Joseph Cornell, who died in 1972 aged 69, belongs to the tradition of the homebody-artist. A gray whisper of a man, he eschewed the thrills of travel for a lifetime of tea at his home on Utopia Parkway in Queens. His medium was the Box – that is, the Victorian-era shadow box, and he spent his days in his basement workshop, assembling cork balls, paper birds and other penny storage material into improbably poetic settings that owed much to French surrealism.
Among the cities he never visited was Washington, DC, so one wonders what he would make of the news that the National Gallery just acquired an actual truckload of his work — some 20 boxes and seven collages from across his career. The gift comes from Robert and Aimee LehrmanWashington collectors.
Robert Lehrman, curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and grandson of the co-founder of Giant Foods, a supermarket chain, has lectured extensively at Cornell and bought his first work in the early 1980s. children’s mystery,” he said. “I like that his work is both very simple and very complex.”
Somehow, it’s hard to imagine Cornell’s intimate boxes nestled comfortably in the marble halls of the National Gallery. The modest scale of his work, reeking of the romantic past, contrasts it with the epic proportions and air of formality of IM Pei’s East Wing, whose atrium alone is likely to boost a visitor’s daily step count. .
On the other hand, Cornell seems perfect for the nation’s capital because its history is so quintessentially American. He was persistent, frantic and consumed with the beauty of ordinary objects. he persisted with his art in the face of immense loneliness. Living with his mother and disabled brother, he found inspiration in the work of other artists and dedicated his boxes to figures from composer Franz Schubert to poet Emily Dickinson to television actress Patty Duke.
The Lehrmans’ gift, which includes about half of their Cornell holdings, “is significant, significant, significant,” said Harry Cooper, the senior curator and head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art. Although the museum has received much larger endowments, the gift, he said, is unique because it targets a single artist and presents his work in unusual depth.
“I would say 20 Cornell boxes and seven collages brings us to the Art Institute as one of two major collections of one of the great artists of the 20th century,” Cooper said. “That doesn’t happen every day.” The collection he mentioned in Art Institute of Chicago consists of 37 works acquired in 1982 by Chicago collectors Lindy and Edwin A. Bergman.
Taking its cue from Bergman’s installation, the National Gallery will display its Cornells grouped by family in a horizontal wall case in an upstairs gallery. He plans to keep several Cornells on display at all times. the first shift opens on Thursday.
The works in the Lehrman gift range in date from 1939 to 1969. About half are in Cornell’s rich surrealist style of the 1940s, featuring Medici princes and romantic-era ballerinas. Others belong to the stripped-down style of the 1950s, especially the Aviary boxes, whose almost empty, white-painted interiors can be seen as precursors to the geometric obsessions of the 1960s minimalists.
The star of the collection is “A Parrot for Juan Gris” (1953-54), a quietly riveting object featuring a paper cutout of a white cockatoo perched on a branch. He is a strange bird, inhabiting a dusty room with no window or view. The walls are lined with paper stuff — sheets of newspaper and scraps of a map.
In some ways, the bird might seem to anticipate a type of person in Washington, someone surrounded by a news world, surrounded by headlines. But when you look closely, you see that the newspapers are in French and are fading with age. The map is of Mozambique. As in every Cornell box, all paths lead away from the present and into the mists of fantasy.