Book features surrealist collages of New York artist

Artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell took the axiom, "the best things come in small packages" to heart. He was known for his "surprising and evocative art in small boxes" and also for his surrealist collages of films, according to Jodi Hauptman, art history.

She is the author of Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema, based on her doctoral dissertation at Yale and published by Yale University Press. Hauptman became interested in photography and film as an undergraduate at Princeton University and pursued this interest in graduate school, where she became acquainted with Cornell's work.

Cornell lived in Queens, N.Y. with his mother and disabled brother, Hauptman said. Self-trained, he had his works first exhibited at galleries and later received recognition with exhibitions at leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Art Institute of Chicago maintains a large collection of the artist's work. Other well-known artists, such as Andy Warhol, visited Cornell at his home, Hauptman said.

"He was an indefatigable collector of found objects, picking up and storing anything that appealed to him, and he haunted New York's second- hand bookstores for prints that could be incorporated into his art. He collected films and made collages of films in addition to his more famous box constructions," Hauptman said.

For example, Cornell created "Homage to the Romantic Ballet" (1945). The inside cover featured a found print of a 19th-century ballerina against a velvet background. Inside the box, also lined with velvet, Cornell placed bits of tulle, beads, glitter, potpourri and butterfly wings--all of which evoke the spirit of the ballet.

In her book, Hauptman focuses on Cornell's art involving movie stars, such as Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe, actresses whom he admired from afar and sought to capture in his boxes or in films.

The box celebrating Lauren Bacall is featured on the cover of Stargazing. Known as the "Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall" (1945-46), the work features a photograph of Bacall from the film To Have and Have Not (also starring Humphrey Bogart), protected behind blue glass. While cubes showing her dog, Bacall as a child and as an adult are on either side, panes above display aerial views of Manhattan skyscrapers. Actually an arcade game, the box is designed so that a ball rolls through glass chutes from top to bottom.

Accompanying the box portrait is a dossier–a collection of Bacall memorabilia, magazine covers and photographs that Cornell added to almost to the time of his death.

The dossier, which included notes by the artist, was of particular interest to Hauptman because of the insights it gave to Cornell's creative process. The dossier "records the genesis and development of the box portrait," she wrote. According to Cornell, the rolling ball wanders through Bacall's life and through the milieu of the cinema representing "a journey."

In the book, Hauptman explores Cornell's relationship with the actresses he enclosed in what might be called, using his evocative phrase, "Crystal Cages." She writes "the artist positions himself as a caretaker or custodian–of their well-being, reputation, history, dignity or innocence... and was well suited to this task...."

A reviewer in The New York Times wrote that Hauptman "deftly analyzes the cinematic motifs and formal devices in [Cornell's] portraits and goes on to probe the ambivalence underlying all of Cornell's work...Hauptman's study hints at the artist's sublimated passions...."

Advance readers praised the book. Cecile Whiting of the University of California wrote, "Hauptman offers many provocative insights about [Cornell's} work" and Johanna Drucker, Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, wrote that the book was "unparalleled for "historical detail and interpretive sophistication...enriching our understanding of this most engaging of American artists."

A visiting assistant professor at UD in 1997-98, Hauptman joined the faculty in 1998.

–Sue Moncure