Thinking inside the box

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear.

The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across the world and dwelt, mentally, in an era earlier than his own.

Art historically, the name Cornell immediately evokes the word ‘box’: his trademark medium was a small wooden case with a glass front. It is largely these that fill the Sackler Galleries at the RA, making this a paradoxical experience: a large exhibition in a fairly small space. Cornell’s boxes themselves are of a convenient size to keep on a desk or dressing-table. But each one may contain a miniature world of images and associations, bric-à-brac and this and that.

A fairly typical example — except that nothing about Cornell quite ran to type — is ‘L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode’ (1940). This consists of an oak casket, lined with marbled paper, with the title and subtitle — cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle — on the interior of the lid. Within are a collection of little glass bottles, topped with cork, and containing mineral specimens and other items. One, carefully labelled ‘reptiles of the Nile’ in minute letters, preserves little spirals of paper presumably representing snakes; another has a tiny photograph, of Cléo de Mérode herself, a dancer and celebrated beauty of the 1890s.