That Old White Magic. - Review - book review

Jodi Hauptman. Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 240 pp., 36 color ills., 72 b/w. $40.

The actress Hedy Lamarr died on January 19, 1999, at the age of eight-six. The photograph featured in the obituary in the New York Times depicts Lamarr in the arms of Charles Boyer in the 1938 film Algiers. Lamarr gazes past Boyer's shoulder with ethereal, far-away eyes as if longing for some imagined other world. It is just such a cinematic gaze that would capture and inspire Joseph Cornell, whose life and work paralleled the rise of the motion picture industry in the United States.

Similar to Dickran Tashjian's 1993 book Gifts of Desire, in which Tashjian explores a select grouping of Cornell's works as offerings of reverence to the objects of his affection, loch Hauptman's Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema explores a particular aspect of Cornell's work: his "portrait-homages" of Hollywood actresses. The primary subjects discussed here are Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Jennifer Jones, Hedy Lamarr, and Marilyn Monroe, all of whom he commemorated in box-constructions and collage, and, Rose Hobart, for whom Cornell produced a filmic collage.

Although Cornell's muses were not limited to screen actresses (I would argue that theater and the ballet were equally influential to his oeuvre), Hauptman asserts that to understand Cornell's oeuvre requires a view through the lens of a motion picture camera." (5), and as such argues that the artist's camera-eye informs all of his work. Initially fascinated by penny arcades and silent films, Cornell built up a visual vocabulary based on cinematic images. With the exception of Rose Hobart, Hauptman explores only those films directed by Cornell that support the author's thesis. Some of Cornell's earliest works, dating from the early 1930s, are based on optical toys. Informed by motion photographers like [acute{E}]tienne Jules Marcy as well as the penny arcade, Cornell created games, or "jouets surr[acute{e}]aliste," supporting Hauptman's assertions.

Abandoning a chronological organization of Cornell's work, Hauptman chooses to uncover Cornell's methods of production through his portrait-homages. Beginning with The Enchanted Wanderer, she reveals Cornell's methods of accumulation, archiving, and processes of mapping and journeying. Hauptman guides us through his portrait-homages, along the way acknowledging the multiple influences on Cornell's work besides film--nineteenth-century Romantic and Symbolist literature, Surrealism, Christian Science, and the streets of New York--as well as sources that parallel his work, especially the writings of Walter Benjamin. Hauptman equates Cornell's voracious archival appetite with that of Benjamin's, particularly in The Arcades Project, which has recently been translated into English. Benjamin scoured the urban landscape of Paris in search of fragments in order to preserve and re-create place and time, much as Cornell used the flotsam and jetsam he collected while idling through the streets of New York. The differenc e is that while just as real to him, Cornell used his trouvaille to create histories imagined, rather than to re-create a certain place or period of time as Benjamin did with nineteenth-century Paris. More akin to his object searching was Andr[acute{e}] Breton, who, like Cornell, exalted the found object, and imbued it with magical qualities lodged in the subconscious.

Preferring the images of the silent screen untainted by the human voice, Lamarr reminded Cornell of a film star he would have seen in the silents. Originally published in the journal View in 1942, The Enchanted Wanderer takes us on a gender-bending excursion through the imagined time traveling of Lamarr. The impetus for Cornell to create The Enchanted Wanderer was Lamarr's many roles in which she portrayed characters with masculine traits. It is curious that Hauptman's reading of The Enchanted Wanderer fails to mention that Cornell actually corresponded with Lamarr. Although he remained first and foremost a fan, he was not too timid to write to the actress, and it is known that she responded to his letters. It is likely though that he would never actually have had the nerve to arrange to meet her in person.

Cornell did, however, come close to meeting one of the subjects of his portrait-homages. Hauptman recounts an episode that occurred during a exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Exhibiting The Crystal Mask, Cornell persuaded Levy to invite Garbo to view the work, and she agreed to attend. Unable to face the actress, he hid in a hack room in the gallery. After hearing Garbo's criticism of the work, which Hauptman illustrates with a surviving photograph of Cornell "star-gazing" at the image of Garbo in The Crystal Mask, Cornell destroyed it. In this work, and the surviving Untitled (Greta Garbo) (ca. 1939), Cornell encases the actress's image in a daguerreotype-like frame, "mummifying" Garbo's image In an outmoded form of photography in the hopes of preserving her image for eternity.