Cornell and Artists

Kusama's relationship with Joseph Cornell

For an artist who advocated free love during her time as the high priestess of the hippies in late 1960s New York, Kusama is remarkably discreet about her own romantic connections.She describes Donald Judd as an early boyfriend, but the artist with whom she forged arguably her closest relationship was Joseph Cornell. When they first met in the mid-1960s, Kusama was in her thirties; Cornell was twenty-six years her senior. Yet the two formed an unlikely bond that latest over many years. Kusama has described their relationship as passionate yet platonic. Cornell became infatuated with the younger artist, calling her several times a day and making and sending her charming collages with personal messages (‘Have some tea and think of me’; ‘Happy Easter to Yayoi’).

Kusama spent days at Cornell’s Queens home, where he lived with his mother. The two artists sketched each other; Kusama still owns a number of drawings Cornell made of her. At the time she was living hand to mouth, and Cornell, taking pity on her situation, gave her a number of his works to sell.
This early experience of art dealing was to lead Kusama to a temporary new profession on her return to Tokyo in the early 1970s, when for a time she acted as an art import agent, sourcing Western works to sell to Japanese clients. Her sales career was short-lived however, as the oil crisis and subsequent recession destroyed her market.

Cornell died in 1972, and Kusama felt this loss deeply. His legacy to her had not ended, however. When she returned to Japan she had brought with her boxes of magazine cuttings and other collage materials Cornell had given her. In the subsequent years, as Kusama began to build her artistic career again, she used these materials in a series of luminous collages. These works were to signal Kusama’s re-emergence to the Japanese art scene after her American sojourn. They also acted as a form of mourning for the American artist who had had such fondness and affection for her.

Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp ... in Resonance -- The Duchamp Dossier

The expatriate Frenchman Marcel Duchamp met the American artist Joseph Cornell in New York in the early 1930s. In the early 1940s Duchamp engaged Cornell to assist him in assembling the deluxe editions of Duchamp's new project, the miniature "museum" of his work, commonly referred to as the Boîte-en-valise. At this time Cornell also began to formally assemble his Duchamp Dossier, a work that contains 118 items ranging from Mona Lisa postcards, dry-cleaning receipts, and correspondence, toBoîte-en-valise fragments, readymades, and a study by Duchamp for his Allégorie de Genre. Cornell's Duchamp Dossier thus provides a particularly rich source of insight into both artists' creative lives during several crucial decades.

The Duchamp Dossier (c. 1942-53) was discovered in Cornell's studio shortly after his death in 1972. Unlike many of his other dossiers, this one was never shown publicly and remained unpublished in Cornell's lifetime. Cornell compiled most of the material for theDossier during the years 1942 to 1946, although it includes some items from the 1930s and 1950s.

Many items in the Dossier document Cornell's work in assisting in the assembly of Duchamp's Box-in-Valise: Duchamp's written requests for more Boxes, and an improvised receipt based on the cover of a Long Island Railroad conductor's booklet. Individual elements of Duchamp's Box-in-Valise -- the reproductions of his early paintings, for example -- can also be found in the Duchamp Dossier.

Cornell was an avid correspondent, and the Dossier derives much of its flavor from the postal system -- stamps, telegrams, postcards. We find several communications from Duchamp, a note from the art dealer Julien Levy, and remnants of envelopes bearing intriguing return addresses such as that of the artist Piet Mondrian. A group of nine letters from Mary Reynolds, Duchamp's longtime companion, reveals her own close friendship with Cornell and her delight in the works of art that Cornell sold and gave to her. With typical brevity, Duchamp relied on a postcard to inform Cornell of his imminent departure from New York at the end of the war: "Au revoir / affecteusement / Marcel.

Questioning Authority: Chris Benfey on Joseph Cornell

Cultural critic Chris Benfey, Mellon Professor of English and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor, recently reviewed the Joseph Cornell exhibition at the new Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, for (Slate.com). The show, which features a wide range of the twentieth-century American artist’s films, boxes, and collages, will be at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from April 28 to August 19.

QA: The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum has several works of art by Cornell. What are their subjects and why are they significant?

CB: There are a dozen works by Cornell in the museum including three boxes. The rest are collages of the kind he did late in his life, and they include subjects he returned to again and again. Cornell was passionate about ballet, and collected all sorts of objects and documents related to nineteenth-century ballerinas. One of the Mount Holyoke collages is called Tristesse Ballerinette, which I suppose you could translate as the sadness of a little ballerina. Another is called The Moon, one of the hundreds of boxes and collages inspired by astronomy.

QA: Why was Cornell interested in poet Emily Dickinson?

CB: Both Cornell and Dickinson were loners who holed up in their houses and created utterly distinctive works of art. We know them by their addresses: Emily Dickinson on Main Street in Amherst, [Massachusetts]; Joseph Cornell on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. Cornell first became interested in Dickinson when he came across her photograph, taken when she was around 16 during her year at Mount Holyoke. The thought of Dickinson alone in her room writing poems became an obsession for Cornell, and he began creating his distinctive boxes and collages inspired by her life and poetry.

QA: What are your favorite Cornell boxes and why?

CB: I love the box titled Toward the Blue Peninsula (For Emily Dickinson), from around 1953. It shows a white room with a small window looking out on a blue sky. As you look at the box, you realize that it’s a bird cage, too, with wire mesh. There’s a little perch at the bottom of the box, but the perch is empty. The absent bird is Emily Dickinson. His Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) is amazing. It’s both a pinball game and a mysterious portrait of the very young Lauren Bacall, who had just starred in Howard Hawks’s film To Have and Have Not. Cornell thought Bacall looked like a lonely young woman in a hotel room, a bit like Emily Dickinson in her room in Amherst or Joseph Cornell on Utopia Parkway.