Nevertheless, his taste ran beyond the radical avant garde art, seen at the Levi Gallery in New York, to Renaissance masters in the Metropolitan Museum. Chance remarks, such as “Floating Clouds flocks—one was fish-shape—screened by the tracery of the branch of Claude Gellee’s [Lorrain] soft grace in the movement drift West to East”, show how closely Cornell observed that classical master of landscape’s atmospheric effects (p. 456). Another remark reveals that he had looked with care at the paintings of Carravaggio and at Rembrandt’s etching of a visionary experience, A Scholar in his Study (erroneously titled Faustus), using the phrase “a living realm of golden shadow” to make a comparison with a film he was discussing (p.174). His own heritage led him to art of the Dutch “Golden Age”, especially that of Vermeer. Perhaps the most telling remark on the origin of his own boxes concerns the “perspective boxes” of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627-78). Van Hoogstraten’s painted miniature interior scenes were to be viewed through a peep-hole giving the illusion of entering an enchanted realm. Cornell wrote of the “peep-show effect of the Dutch boxes—a feeling that this ‘imagery’ is the one Vermeer was acquainted with—seen in a mirror plus illumination—beyond trickery etc. into a world of awesome beauty and with such simplicity” (p. 255). While Cornell did not construct exactly such peep-shows, the mood of safely enclosed yet remote and unreachable space set a standard for many of Cornell’s constructions. (The well-known nineteenth century English Baxter Prints, which Cornell could have seen in bric-a-brac shops, were often very deeply framed to give a “shadow box” effect, making them akin to Cornell’s actual constructions.)
Cornell was unusual among artists for being well read, especially in modern French literature. He never traveled to France but was indeed “Francophile” in keeping with descent from Guilliaume Corneille, who in 1640 came to America by way of Rotterdam, Holland. Along with concentration in French culture, Cornell ranged far into English and American literatures: Browning, the Brontes, Coleridge, Cummings, de la Mare, Emerson, Frost, Joyce, Keats, Poe, Pound, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stevens, Swinburne, Traherne, Vaughan, Williams, Whitman, Wordsworth, and Yeats—all referred to in the journal. Levels of serious engagement is another matter, the writers who probably affected him most being Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alain-Fournier, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Gerard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme, along with Andre Breton and certain cultural and literary critics. Emily Dickinson’s New England isolation and piercingly insightful verse especially appealed to Cornell, as did Rilke’s powerful estheticism in verse and letters. Alain Fournier’s youthful romantic yearnings for a lost wonderland and his impossible love closely paralleled Cornell’s nostalgia for childhood and his unfulfilled erotic longings. Proust also heightened the feeling of a lost world of youthful wonder, while the artist’s new found independence and individuality were emphasized by de Nerval, Mallarme, and Rimbaud. In keeping with their Symbolist credo, these writers exemplified wishes for a transcendent esthetic realm, visionary in intensity, beyond the exigencies of ordinary life—certainly the aim of Cornell’s shadow boxes. When Cornell wrote: “up at 6:30 and that miracle of renewals in the boxes that seem to offer so little expression of real feelings and aims—warmth color in painter’s sense—etc. today the white long one with the cordial set ...”, he enacts the Symbolist poets’ ritual of transcending by art alone ordinary sensations to reach a higher consciousness.
Symbolist and other writings excited Cornell’s creativity leading him towards an art of reflection, mystery and wonder, but evidence is lacking in the journal for the actual healing effects which are so patent for music. of all the arts important to Cornell, music’s effects are most clearly stated, though he claimed no musical ability of his own. Whether music has the power to heal or simply offer consolation is open, as Cornell admits, to question. More than with responses to literature, or even art, he struggles to find language for the effects of music upon mood. For instance, “Beethoven #16 heard in bed last movement adagio heard in kitchen reverently. Slightly (but only) missing the identification (i.e. the quartets) so taken for granted ‘only yesterday’—can do it with Rasumovsky’s Opus 59: 1, 2, 3, #24 probably #15—does not matter too much—the above #16 was orchestrated by Toscanini”. He continues, “Howard Hussey [a research assistant and friend] about Gieseking—Debussy—the ‘Preludes’ ‘healing’—for myself something different—consolation—healing more about Debussy his credo healing once found pre-eminently in the slow movement Opus 163 Schubert’s String Quartet where does one go for ‘healing’ when the player & or radio breaks down?” Cornell comments, however, that “reinings in” of the excessive actually to the point of “healings” have occurred “without any recourse to musical records or radio”. As an afterthought, he wrote: “Consolation would be my word rather than ‘healing’ If ‘healing’ were to be applied to this realm—I have found Schubert’s ‘Impromptus’ (8) more deserving of the word” (p. 415).
These statements about consolation and healing could not be more important for what Cornell thought all the arts to be about. They are means of dispersing and replacing dysphoric moods, the question being whether the effect is temporary or permanent. We wish that his language was more precise, relating specific musical experiences to actual moods he surmounted. Nonetheless, an important point is established. Elevating low moods, at least symbolically healing the fractures in human relations, especially sorrows for loss, were Cornell’s purpose for the arts. In other words, the boxes are specially constructed objects to counteract despair over shortcomings and failures in real-life relationships. In 1969 he was thinking with remarkable prescience in the language of “Object Relations” psychology about the mood-altering uses of objects. The example prompting his reflection is the “consolation” Mary Baker Eddy felt upon seeing a mere rubber band twisted into heart shape lying on papers in a drawer. This leads Cornell to speculate: “WHAT ABOUT a plea for the ‘object proper’ harking back to first unconscious origins [?]” (p. 417). He is thinking about symbolic replacement objects when there are deficits of attachment. Evidence of this motivation is found in the remark: “Obsessive desire to do an ‘In Memoriam’ with boxes” (p. 270). This was recorded in 1960 prior to the deaths of his mother and brother, the closest name in the journal being “Camus”. Reverberations from the writer
Albert Camus’s untimely death may reach as far back as that of Cornell’s father, prompting Cornell to consider calling a box Homage to Camus (p. 270). It is significant for the theory of creativity that loss of a writer, whose Rebel Cornell admired, should escalate into an obsessive need to mourn. This makes of the box, which may or may not have been attempted, a concretizing of feelings so disturbing that they needed an “objective” intermediary to receive and contain them. The “object proper” from the unconscious comes into play in the act of re-supplying a lost attachment object. Making a box would externalize the feelings and at least begin healing.
Cornell’s boxes should perhaps be thought of as solidified music, complex harmonies visually agreeable and, at their best, allied to “the music of the spheres”. Certain of the cosmological assemblages suggest this more than those using every-day objects, or from observing nature; but even with these it is tempting to make Cornell into a Platonist composing to invoke the visual evidence of a purer reality of essences. As far as is known, he never tried to incorporate actual music into a box; the idea of a clever swiss music box, complete with warbling birds, did not appeal any more than did the beguiling Dutch interiors of Van Hoogstraten’s peep-boxes. (Certain boxes, such as An Image for the Two Emilies (1954), do produce a tinkling sound when agitated, but this is trivial beside Cornell’s larger intention.) Cornell, a master of imaginative extension, rejected the whimsical and sentimental, such as found in Victorian parlour dioramas or stuffed animals behaving like humans, in favour of drawing the imagination beyond its usual limits into archetypal realms. Theorizing synesthesia, say in the manner of Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), was not Cornell’s bent. Nor was following Carl Jung into dense Germanic speculation on the origin and meaning of archetypes. Perhaps this was fortunate for preserving the simple, playful constructions with such surprising capacity to extend every-day objects into realms of awe and wonder.