It can be surmised from his life-long “dismissing” attachment style in adult relationships that Joseph Cornell had been “avoidantly” attached to his mother as an infant. Yet no actual records confirm or deny this inference. Forming an impression of her style of mothering is limited by the scant biography: Cornell’s mother was an adored only child, from a colonial New York Dutch lineage, who had been trained as a kindergarten teacher but married before entering the profession. Helen Ten Broeck Storms was short but not unattractive and willingly gave up a career for marriage to Joe Cornell, a
cultivated somewhat older man of similar upper middle class origin. Deborah Solomon, Cornell’s biographer, hints at an early distant relationship between mother and son writing: “Joseph grew up longing for his mother’s affection, which he tended to associate with gifts she bestowed”.1 This suggests that gift objects were substituted for direct responsiveness and affection. Solomon also notes that, disappointed by her marriage, Helen Cornell invested emotionally more in her sons than in her daughters but that, as observers remarked, their relations were tense. We will return to the life-long locked-in relationships of mother and children with its special effects on Joseph.
In adulthood Cornell appeared to be an oddity, an “outsider”, avoiding social contacts except on his own terms; some saw him as “weird” when it came to relationships with women whom he worshiped at a distance. Always single and virtually housebound, he used art to turn female celebrities into unreachable, slightly androgynous icons. This looks like arrested development, stoppage at the idealizing that adolescent boys protectively use when first seeing girls as sexual. Cornell was obsessed with glamorous women but, as an adult, he was equally pulled back into childhood innocence. While not sexually attracted to children, he found them enchanting and always wanted to hear about childhood experiences. It was as if he wanted to re-enter his own childhood to recapitulate its wonders while undoing painful dislocations. Much of Cornell’s creativity was a kind of child’s play, inventing symbolic toys by means of which he undoubtedly reduced risk of depression. His mother’s giving of gifts rather than real affection, suggests a life-long hunger for compensating objects, with art a strategy for supplying them.
Cornell’s box assemblages are often spoken of in terms of mood and can be seen as a means of self-regulating the unwelcome depressive moods which he recorded in his writings. He became adept at externalizing moods in imagery, giving them independent existence where they could be safely contemplated and modified. Viewers of the boxes distinguish subtle gradations of mood, typically within a range of wistful melancholy and nostalgia. Carter Ratcliff calls Cornell “a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences”, whose boxes contain “missing presences”. “Even the emptiest—the all-white dovecotes and grid works—look full of departed personages”.2 In other words, absent attachments are being spoken about. Dore Ashton agrees, noting that while “many twentieth-century artists have dealt with the notion of the void, of nothingness, of empty space, Cornell’s treatments are more specifically characterizations of absence”3 Deserted Perch (1949) and The Cage (undated) are examples of compartmentalized wooden boxes in which minimal objects are isolated. One wonders whether the separated tennis balls in The Cage may stand for Cornell himself, his disabled brother Robert and their widowed mother, living in the Utopia Parkway house in Flushing, Long Island. Even if so simple an association were accurate, the box exceeds any such homely reading by transforming loss and absence into enchantment. Cornell’s most successful boxes induce rarefied moods, transporting viewers away from painful or banal autobiographical references. For example, Deserted Perch (1949) is more than a reminiscence of the artist, aged fourteen, losing his father to leukemia. Cornell’s father indeed had a wood-working shop where Joseph learned skills, but the box is far more than a gloss on this fact.
Several of the most arresting boxes refer to the delights and anxieties of childhood without suggesting specific incidents. Soap Bubble Set (1948), Forgotten Game (nd) and even the strange and unsettling Untitled (Bebe Marie) (1940s), so disliked by feminists, evoke childhood moods which pressed to be re-experienced. Others range into never-never lands of uplifting imagination: for instance Homage to the Romantic Ballet (1942), with its multitude of evocative objects, Hotel de l’Etoile (nd), with its “living” bird, and the Medici Prince Series (c1952-4)—each imaginatively enlarging upon Cornell’s limited access to high culture. Another, the strange and forbidding Toward the ‘Blue Peninsula’: For Emily Dickinson (1951-2), pays homage to a kindred reclusive American seeker.
Thus Cornell was always extending his actual experience into wished-for realms, differing in quality from anything found in European Surrealism. Accessing the unconscious yielded much more gentle and benign results. His work is never shocking or outrageous like Max Ernst’s, whose collages Cornell first saw in a New York gallery in 1931. Retaining an innocence, the American artist was no rebel against stifling conventions in religion, society and art. His boxes are so startlingly alive because Cornell welcomed almost naively associations of attachment, loss and wished-for replacement. He did not tap into the darkest unconscious to settle scores or upset anyone. If we are startled, it is by sincerity of intent, with no pre-planned transgressiveness as happens so often in Surrealist art. There is indeed careful planning and forethought in box-making, but also spontaneity and delight in unexpected results which are typically benign for all their oddity.
Writings
Consideration of Cornell’s writings shows how deftly he extracted the important themes for art from his somewhat erratic writings. The “shadow boxes”, and the later collages, are disciplined, formal and austere, while Cornell’s journal is freely impressionistic and associative. His letters, which are more orderly, not only keep the spontaneity of the journal but can be witty and playful. Images appear in the writings—a bird, a quince tree or a little girl—rousing Cornell to ensconce them in a box, a mini-theatrical container for examining moods. The passing moods are caught and fixed in monuments to inner states. It is as though Cornell were capturing for preservation special moments of being, editing all that does not pertain to the desired mood. There is never a sense that he has merely designed mood changing imagery into boxes, or that images have been lifted from secondary sources to produce an effect. Verbal and visual vocabularies arose from the same urgent sources, with the visual always taking precedence. His birds are far more than victorian parlor stuffed birds under glass and his skies more than painted backdrops. They are visual summations of deeply meditated associations to childhood experiences.
The so-called “Diary” or “Daily Journal”, along with loose sheets and jottings, the records of changing reactions to the outside world, musings, reflections upon nature and citations of music and literature, can only be sampled. (We will term it a “journal” since, unlike a “diary”, it is discontinuous in the published form.) Cornell occasionally reworked his dated entries but he did not revise them into autobiography. There is no connected narrative, only rich and often mysterious deposits for the biographer. The writings as he left them are an incomparable revelation of Cornell’s restless questing and of the quality of his awareness. We are indebted to Mary Ann Caws for editing a representative selection of diaries, letters and files; yet this is only a preliminary, loosely annotated fraction of Cornell’s archive at the Smithsonian. His massive “Dossiers” on many topics pertaining to images that emerged in his art are beginning to be studied, especially the 1000 page “GC 44" (“Garden Center 1944”), containing thoughts and reflections from his summer’s work in a Flushing, Long Island garden center. Lindsay Blair shows this to be a key document by which to discern Cornell’s thematic concerns and to discover his parlous emotional life stabilized by creativity. But much more careful editing is necessary before it is possible to make a full assessment of the written records so essential as accounts of Cornell’s inspiration.