, and to references of journeys- oceans, constellations, maps, compasses, and so on, as if he were a ship passing in the night. It is easy to see the artist taking flight through these symbols, traversing the dark emblems of the psyche as a ship passing in the night.
Cornell never attended art school- he did not set out to make art, or to become the father of assemblage or a surrealist artist. As a young man, he worked in textiles. This made him miserable, but he was committed to contributing to Robert’s medical expenses. The family wasn’t poor at the outset, but the years and the cerebral palsy meant dwindling resources as they plunged into the Depression. By this time, the family lived in a house on the poetically named Utopia Parkway, and after work, Joseph would care for Robert, then dive into his imaginary journeys after tucking his brother in. He had little other social contact- he hated working, mostly because he had to speak with other people and found it painful to do so. This got even worse when he lost his job during the Depression and had to take on door-to-door appliance sales work. He also worked in a defense factory and a greenhouse. One day, his mother’s friend helped Joseph secure a job designing textiles. Eventually, he was designing feature layouts and covers for magazines of some repute, such as Harper’s Bazaar.
And so it was that Joseph was simply plodding through life, with his grim daily grind muted only by his rich fantasy life- fantasies that were benign and mundane, for the most part, sentimental for discarded beauty, for sweets and forgotten B-movie actresses, for laundromats and pigeons and rivers and moons, for books and birds. By constructing shadowboxes, by juxtaposing arcane objects with leftover Victorian bric-a-brac and old drawings torn from books, he sublimated all that was dull and ordinary in life and created a beautiful genre of art, the assemblage.
As a collage artist myself, I had long been a fan of Cornell’s work, but 
nothing could prepare me for their strange and stunning impact when I saw them in person. The Art Institute of Chicago has an impressive collection of his work, but I hadn’t known so before I dropped in unexpectedly on the last day of a rush visit in the Windy City. My last minute itinerary was dropped, and I dashed to the Institute without checking in advance what to anticipate. And so I was taken aback when there I was, in the presence of not one or two or three but dozens of Cornell boxes. Peering into these curiously spare yet cluttered worlds was transcendent. I could feel isolated parts of my own childhood rising in the back of my throat, in full exquisite intensity, and then I was sailing, too, into that great beyond.
Those who ask what the juxtaposed assemblies mean should be damned for all time- these could only be spoiled, ignorant voices with no imagination, whose every whim was catered to, people who never had to examine the dark recesses of injury or the transforming fantasy of dream-worlds. Those without empathy, those with profoundly superficial concerns might not instinctively grasp the fact that Cornell’s constructions map the realm of human interior, capture snapshots of the great mystery for which we have no words. As I peered into dozen after dozen of little boxes, at birds and constellations and balls and alabaster dolls and parachutes and apothecary bottles, I was transported into the symbolic realm.
Some sharp observers have noted a kind of autism in Cornell’s obsessive love of objects. Outside of his Robert’s special needs, Joseph had serious difficulty relating to other human beings, and he communicated best by letting his found items do the talking. Some find this at odds with his peculiar faith in Christian Science- which teaches that all material objects are illusions.
But upon careful contemplation, Cornell’s spiritual philosophy more likely FUELED his constructions. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the faith, famously eschewed all drugs and medicines for true healing that came only through the spirit. Interestingly, these beliefs did not interfere with Robert’s obvious needs for wheelchairs and medicines. It was a profoundly personal religion, not an evangelical one. For Joseph, the teachings that the body, and all things in the material world, are illusory constructs merely symbolic of true spirituality, complemented perfectly his idea that his boxes were symbolic of the real, not real in and of themselves.
No, his works were not real, they were…surreal. Well, in the sense that they revealed the unconscious secrets of the soul, they were. And though from his early shows onward, he was lauded as the first American surrealist, he decried this from the get-go. Sure, like Marcel DuChamp, he championed the objet trouve. And he portrayed dreams. And he loved the juxtaposition of the bizarre. But Cornell said, “I never had any real sympathy for the movement and what it stood for.” What he meant was simply that the surrealists’ defiance at church and religion and their sick fixation on sex were distasteful and bewildering to him. Cornell thought the ism was simply an excuse to throw in strange lusts and elevate it to art.
Nonetheless, on most philosophical merits, Cornell’s work best fit with surrealism and many of his early shows were advertised as such. Cornell also made movies using the same techniques in his art- he spliced pieces together seemingly at random. From some old films he found discarded, and some old tape, he created a short film featuring pictures of his idol Rose Hobart. Cornell asked his representing gallery to host a viewing, Though most of his audience yawned and shifted with boredom, the event turned out to be pivotal in Cornell’s small, pending fame- for Salvador Dali was in the audience.
Dali erupted during the film into a raving lunatic, shoving the projector crashing onto the ground and hollering furious blue murder. Apparently, the film-collage was Dali’s private copyright, and he told the gallery owner, “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I WAS GOING to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…I never wrote it or told it to anyone but it is as IF he had stolen it.”
The thundering Salvador, a world-famous artist, drew monumental attention to then-unknown Cornell. But Cornell seldom showed films again because of this incident, though he made them. This primitive, early work to which the humble Cornell beat the megalomaniac Dali was a precursor to the experimental film movement. Dali forever afterward was both purposefully and inadvertently advertising Cornell to the art world, and his boxes grew in popularity. The demands, even of mild celebrity, on Joseph were exhilarating but exhausting. It was extremely draining for the artist to interact with people. For this reason, converged with his strict adherence to the sexual ethics of Christian Science, he did not really date.
You can imagine what people thought of a shy, reticent artist who lived with his mother, mooned over silent film stars, and Lauren Bacall, and fancied opera and ballet. The obvious seemed obvious to everyone around him, and it was widely assumed that Cornell was gay. Indeed, one of the few lasting friendships he built, and one of the more frequent guests to his Utopia Parkway home was an out homosexual, and tongues wagged.
But Joseph was not gay. He simply was no good at approaching women, and if he was, then what? The complicated rituals of courtship that make the rest of us dizzy made him sick to his stomach. It was a game he couldn’t possibly take upon himself. And if he did, then the maintenance of a partner would mean unthinkable levels of interaction of which he was simply incapable. He did take to women, quite enthusiastically, ordinary girls from laundromats and diners, plus, of course, fantasizing endlessly about film stars and poets and anyone else who was at a safe distance. For these women, he made boxes, shrines. “He built boxes for Emily Dickinson,” writes Sheila O’Malley in The Sheila Variations. “Her ghost haunts those boxes … But he didn’t build them as gifts FOR Emily Dickinson (who, of course, was long dead). He built them as spaces that she might inhabit. It was like “preparing a place” for her. That’s why so many of the Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Which is interesting, too. He always wanted to make sure that Emily had a way to escape.”
Deborah Solomon writes in her biography, Utopia Parkway, about a workmate who captured Cornell’s dreamy obsession. He saw her in the time-card line and spent the next few months musing and mulling over the 20-year-younger Anne Hoysio, whom he described as having “such gracious qualities of serenity.” They did have lunch at work, and he left flowers on her desk, but he didn’t so much as ask her to the movies. Anne had no idea of their vivid, intense relationship happening in Joseph’s mind. He gave her a shadowbox- she gave him a Christmas card, signed with her name and the name of their company. As Solomon said, “…she considered her friendship with Cornell so insignificant that she thought she had to remind him of who she was. Cornell kept the card for the rest of his life.”
Cornell also loved another girl, someone more of a wild card, who betrayed his trust by stealing some of his art. He insisted on helping to bail her out, despite that the crime was against him. She conceded that she hadn’t known the value of their friendship, but Joseph knew how troubled she was and loved her still. But one day she was found murdered in her cheap hotel room, and Joseph never got over it.
No, Joseph’s secret was not that he was gay. It was that he lived his entire life without a lover. There were a few chaste squeezes and pecks here and there, but the closest he came was with one woman who noted that his needs differed from those of most men. They enjoyed a naked bath, and she offered him a blow job, but he did not ask to consummate what they’d started. He said sex would destroy his art. Joseph Cornell lived and died a virgin.
Nor did Joseph experience the heady thrills of giddy intoxication- not once did a drop of liquor pass his lips. His only vice was his penchant for sugar, which would put Homer Simpson to shame. At some points, he subsisted entirely on doughnuts and candy.
Yet Cornell’s life was not loveless, however unorthodox and solitary it seemed: the love of his life was his brother, Robert. Surely on occasion he resented Robert’s illness, but his dedication was unwavering and it much more than “duty” that propelled him. Robert asked nothing of Joseph, was a gracious and thankful patient, and listened endlessly to the artist’s explanations of his work, provided an audience of one- as much as Joseph could handle. Robert was, against the odds, extremely cheerful, and funny. He occasionally had success in making Joseph laugh. Though his illness was a tremendous burden on Joseph, it was also a gift, an intimacy that
exists in few other partnerships. Robert couldn’t leave the house and so was incapable of forming much in way of a social life. And Joseph couldn’t relate to many people, but he was comfortable with his brother from day one. And so they had a unique, deep bond that was unbreakable. Once Robert died of pneumonia in 1965, Joseph’s descent began.
On December 29, 1972, Joseph left the symbolic world of the body and his objects and went into the spiritual realm to be with Robert. In a sense, he’d spent his entire life nearly as housebound as his disabled brother, rarely leaving even his neighbourhood. Yet some part of Joseph had never been tethered: glancing through the symbols of his work, we see endless witness to the flights of his imagination, theme after theme after theme: hot air balloons, constellations, globes and maps, birds, ballerinas, moons, compasses, ships, oceans, tides, bubbles, and owls.
Though he’d been fine days before, when a friend called and got no answer, she’d sent her husband to Utopia to check in. Through a window, he saw Joseph fully dressed under a blanket, peacefully dead.
And though his art freed him from his earthly constraints, clearly he still had some regrets about his experience in the physical realm. In a phone call that morning with his sister, he spoke his last words. “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.”
Lorette C. Luzajic
Lorette C. Luzajic is everywhere. The only one with her name in the world, a quick Google will turn up a lifetime of reading. Writing about interesting people is her favourite kind of work, and you can find more at www.bookslut.com, where she writes Fascinating Writers. She also writes a column called A Matter of Life or Myth for www.thepaleogarden.com. Lorette is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and she just released Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world.) She is currently working on an anthology about the meaning of Michael Jackson, and a short story collection. These, and the sequel for Weird Monologues, will be available by the end of 2009. Follow her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net, or visit this link on Amazon to purchase her books.
No bookshelf is complete without those massive Russian tomes, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Many say Leo Tolstoy authored the greatest novels ever written. The size of these sweeping epics was rivaled only by the writer’s formidable beard. Each novel pondered those questions that plague man most — the meaning of life, the struggle with lust, political freedom, union with God, death. His books were highly moral, yet they were often censored by the Russian government, for the mere mention of adultery and suicide and war that kept those pages turning.
