Thinking inside a box

TWO large photographs greet visitors to the Joseph Cornell retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The first shows a squat house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, N.Y., where Cornell lived from 1929 until his death in 1972. The second pictures shelves in the basement packed full of containers, each labeled like last winter’s canning: springs, cordial glasses, pipes.

For decades Cornell regularly took the subway into Manhattan, where he wandered the city visiting galleries and secondhand stores, carting home curios he assembled into a private world of dioramas in the basement. Cornell built his own boxes and sometimes spent years obsessing over the arrangements of his iconic props: celestial maps, seashells, fan magazine clippings of actresses.

“He forever altered the concept of the box -- from a time-honored functional container into a new art form, the box construction,” curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan writes.

Today, Cornell’s assemblages are proudly displayed in museums around the world and his work commands millions of dollars at auction. But it’s still a rare chance to immerse one’s self in Cornell’s universe in depth, which makes the San Francisco show a treat.

Featuring more than 170 constructions spanning the artist’s career, including 30 that have never been on display before, the show amounts to an autobiography of Cornell’s recurrent fascinations: birds, ballet dancers and the color blue.

Called “Navigating the Imagination,” the show was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The retrospective, the first major exhibition devoted to Cornell in more than a quarter of a century, is on display in San Francisco through Jan. 6.

Instead of a chronological order, the exhibition is organized by themes that chart the cross-currents of Cornell’s psyche: cabinets of curiosity, dream machines, nature’s theater, geographies of heaven. The exhibition was put together by Roscoe Hartigan, chief curator at the Peabody Essex, who first worked on a Cornell show when she was an intern in graduate school helping to assemble a memorial retrospective for the artist in 1973.

“What has kept the work fresh for me is that he really demonstrates the power of the imagination,” she says. “There are endless possibilities for discoveries. I have a very emotional response to this work because of its richness.”

Cornell was born in 1903 to a well-off family. He attended Phillips Academy but became the head of his family when his father died in 1917. He went to work as a textile merchant, and at age 26 he moved into the Queens house with his mother and disabled brother, Robert. He outlived both and spent of the rest of his life in the house.

Shy and skinny, Cornell had an outer life that appeared drab. He apparently had no romantic relationships, found his job dull and rarely traveled far from home. Yet he led a thriving inner life, nourished by the cultural vibrancy of New York and the spiritual writings of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy.

He was an omnivorous consumer of poetry, art and music and an inveterate collector of souvenirs from his rambles around the city. Everywhere he went he collected things: driftwood from the shores of Long Island, odds and ends from the attics of relatives. At night he transmuted this ephemera into magic.

Putting it all together

Around 1929, Cornell began constructing Surrealist-influenced collages. The earliest work in the show is a print of a schooner in which a gigantic flower blooms from the aft sails. Inside the flower, a spider spins a web. But more than the mind scape of Surrealism, it was the juxtapositions of the city that really inspired Cornell’s genius.

During the Great Depression, Cornell happened to be walking past an antique store window full of compasses.

“I thought, ‘Everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it?’ ” he remembered. Two blocks later, Cornell spied a shop window full of boxes. Riding the train home, the thought occurred to him to combine the two. He learned carpentry and began building his own glass-fronted boxes. “Poetic theaters,” he called them.

“How I ever get any objects finished, especially with the endless detail that goes into them, is always a mystery to me,” he wrote.

In 1936 Cornell exhibited two boxes in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” show. Soon museums were buying his work. In 1940 Cornell quit his day job, devoting himself to his art as well as the occasional job dressing windows for upscale department stores and designing layouts for fashion magazines. He also began making, or assembling, films. His best known is “Rose Hobart,” in which he took footage from a jungle drama called “East of Borneo” and created a film collage to the namesake actress. A number of Cornell’s rarely seen films are being shown at the San Francisco museum in conjunction with the retrospective.

Cornell’s work could be simple: One box (untitled) frames a pipe with a picture of a dancer cut out into two pieces so that the silhouette appears to be sucked into the mouthpiece while the dancer looks as if it’s flying out of the bowl. Other constructions are virtual mash notes to unattainable objects of adoration, such as one boxed homage to Lauren Bacall.

Often whimsy is the dominant mood. “The Pantry Ballet” showcases a cast of dancing plastic lobsters in skirts, flanked by flatware on the outside of the frame. More often, however, the key notes are of longing and elegy. One box features blue sand pouring into a broken glass and spilling over the jagged edges, evoking passing moments as sharp as they are fleeting.

Although Cornell influenced artists as different as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, another measure of his accomplishment is the effect he seems to have on viewers, who circle around his work again and again, often returning to particular pieces to peer at new details.

“Once people get hooked on Cornell,” observes Janet Bishop, the museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, who organized the San Francisco presentation, “it becomes an enduring passion.”

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