Notes
1. Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997) p. 8. Orientation to material objects rather than persons is a well-known attribute of the avoidant/ dismissing attachment style.
2. Carter Ratcliff, “Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Mechanic of the Ineffable” in Joseph Cornell, Kynaston McShine, ed., (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), p. 43.
3. Dore Ashton, A Joseph Cornell Album (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 94.
4. Mary Ann Caws, ed., Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters and Files (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), p. 260. All further references are given by page numbers in the text.
5 Rudolf and Margaret Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: Norton, 1963). See “The Saturnine Temperament”, p. 102f.
6. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, “Joseph Cornelclass="underline" A Biography” in Joseph Cornell, K. McShine, ed., pp. 95, 97.
7. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), p. 345.
8. Solomon, Utopia Parkway, p. 87. Cornell was also afflicted by vacillating indecision, typical of the obsessional personality.
9. Caws, Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind, p. 22.
10. Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 11. See pp. 252-4 on collecting as mood control.
11. Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornell (New York: George Braziller, 1977), p. 9; pp. 10-11.
12. Hartigan, “Joseph Cornelclass="underline" A Biography”, p. 92.
13. Waldman, Joseph Cornell, pp. 9-10.
14. Solomon, Utopia Parkway, p. 9.
15. Ibid., p. 8. Solomon also comments: “To read through Mrs. Cornell’s letters from Westhampton—with their fiery, baroque declarations—is to understand how emotionally wedded she felt to her son and why his relationships with other women had to be conducted in the locked privacy of his fantasies”. p. 326.
16. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan et al., Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Shadow Play Eterniday (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003) For examples of repetition of objects see, for example, plates 14, 18, 21, 33, 40, 44, 45 and 46.
17. Solomon, Utopia Parkway, p. 322.
18. See Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Master of Dreams (New York: Abrams, 2002), p. 8 for Mrs. Cornell’s jealousy of other women entering her house.
19. Ibid., p. 324.
20. Caws, Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind, p. 426.
21. Solomon, Utopia Parkway, p. 294.
22. “What Does Christian Science Teach?” See <www. carm.org/ christian_science/ doctrine> for Mary Baker Eddy’s basic scriptural teachings. As a young man Cornell found relief from persistent stomach complaints by following her teachings.
23. Richard Maurice Bucke, MD., Cosmic Consciousness: A Study of the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901), (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books Inc., 1961), p. 61.
24. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971). See especially chapters 3 and 4. Carl Jung advocated building in wood and stone as playing, in The Black Book. (See Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 2003), p. 245).
25. Hartigan et al., Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Shadowplay Eterniday, pp.224-5.
26. Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Master of Dreams, p. 7. She recalls that he would sometimes forget where he was and that his conversation could be “hard to follow”, “precise at one moment, obscure the next”, p.8.
27. Lindsay Blair, Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 19.
28. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber, nd.) p. 57.
29. Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Stargazing in the Cinema (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 198-9. Lindsay Blair agrees that caged and bound dolls, such as Sequestered Bower, are disturbing and hold a “sinister element” that reveals “desire”. Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order, p. 115. Untitled: Melesande (1951-2) is another example. Cornell never came to terms with hostility in any of its inner or outer manifestations. He seems to have paid little attention to the terrors and destruction of World War II during some of his most productive years. It is sometimes suggested that Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1941) was a response to war, but such deviations from his “peaceable kingdom” are rare.
30. Lindsay Blair, Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order, pp. 72-3.
An Impossible Quest: Male Artists Avoiding
Women
Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell are artists tormented by relations with women whose presence in their lives they can neither affirm nor reject. Attraction-anxiety, affirmation-avoidance, love-hate: the paradox of ambivalence suffuses their art as it did actual relationships. There was no final resolution for any of them, but art went a long way towards defining the problem with a clarity never before possible in the history of culture. This sample of artists was chosen to study in depth as representative of a much larger cohort of similarly motivated artists. It could have been strengthened by psychobiographical studies of such other modern luminaries as Rene Magritte and Willem de Kooning. Undoubtedly a more systematic selection of artists for study would have been preferable, but I hope to have made the point that representations of women that manipulate and distort them result from avoidant psychological defenses operating in the artists themselves.
Some will object that these studies are psychological reductionism with no relevance to modern masters of Picasso’s pre-eminence. But this is the question with which he, and the others, pose the culture as a whole: why such uncritical acceptance of blatant anti-feminine imagery? Why is it that towards the end of the twentieth century visual attacks on the beauty and integrity of womanhood should so obtrude in European and, to a lesser extent, in American art? A little earlier, such artists as Picasso, Bellmer, and Balthus, would have been relegated to the eccentric fringes of art. Cornell would have been seen as an eccentric escapist, not as a maker of mysterious icons central to the culture. Had they not served a powerful group fantasy, a collective anxiety about the viability of male-female relationships, these artists would have been ignored or condemned. But the significant artist is one who uses his personal conflicts to empower an imagery of latent group anxieties just ready to break into awareness. The significant artist finds a new vocabulary of images for personal anxieties and dramas that former generations regarded as too outrageous or
immoral to articulate. These anxieties and dramas are recognized by the group as resembling their own, perhaps not to the full extent of Picasso’s lasciviousness, Belmer’s sadism or Balthus’s weird interest in young girls but matching up enough to those of the artists to make them into cultural heroes. We are excited by those artists who show us what we already feel but were too timid (or “repressed”) to dare represent in word or image.