Joseph Cornell

Soap Bubble Set, 1948, is a uniquely beautiful and nuanced example of a Cornell assemblage that melds the humanities and science with the metaphysical. Cornell guides the viewer through the physical and spiritual world with everyday objects and materials that allude to astronomy, literature, and art history.

The box was an ideal vessel for Cornell’s deliberately sourced objects as it allowed the artist to create a dramatic mise-en-scène for the viewer to explore. The structure of the box itself suggests a proscenium, and its azure velvet-lined interior stands in for theater curtains that invite the viewer to peer past the panes of glass into its interior scene. The use of the deep blue velvet also pays homage to 19th-century French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

Cornell may have found a counterpart in Mallarmé, who was interested in the fusion of poetry, art, and form. Mallarmé’s poems were often arrangements of words dispersed on the page in varying fonts of different size and italicization with uneven spacing between them. At first, the individual words seem unrelated; it is only through their sounds and the reader’s associations that their multilayered meanings are revealed. The dialogue between the objects in Cornell’s boxes acts similarly. Taken individually, the objects appear haphazard. Yet, upon closer examination, their careful curation creates a visual poem that would make the French Symbolist poet proud. As Hilton Kramer wrote in Cornell’s obituary: “The poets recognize Cornell as one of their own.” Indeed, two of Mallarmé’s most well-known works are titled “L’Azur” and “La pipe”: two of the main elements found in Soap Bubble Set, 1948.

Cornell uses the box and its elements to guide the viewer on a journey into his poetry. On the lower-right of its exterior, Soap Bubble Set, 1948, features a drawer whose interior hints at the multiple layers of meaning that the artist has imbued throughout the work. Partitioned into six slots, four of which contain corks, the interior of the drawer is lined a page of text by 18th-century French writer Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. Cornell’s use of groups of four is suggestive of the four classical elements – air, water, earth, and fire – which pop up throughout the box. The two empty slots perhaps allow for the possibility of later additions with new discoveries. Furthermore, by placing the corks below and “hidden” from the rest of the sculptural composition, Cornell underscores, perhaps in the literal sense, this theme as present in the work as a whole. In either case, the presence of the drawer acts as a perfect gateway into understanding how Cornell used seemingly mundane objects to enter and play in deeper, more intellectual worlds.

One such object is the Dutch clay pipe attached to a piece of driftwood in the lower-right of the interior of the box. Cornell’s personal fascination with clay pipes and the bubbles they produce catalyzed in 1939 when he saw Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, 1733/34, at the World’s Fair. The painting depicts a boy leaning on a window sill and blowing a bubble while another boy next to him attentively watches. Intentionally or not, Chardin’s rendition of bubble-blowing alludes to Dutch memento mori and vanitas paintings, where the expansion and subsequent bursting of bubbles served as a reminder of the transience of life. Cornell, whose family was of Dutch origin, was so struck by the Chardin painting that he acquired a large collection of Dutch clay pipes at the World’s Fair from that country’s pavilion.

Cornell’s placement of the pipe in this and other boxes firmly sets his work into the lexicon of art history while injecting the box with the symbolism of the pipe and its product. Furthermore, its position within the box, situated directly below a German-language map of the orbital path of the Earth and moon around the sun, allows the artist to add his own take on the bubbles’ meaning. An avid follower of scientific developments, Cornell would have been familiar with Edwin Hubble’s 1929 paper that proposed the model for the ever-expanding universe. This phenomenon is mirrored in the swell of the soap bubbles: the swelling bubbles could signify the ballooning universe, or the planets that populate it. In the words of Cornell himself, “the fragile, shimmering globules become the shimmering but more enduring planets–a connotation of moon and tides–the association of water less subtle, as when driftwood pieces make up a proscenium to set off the dazzling white of sea-foam and billowy cloud crystalized in a pipe of fancy.” (J. Cornell, quoted in W. Copley, Objects by Joseph Cornell, exhibition catalogue, Copley Gallery, 1948, n. p.).

The aforementioned map and its reference to the cosmos only partially explains its position in the work. It is not only a nod to Cornell’s fascination with science and the Age of Discovery: the map also contains astrological symbols for the corresponding positions of the Earth’s yearly orbit. By combining science and astrology, the map bridges the gap between the spiritual and the physical, and, as such, it acts as a legend for engaging with the other objects in the work. This is further reinforced by Cornell’s choice of a German-language map and by its position at right-center within the box.

The fact that the map is in German may be a reference to pioneering German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who built upon Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe to describe the laws of elliptical planetary motion. Kepler lived in an era that did not distinguish between astronomy and astrology, and, to support his belief that God created the cosmos in an intelligible way, he incorporated religious and spiritual reasoning into his scientific theories. The map’s location – above the earthly pipe and driftwood and below four hanging wooden cylinders with geometric images representing planets and the heavens – underlines Cornell’s adoption of a similar mindset. If the pipe on the driftwood suggests the voyages of ships across vast bodies of water during one Age of Discovery, then, for Cornell, the map and the symbolic planets foreshadow the dawn of a new age exploring the planets and the stars and the spiritual implications those discoveries provoke. Cornell uses the map to illustrate, both literally and figuratively, that the scientific discovery of the vastness of the cosmos serves as a gateway for the imagination to run wild.

Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972) was born in Nyack, New York and lived his entire adult life in Flushing, Queens. As a teenager, Cornell studied at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, but before graduating he returned home, where he lived with his widowed mother and wheelchair-bound brother. He never left New York City after that; instead, he let his imagination do the traveling.

Although Cornell was not the strongest student, his time at Andover instilled in him a thirst for knowledge that would permeate his artistic career. He was very well-read, and his sophisticated and deep knowledge of literature, science, art, dance, theater, cinema, and music shaped his creations. It is estimated that he owned more than 3,000 books and magazines, as well as a multitude of films and record albums. Cornell also left behind a veritable archive of diaries and letters.

Cornell collected ephemera, memorabilia, and curiosities during his frequent visits to New York City’s museums, bookstores, libraries, and art galleries. He drew inspiration for his famous boxes from displays and dioramas in The Museum of Natural History – these exhibits at the museum originated from 16th-century cabinets of curiosities.

Cornell was not an artist in the traditional sense: he could not paint, draw, or sculpt. His training was unconventional, as he learned how to construct his renowned boxes from his next-door neighbor, a carpenter. Despite his lack of formal art education, however, he quickly became a master of assemblage. He voraciously collected objects while wandering between Queens and Manhattan, and curated collections of seemingly disparate items into cohesive, mystical tableaux.

Cornell’s work was first exhibited in “Surréalisme” at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932. The multimedia exhibition included works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí, among others. While his early work was frequently exhibited alongside that of Surrealist artists, Cornell himself staunchly opposed being classified as a Surrealist.

Both Cornell and the Surrealists rejected traditional representations of reality.However, whereas Surrealists created works through the process of involuntary association that sought to express the unconscious, Cornell saw his art as the result of cataloguing and classifying objects and associating them with fantasies and childhood memories. In other words, his process was deliberate and not one of what the Surrealists termed “chance encounters.” As a devoted Christian Scientist, Cornell believed engaging with the subconscious and memory was a very spiritual undertaking.

Soap Bubble Set, 1936
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Soap Bubble Set, 1948
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois USA

Soap Bubble Set, 1948
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Soap Bubble Set, 1949-50
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA

Blue Soap Bubble, 1949-50
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

Soap Bubble Set (Lunar-Space Object), ca. 1959
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

SoSoap Bubble Set, 1960
La Galleria Nazionale, Roma, Italy