Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism

272 Pages·2021·141.303 MB·English

by  Marci Kwon

E N C H A N T M E N T S
Joseph Cornell
and
American Modernism


Marci Kwon
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 33 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM

For David, my imagination
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 44 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM
For David, my imagination
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 55 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM
Copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the
intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress
and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global
exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to
reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission.
Requests for permission to reproduce material from
this work should be sent to [email protected]
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
COVER: Joseph Cornell, A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova: Homage to
the Romantic Ballet, 1946. Glass, paint, wood, photostats, mirrors, paperboard,
feathers, velvet, and rhinestones, 91/2 × 13 × 4 inches. Menil Collection,
Houston, TX, gift of Alexander Iolas.
DETAILS: endpapers, fig. 2.30; page I, fig. 1.27; page II, figs. 1.1, 1.9, 1.25, 3.26, 4.1,
and 5.2; pages IV–V, fig. 3.39; page XIV, fig. 1.3; page 246, fig. 5.23
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Names: Kwon, Marci, author.
Title: Enchantments : Joseph Cornell and American modernism /
Marci Kwon.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022667 (print) | LCCN 2020022668 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780691181400 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780691215020 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cornell, Joseph— Criticism and interpretation. |
Modernism (Art)— United States.
Classification: LCC N6537.C66 K89 2021 (print) |
LCC N6537.C66 (ebook) | DDC 709.2— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022667
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022668
British Library Cataloging- in-P ublication Data is available
Design by Jenny Chan / Jack Design
This book has been composed in ITC Avant Garde Gothic and Sentinel.
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in Italy
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 66 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM

C O N T E N T S
IX Preface  The Great and the Small
XV Acknowle�dgm ents

1 Introduction Enchantments

�
21 Chapter One • Parts of a World

57 Chapter Two • Universe to Cosmos

93 Chapter Three  Folk into Myth

131 Chapter Four  Enchantresses
163 Chapter Five 4 Rooms and Skies
191 Epilogue  Some Varieties of Enchantment
�
220 Notes
247 Index
254 Credits
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 77 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM
FIG. P.1 Joseph Cornell, Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, 1940. Velvet-l ined
wooden box containing glass necklace, jewelry fragments, glass chips, and
glass cubes resting in slots on glass, 43⁄4 × 117⁄8 × 81⁄4 inches. Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 88 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM
P R E F A C E The Great and the Small
“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea,
under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam.
“It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.
I suppose this is the reason why gems are used as spiritual
emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments
of heaven.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
I remember the first time I encountered Joseph Cornell. It was 2004, a few months into my
�
sophomore year of college, and the Museum of Modern Art had just reopened in a gleaming
building on Fifty- Third Street. Ascending the ziggurat of escalators to the fifth floor, I
wandered past paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse before arriving at the gallery
dedicated to Surrealism. Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket from 1940 was installed in the
corner of a large plexiglass vitrine (figs. P.1, P.2). Just twelve inches wide, this modest box holds
a world. Glass cubes shine like diamonds, like the paste necklace draped across the box’s lid,
whose rhinestones form an arc of sparkle below a block of blue text. This text tells the tale of
the famed nineteenth-century ballet dancer Marie Taglioni (fig. P.3). While traveling on a
Russian highway one snowy night in 1835, Taglioni’s carriage was stopped by a bandit.
Unfurling a panther’s skin on the icy ground, she proceeded to dance so beautifully that the
robber allowed her to leave unmolested, her jewels still in her possession. The story concludes:
“From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so
precious to her, TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel
casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint
of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice- covered landscape.”
At this moment, Cornell’s work seemed to capture everything I loved about art: its ability
to call forth places and times other than my own, its unabashed investment in the magic of the
aesthetic encounter. Unlike the painters and sculptors who preceded him in MoMA’s galleries,
Cornell eschewed the hallowed mediums of paint, marble, and bronze in favor of altogether
more modest materials. Before my eyes, chunks of glass were transformed into gleaming
repositories of history and memory, precious as the diamonds they mimic.
IX
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 99 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM
Yet I could not help but notice that Cornell’s work seemed at odds with its companions
in the Surrealism gallery, to say nothing of the preceding parade of ambitious paintings and
sculptures. The brutality of André Masson’s bloody fishes, battling amongst haphazard
passages of sand and gesso; the startling juxtaposition of taxidermy parrot and mannequin leg
in Joan Miró’s Object (1936): these works seemed more concerned with shattering illusions
than creating them.1
I was not the first to observe Cornell’s incongruity with canonical narratives of Modern
art. Deborah Solomon’s popular biography presents Cornell as a hermitic figure who, despite
his engagement with New York City culture, remained ensconced in his mother’s basement,
lost in dreams.2 When I returned to the artist years later, I found scholars had done much to
complicate this stubborn caricature. Their books have detailed Cornell’s engagement with
subjects such as astronomy, cinema, childhood, travel, and Surrealism to establish his place in
modernity.3 While sympathetic to the aims of these interpreters, I could not help but notice
that these accounts remained structured by the dualistic oppositions— between belief and
disbelief, ideal and real— that Cornell seemed determined to overcome. Taglioni’s Jewel Casket
is after all an expression of the artist’s belief in the incantatory power of the aesthetic
FIG. P.2 Installation view of the exhibition Painting and Sculpture:
Inaugural Installation, November 20, 2004–D ecember 31, 2005, with
Joseph Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket at bottom left. Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
FIG. P.3 Detail of Taglioni’s Jewel Casket.
X Preface
0011 KKWWOONNtteexxtt__FFIINNAALL__SSRRSS..iinndddd 1100 1111//1111//2200 1111::3311 AAMM