Katie and her posse visited the Pollock-Krasner House a week ago and she told me that the floor of the studio out back is still spattered with paint: a work of art in itself. (You can walk on it, but you have to wear special slippers.) If ever an artist exemplified intense external emotion best, it’s Pollock. His works are segments of chaos, almost as if that slung paint could go on forever if not for the constraints of the canvas.
I thought about this today as I toured an exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s art from the ’30s through the ’60s on display at the Katonah Museum of Art in the hamlet of Katonah, New York.
Self-contained and insular in his life and art, Cornell is the polar opposite of Pollock. His works demonstrate emotion too, of course, but of reflection or longing, via assemblages he built inside handmade wooden boxes, and more fantastically, inside pocketwatches, antique books and blue-glassed specimen boxes. He’d stock these containers with Boo Radley curios from a lifetime of collecting and hoarding at antique shops and five-and-dime stores. An automobile watchcase contains a tiny silver spoon, fork and knife, with a thin spiral of copper metal and crumbs of pyrite. In a homage to Magritte, Cornell cut uniform coaster-sized discs from photos of the sky and from the pages of a book in French, stacking them neatly in a paperboard powder box along with a lens flecked with white paint.
He spent most of his life holed up in a house in Queens with his mother, crippled brother and an encyclopedic knowledge of art, science, the cinema, ballet, literature, theatre, music and history. He admired actresses and made themed boxed artworks for them. A related work on display at the exhibit, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), is a valise box containing detritus from the life of a fictional character: dozens of postcards and photos, a prayer card and a claim ticket, maps, a calendar page from Saturday, August 17, and a tarnished penny.
After Marcel Duchamp befriended and hired him in the early 1940s, Cornell built boxes for the great dadaist’s boîte-en-valise series. One of these on display contains 69 reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works, including miniature replicas of the Large Glass, a urinal and the Mona Lisa with a moustache.
On my train ride back to Manhattan, a blind couple boarded, each led by a harnessed Labrador retriever trained for public transport. As soon as the couple found free seats, the dogs flattened their bodies and squirmed underneath. Then the man reached down and tucked in his dog’s tail and left rear leg, which were intruding into the aisle. The dogs didn’t appear comfortable with their lack of headroom and the man’s yellow Lab had the doleful look of an animal resigned to its duty. Its head poked into the footspace of the seat behind the couple and the guy there gently bonked the dog’s snout with his shoe by accident before realizing the animal was there. When the couple rose to exit at White Plains, the dogs squeezed out and it appeared as if they were being birthed from the floor of the train.
