Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema
Jodi Hauptman
Yale University Press, 250pp, £25
Who knows what Lauren Bacall thinks of the altar to her that Joseph Cornell constructed after seeing outside a New York movie theatre one night in 1945 a poster for To Have and Have Not? In the most startling chapter in her radical reinterpretation of Cornell, Jodi Hauptman recounts how he was transfixed by Bacall looking at him over her shoulder - "The Look", MGM named their 19-year-old bombshell.
He wrote to the studio and got publicity photographs of Bacall in black silk top and skirt and bare tummy, Bacall as a child, her pet spaniel. Then he mounted them in his Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall, a slot machine game that allowed the user to roll a glass ball past images of the star in smoky black and white, behind midnight blue glass. It is an extraordinary joke about movie fans' masturbatory fantasies.
This is not what most people think of when they think of Joseph Cornell, the untrained American artist who lived all his life with his mother and brother in Flushing, New York, and whose only escape was lonely rambles into Manhattan where he gathered ephemera from second-hand book shops and theatre lobbies to bring back to his basement and assemble in dream-like boxes. Born in 1903, he longed to have lived in the 19th century. Hauptmann's achievement is to drag Cornell into the late 20th. She uses the huge archive of writings and memorabilia also exploited by Deborah Solomon's 1997 biography Utopia Parkway to brilliantly connect Cornell's fantasies to Hollywood history and modern celebrity.
Cornell's foraging, she argues, is typical of modern subcultures of fandom, simultaneously adoring and sinister. In the 1930s and 40s Cornell was one of millions who collected images of Bacall, Garbo, even his more idiosyncratic icons Rose Hobart, Jennifer Jones and child star Deanna Durbin. In Hauptman's book, Cornell emerges as the first pop artist. While Jackson Pollock was out in the Hamptons creating a new abstract art, Cornell was in the streets tapping into shared obsessions, decades before Warhol's Marilyn. Suddenly he looks far more central to the history of American art.
Cornell claimed his art was a dream of "innocence". He wanted to save women on the silver screen from Hollywood's Babylonian captivity. When he put Bacall in a box he thought he was protecting the child inside the husky-voiced star. The same delusion justified his following girls in the rainy New York streets.
Hauptman demonstrates how far from "innocence" Cornell's art is. His art aches with unfulfilled desire, the longing of the fan for the screen goddess. In 1936 he made his own film, Rose Hobart, by cutting up a print of the forgotten, Hollywood melodrama East of Borneo, which has the actress preyed upon by the prince of a volcanic island. Cornell cuts away narrative, sound, and just focuses on Hobart, intercutting her with the erupting volcano. It's such a surrealist masterpiece that when Salvador Dalí saw it at a screening in New York in 1936 he had to be restrained from attacking Cornell, screaming that he had stolen the thoughts out of his head.
Where Cornell differed from Dalí was in his weird American sincerity. He collected detritus from the New York streets to send as a "love letter" to Jennifer Jones after seeing her 1945 film Love Letters. But his only (almost) direct encounter with an idol was with Greta Garbo. In 1939 he made a glass box tribute to Garbo and persuaded gallerist Julien Levy to invite the star to see it. The shy Cornell hid in the office and listened to her criticise his work. Afterwards he destroyed it.
Hauptman's book moves fluently from film to art to biography. She demonstrates how Cornell's art is a mythology of America, using the glass screen of the boxes to replicate the cinema screen: the worlds he creates behind glass are as seductive and unreachable as the fictions of film. Few artists have brought such a passion to the endlessly deferred romance of stardom as Cornell. His Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall is about erotic power and social impotence. It is as sombre as his friend Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even, with Cornell as the eternal bachelor, unable ever to reach his would-be bride Bacall.
The book is less convincing in putting Cornell in his place sexually. Despite his intense, disturbing images of children and women we do not really know the nature of the celibate Cornell's sexuality. In the penultimate chapter Hauptman characterises him as a paedophile terrified of the mature female body. The trouble is that having dragged Cornell out of the antique shop and into the cinema, she pushes him back to the margins.
It is not a useful way of looking at his art. If Cornell is perverse, so is modern culture. As Hauptman shows, he transformed his private fantasies into a description of America. When Joseph Cornell saw Lauren Bacall on a New York street it was as if he looked into the very heart of Hollywood which demands that we consent to love without being loved, to have and have not.
