The monosyllables of condescension form at the back of the throat and hover in the staging space just before the lips: “twee,” “fey,” “camp,” even “cute.” The art under inspection, after all, has that form technically called mushy stuff in syrup: old French hotel ads and stuffed birds and soap-bubble pipes hermetically sealed behind glass, evoking vanished Victorian worlds of Curiosity Shops and steamer trunks and natural-history-museum displays of long-refuted principles. They ought to have dated; they ought to date; they are, in a way, about being dated. And yet something keeps the visitor locked in place, looking, and turns his mind to the warmer, though still not quite satisfying, words of romantic praise: “haunting,” “mysterious,” “dreamy,” “sublime.”

The objects that cause this odd rhythm of stop and look and stop to think again are the shadow boxes that the American artist Joseph Cornell constructed for forty years in the basement of his mother’s house on Utopia Parkway, in Queens. This year is the centenary of Cornell’s birth, and his boxes continue to hold their own in the American imagination. Since his death, in 1972, it is not so much that Cornell’s fame has grown, which is what happens when critics water a reputation, as that his work has become part of the living body of art, which is what happens when artists eat it. It was strange to find how big a part Cornell played in the imaginations of young artists during the nineteen-eighties, when the Abstract Expressionist painters, for so long more central and cosmopolitan, seemed irrelevant, stagy, and stuffy, and when even the autistic genius of Warhol seemed to belong to a Beaux-Arts past, with its faith in painted things stuck on a wall.

Only Pollock, of the artists of the great or big generation, seems today as large as Cornell. The Cornell literature, which can get very literary (a clue, perhaps, to his popularity), continues to grow: he has already been the subject of a fine biography, Deborah Solomon’s 1997 “Utopia Parkway,” and in the past two years there has been a new, illustrated life, by Diane Waldman, and an elaborately produced collection of literary tributes, edited by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and called “A Convergence of Birds.” (Last year, there were two gallery shows, one of collages at C & M Arts, and one, extended through this winter, at the Allan Stone Gallery.) Cornell’s small art looms so large, in fact, that one is occasionally inclined to take the side of the big boys against the recluse, just as there must still be a Longfellow fan out there who has heard quite enough about Emily Dickinson, thank you. It does look twee, or at least awfully easy. Cornell, like his beloved Saint-Exupéry, gets the mushy-stuff pass that only one or two artists per generation are permitted. Art critics and historians try to solve this problem by searching for the conventional signs of avant-garde reassurance—you see, his boxes are really boxes, you know, primary structures, with, like, appropriated ironies inside—and by making his art into yet another mock-in-the-box. Yet no one has ever really looked at it as anything but desperately sincere. The mushy bits, the parrots and constellations, are, beyond all argument, the potent bits.

It is in the biographies and, particularly, in the diaries and letters that have been published in the past decade that a sense of the man emerges. When you read Cornell while staring at his art, two words eventually come to mind and stick there to help explain what makes the art last, makes it matter: “weird” and “real.” For weird he was, weirder than we like to admit. A sweetened Cornell has grown up in our memory: an innocent outsider who made his boxes from his reveries about ballerinas, and whose poetic art exists in a state of “childlike wonder.” This is not false, exactly, but it is incomplete. The ballerinas and actresses he worshipped, sometimes from very close up, were often freaked out by the attentions of this shy, gaunt man offering them a box filled with . . . them. (Some of his devotional objects, like the box he made for Lauren Bacall in the forties—smoldering femme fatale surmounted by a predella of dagger-shaped skyscraper turrets—look like props in the last reel of a Hitchcock film.) Cornell’s art occupies a special place between the spooky and the sappy, and it is the spookiness that gives the sappiness its power.

But Cornell’s art was also real, in ways that are easy to miss. Reading his diaries and letters, you are struck by how outward-turning and observant this reclusive dreamer was. Cornell knew more people than Cholly Knickerbocker, from Allegra Kent to Tennessee Williams and Marcel Duchamp—it’s hard to name any artist of that generation whose circle was as wide. More important, his life looked like the art he made. He sat in cafeterias drinking coffee and eating pie and staring at girls and going to the movies and reading Mallarmé, and he managed to find funny and affecting coördinates (they were too casual to be called symbols) of these things to put in his boxes. To call Cornell a realist may seem to play with words, but, in the root sense that a realist is an artist preoccupied with the world he finds rather than with the world he wants, Cornell is on the side of the real. He is an artist of longings, but his longings are for things known and seen and hard to keep. He didn’t long to go to France; he longed to build memorials to the feeling of wanting to go to France while riding the Third Avenue El. He preferred the ticket to the trip, the postcard to the place, the fragment to the whole. Cornell’s boxes look like dreams to us, but the mind that made them was always wide awake.

Some American lives roll in mythical shapes—a Presidential aspirant gets born in a place called Hope, and a budding rhapsodic novelist is named after Francis Scott Key—and none more than Cornell’s. He was born on Christmas Eve (in 1903), he was employed by a company named Whitman, he spent his life on Utopia Parkway. And Edward Hopper peered over his sister’s shoulder, teaching her drawing as the young Cornells grew. He came from an old and distinguished and once rich Yankee family—a background one senses in the long jaw and the attenuated, aristocratic face, skin drawn tight over pointed features—and had, he always insisted, a “happy childhood.” It was made from resistant material: his father died of a blood disease when Joseph was only thirteen, and the family was expelled from their big house on the river in Nyack and moved to Queens. Queens was a leafier place then, but the house they bought, and lived in for forty years, was the simplest of single-family frames. The great tragedy of Cornell’s life was the plight of his younger brother Robert, who came down with a crippling form of cerebral palsy when he was only one, and whom Cornell took care of for the rest of his life. Robert lived to be fifty-four, as a wraith surrounded by toy-train sets, but his brother treated him as a wonder, not as a burden. (“Beautiful smile from Robert leaving house to go in,” he writes. “Stayed with me all afternoon.”) Cornell seems to have spent little time in the wilderness of the world before he retreated to Utopia Parkway. A few unhappy years at prep school (Andover, no less), where he was remembered for idolizing Harry Houdini; a job as a salesman for the Whitman textile company. It is said that Robert’s condition kept Joseph at home, filling his work with its conspicuous longings for elsewhere. But other men with sick siblings have gone to France, and, if you read through his papers, Joseph seems a self-willed recluse. Frighteningly well read—a list of his favorite books stretches from Donne to Robbe-Grillet—he had a particular affection for Emily Dickinson and Rimbaud, both great rejecters, and wanted to emulate them.

Music was his first love. Mozart, in particular, obsessed him, and at a time when hearing one of the piano concertos was still a bit of an event. He does not seem to have responded to visual art in the usual sense; his firsthand experience of art was mostly secondhand—books and prints and etchings seen on Fourth Avenue. In his diaries and letters, while he is knocked sideways by prints and poems and pies and sexy waitresses and melodies, I can’t find a single occasion when he is overwhelmed by a painting, a unique visual thing in place.

As early as 1931, though, he walked into the Julien Levy gallery, on Madison Avenue, and began to look at Magritte and Giacometti and, above all, Max Ernst, whose collages made from nineteenth-century engravings embodied Cornell’s own fascination with the secondhand—and were, in any case, of the kind that even an untrained draftsman like him could do. He began making collages and assemblages, first in homage to Ernst, and very quickly in a happier manner, entirely his own.

Surrealism’s influence on Cornell is so plain that it is easy to miss how fundamentally at odds he was with the Surrealist enterprise. As he said, memorably and simply, what he wanted in his art was “white magic,” where Surrealism’s was all black. The earnest Victoriana that looked to Ernst like the rotting leftovers of the great bourgeois feast of the European nineteenth century looked to Cornell like Europe. Cornell wanted to reënchant his objects, to give the things he loved the permanence of art. Though Surrealism supplied, in neatly literary form, a vocabulary and a manner for him, it was not the Surrealists but their predecessors, the Cubists—the last rhapsodic realist movement, the end point of the nineteenth-century search for a language light enough to be modern, large enough to own a city—who eventually won and held his heart. For him, the minor Cubist Juan Gris was, bizarrely, first among modern artists, and it was the larksome Cubist poet Apollinaire, not the dour Surrealist Aragon, whom he placed high among modern poets.

He did some early assemblage and collage, but by the end of the thirties he was fully launched on his boxes: often carefully carpentered from pine, intricately opaque (many have a bottom drawer, kept permanently shut, with a feather or a jack inside), many whitewashed or lacquered fifteen or sixteen times. Where did he get the idea of putting his objects in little boxes under glass? Diane Waldman, in her book on Cornell, suggests that Victorian toys, of a kind one still sees in flea markets, were a precursor; others have mentioned images in Atget’s photographs and Victorian shadow boxes, those dainty mantelpiece ornaments. The most important and most obvious influence, though, is surely the dominant visual experience of any city dweller in the past two hundred years: the shopwindow itself. The ordinary objects placed behind glass in juxtapositions meant to inspire desire (the mannequin and the man, the hat and the holly tree)—what was new in Cornell was familiar on the street. Oblique Cornell may be, but no more oblique than a druggist’s window. He is at his best when he is working with resistant or very objectlike material, rather than with material already loaded with sentiment. His pharmacies, of the early forties, are probably his first masterpieces, exactly because they look like pharmacies: inventories of small stoppered bottles filled with feathers and balls and liquids. But they also look like a child’s idea of science, order imposed on beads and lemonade. They are as clear and as mysterious as a shopwindow you see on the first morning in a strange town.

Though Cornell was isolated neither in his work (more people came out to Flushing than visited Max Beerbohm in Rapallo) nor in his art (he had galleries and collectors from early on), he was isolated in another sense, by choice. He had discovered the joys of solitary wandering. Beginning in the early nineteen-forties, his life was structured by a simple rhythm: from Queens via the subway to Manhattan, where he walked and ate and watched and collected, and then back home to the basement and back yard in Queens, where he built his boxes, talked to his mother, and cared for his brother. The flaneur and the recluse were equally intense. Cornell chose to be that classic New York thing: a walker in the city. He was an unambitious walker, though, in that he wanted to see the city, not conquer it. His favorite places took him up and down and all over town: F. A. O. Schwarz and the Bigelow pharmacy and Bickford’s and the cast-iron district. Woolworth’s was his chapel and Wanamaker’s his cathedral. Cornell’s appetite and discerning eye for the street around him appears everywhere in the diaries he kept in the forties and fifties, many of which were beautifully annotated and illustrated in Mary Ann Caws’s 1993 anthology “Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind,” a really golden book. He lovingly evokes a time when there was a scarcity economy of culture and a surplus culture of everything else: a time when, though you could eat lunch for fifty cents, Beethoven’s Ninth was a sacrament and the Budapest Quartet a revelation and a cappuccino as exotic as a French stripper—a time before Warhol and cheap air travel. The dominant note is of humming happiness, and outward-turning observation. One entry reads:

Glass of weak iced tea and liverwurst sandwich on the balcony about 4 o’ clock overlooking 42 and 3rd Ave. with its typical stream of motley N.Y. humanity this sunny afternoon—right against the window with a ledge where I could open the RILKE in unhurried leisure and enjoy it along with all the minutiae of commonplace spectacle that at times like this takes on so much “festivity”—a real “happiness” here in the sun, although too nervous to do justice to the Rilke text—a real glow in the lines of “the Paris of Gérard de Nerval” . . . the preoccupation with the crowds below formerly a morbid obsession in the infinity of faces and heterogeneity— in particular a black robed nun with a rope or chain conspicuous for lack of usual immaculateness and a real type of uniquely unusual encountered only in a city like N.Y.— as usual a significant kind of happiness is difficult to get into this “cataloging” but there it was none the less—”this on-the-edgeness” of something apocalyptic, something really satisfying.

People used to say that visiting Cornell at his house was like stepping into one of his boxes, and, reading his diaries, one senses that what fills the boxes is what filled his life, a constant running in and out of the mind of sweets and children and memories and French poems.

He called his best New York moments—when the cafeteria pie and the light in the window and the knowledge of having found the right old print on Fourth Avenue all came together—”sparkings,” a “conspiracy of events to produce this miracle of grace.” Often, the “sparkings” center on a beautiful young girl he sees briefly on his travels. He called these girls his “fées,” his filles, his faeries. He could come across them even in Flushing: “just now; ‘le retour de la fée,’ just now the teener—a long moving picture portrait—seen crossing Roosevelt & Main—autumn sunlight—went into Woolworth—wandered all over store daydream shopping without buying—hair (chestnut) worn down back—light blue sweater—high cheek bones—boney frame—emaciated—wan—but real fée.” There is something rapt and winsome in his appreciation of his fées; and something just a little creepy about his following them into Woolworth’s.

He captured them in the reproduction of a Medici princess by Bronzino, whose work he had seen once in one of the few “fine arts” shows that moved him, a catch-all collection of Great Paintings at the 1939 World’s Fair. (It was in Flushing, too, and so, perhaps, unintimidating.) The emotional force of the Medici-princess boxes, where the image of Bronzino’s grave infanta is repeated over and over, printed in a sad blue twilight or behind a wall of sepia glass, with children’s balls and jacks laid out around her as offerings, lies in the ennoblement of the fées. But he could fall in love with almost any woman. His infatuations with the great ballerinas of the emerging City Ballet are famous; Allegra Kent, who really was a fée, and nearly as original as he was, became a friend. But he had the same feelings about some pretty improbable movie stars. Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, O.K., but he was also crazy about Sheree North, a now forgotten smoky-voiced soubrette of the fifties, and in 1958 he inserted in a book about French poetry he was reading:

Write Shirley MacLaine—extra measure & a beautiful tenderness vs. roughneck charm of Dinah Shore who runs the Chevy Show—Shirley MacLaine even in “roughneck” dance routines a kind of joie de vivre & childlike joy that floods the stagnant T-V screen with a flood of cool clear water—*Shirley MacLaine bless her!

The boxes he made for his favorite actresses are, in their way, better Pop art than any Pop art properly so called—more connected to the real spell that popular culture casts on an American mind, which is not detached (an emotion that the Pop artists had to work for) but overly invested, finding more in Shirley MacLaine than Shirley MacLaine can quite supply. (His obsessive infatuations were not quite as “innocent” as is sometimes claimed. His friends recall that he would, with any encouragement, send lurid erotic fantasies to his fées; according to Caws, he even sent one a tracing of a string he had put around his penis to show its size.) The unobtainable appealed to Cornell, not because it prevented him from having a real emotional life but because it fed his real emotional life, which was built on longing—commercial, erotic, and romantic.

For Cornell’s great subject—announced and taboo—in all his boxes was nostalgia, and his desire was to vindicate it as an emotion. He wanted to make nostalgia into one of the big permanent emotions you could put in a box, like lust or greed, instead of one of the smaller disreputable ones you kept in a drawer. “Nostalgia ok for Wyeth in isolated New England,” he complained once. “What is the answer for New York City.” The nostalgia he felt, though, was not nostalgia for a particular place or person but a generalized nostalgia for what he called “time passing.” Cornell sensed, and in his art dramatized, the difference between two opposed kinds of nostalgia. What’s nostalgic in Cornell’s art is not that it’s made of old things; a lot of the things are so new that no one would have yet thought of them as potential art—Hollywood stills and penny-arcade chutes. What’s nostalgic is that, behind glass, fixed in place, the new things become old even as we look at them: it is the fate of everything, each box proposes, to become part of a vivid and longed-for past, as real and yet as remote from us as the Paris hotel we never got to. There is, he saw, a kind of nostalgia that posits a world that never existed and a set of virtues never put into practice—the kind that idealizes the heroic forties, or the roaring twenties, or the fabulous fifties—and a kind that finds a bottomless melancholy in the simple desolation of life by time. The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing.

Cornell’s last full decade, the sixties, was sad, and not just in retrospect. The rising generation of Pop artists admired him. But, by an irony he could not have envisioned, instead of seeing him as New York’s Cubist they gave him exactly the role that the Douanier Rousseau had occupied before the First World War for the Cubists themselves, the “innocent” outsider who had stumbled on a method wiser than he was. In June of 1963, Warhol and Indiana and Rosenquist all came together on an impulse to call on the Old Master, in a kind of cheerful parody of the famous Banquet Rousseau, where Picasso and his friends called on the aging Douanier. But Cornell’s longings had no more to do with Pop po-facedness than Rousseau’s sobrieties had to do with the Cubists’ syncopations. Art historians, who see what they expect to see, usually say that the difference between the use of the repetitive image that Cornell invented—twenty-four princesses in one box—and the way Warhol took it up lies in their touch: Warhol’s repetition is said to be affectless and mechanical while Cornell’s is romantic. But in fact Warhol’s silk-screen method allows for far more variation in feeling than anything that Cornell, a true appropriator, could achieve. (Though conservative art critics have a soft spot for Cornell, he was the first entirely camera-and-object-driven artist to enter the museums. Even Duchamp could draw, and Johns, by comparison, was Poussin.) The real difference between them lies in the orchestration of effects: Cornell’s repetitions, enforced by handmade frame and blue glass, are as vulnerable as those of an anxious lover over-stamping a love letter. Warhol’s are impervious as a dandy, delighted to be impersonating a stamp machine.

The Medici boxes are the most “haunting” of all Cornell’s works, and they haunt us because we are not sure if the princess is imprisoned or on display, or if there is really a difference. The grave and overburdened princess, surrounded by children’s blocks and stencilled numbers and pinballs and pinball chutes, is allowed back into the childhood that her position kept her from so many centuries ago. At the same time, the balls and blocks and jacks become accessories of aristocracy; they suddenly have the weary dignity of court art. She is locked up and looking out. What the Medici boxes deny is any kind of conventional warmth, the manic affection for popular objects that enlivened Stuart Davis’s crazy lines, or even Gerald Murphy’s heraldic razor, and it is this lack of warmth, and its replacement by deeper and more sober emotions, that is new in Cornell. Warhol and Cornell worked from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, indifference and infatuation, but they both ended in the realm of the Snow Queen. Warhol showed that it is possible to be truly in love with the frozen, Cornell that it is possible to be frozen in true love.

And Cornell’s loves made him vulnerable, as vulnerable as any hermit who comes to believe his visions. In a dénouement that belongs in a movie or an opera, in 1962 he finally reached out to one of his fées. Her name was Joyce Hunter, and she was an aspiring actress whom he found waiting on tables in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue. He gave her the fée name Tina, made many boxes and collages in her honor, and eventually, tremulously, invited her to live on Utopia Parkway. (They don’t seem to have slept together, and he probably died a virgin.) Predictably, she and a boyfriend ended up stealing nine boxes from him. A dealer put the police onto them, and she was arrested in the fall of 1964, which forced Cornell, gallantly but miserably, to spend his time trying to keep her safe from the police and prosecutors. A few months later, she was found murdered in a West Side hotel room, probably for unrelated reasons. Cornell was heartbroken. Like Swann or Seymour Glass, he mistook emptiness for innocence, and paid for it. Then, in 1965, Robert died— “at 1:30 in the afternoon my blessed brother looked at his wall of celestial toy trains, out on the saffron feeding grounds of the ring-necked pheasants, glanced back and without a sigh was released from his frail frame”—and Joseph was alone. A friend who visited found the once warm house unbearably cold. Cornell said that he couldn’t endure the sound of the furnace going on and off in the basement below.

Since his own death, Cornell has suffered from being too narrowly placed within the apostolic succession of American avant-garde art, which makes him look more of an outsider than he was. Anyone reading the New York poets, Hart Crane and Frank O’ Hara—or, for that matter, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop—would expect a companion visual art that looked exactly like this, rather than like the vast exclusions of Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman. The balance of the metaphysical and the quotidian, the intimate address and the popular symbols, the private mythologizing of mass culture, the singing New York street and the oblique references, a dream of France dotting the work like raisins in a pudding—all these things are far closer to American modernist poetry than to its art. To call Cornell a poetic artist is in this sense just a flat taxonomic fact.

And it is not meant entirely in his praise. The best of his contemporaries were not content with an art that worked like poetry, with its natural bent for a mixed rhetoric, for a little of this and a little of that. The visual arts, for good or ill, tend toward the absolute, the “iconic”—the blue of Chartres would be no better for a little yellow—and the absolutism of the high American modernists is what connects them to the monumental tradition. Cornell’s art was smaller, and more particular. In a curious way, what we miss most about his work is its embrace of the city; we miss the city that was there to embrace. (It would not be the least irony of an art of purposeful nostalgia that we end up being nostalgic for it.) For all its sadness, there is still in Cornell’s work the hum of a secure and many-chambered civilization, one that was roomy enough for Gérard De Nerval, so to speak, to dine on Boston cream pie, roomy enough for Cornell. It is hard not to long for Cornell’s longings, imagining him, in a city now largely vanished, collecting his prints and magazines and poems and wandering in somewhere to eat his doughnuts and noting the exact look on the face of a fée waitress and knowing all the while that, if he could just get back on the El to Flushing by five-thirty, he was home free.



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