Day Seven: More Cornell

Untitled (Solar Set), c. 1956-58. Construction, 11 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 3 5/8 inches. Collection Donald Karshan, New York

Untitled (Pharmacy). 1943. Construction, 15 1/4 x 12 x 3 1/8 inches. Collection Mrs Marcel Duchamp, Paris.

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall). 1945-46. Construction, 20 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/2 inches. Collection Mr. and Mrs. E.A. Bergman, Chicago.

Untitled (Soap Bubble Set). 1936. Construction 15 1/4 x 14 1/4 x 5 7/16 inches. Wadsworth Athenum, Hartford, Conn. The Henry and Walter Keney Fund.

In the fifties and sixties, “assemblage” has emerged as a distinctly American form of sculpture. Like Surrealist objects, a lineal descendant of collage, assemblage–the art of joining unlikely objects or images together in a single context–has as ancestors Duchamp’s 1913 Bicycle Wheel and Picasso’s 1914 Absinthe Glass with Spoon. Because it uses material from the environment and lends itself to eccentric experiments, assemblage seems especially suited to the American temperament.

Like Schwitters, Cornell is able to distill poetry and drama from ordinary fragments. Cornell is . . . attracted to precious fragments–crystal goblets, bits of sparkle, etc. His “boxes” are actually three-dimensional collages, star-maps of a private universe. In fact astronomical imagery is important to Cornell’s iconography. His objects in their new context take on new meanings akin to poetic metaphor. – Barbara rose. American Art Since 1900. Holt, Reinhart and Winston. 1987.

Upcoming . . . Day Eight: Richard Hamilton.

Day Six: Joseph Cornell

There is nothing quite as compelling as a Cornell box. Intricately constructed, infinitely detailed, Cornell creates his own little world in each box. There is much speculation about the origins of Cornell’s art. He had seen the work of the Dadaists, and especially Max Ernst’s collages, but perhaps more importantly, Cornell had a younger brother, Robert, who was disabled to a large extent, and unable to care for himself. Cornell began making toys for him to keep the boy entertained. “He lived with his mother and his invalid brother Robert until their deaths in the mid 1960’s, only a few years before his own death in 1972,” Kynaston McShine, Introducing Mr. Cornell 1980.

These two boxes from the Medici series perfectly encapsulate Cornell’s ability as a toymaker and also as an obsessive collector of ephemera.

In his book, History of Modern Art, H.H. Arnason says that Cornell was a man of culture; his interests as indicated in his box constructions, ranged over much of the art and literature of the Western world. In the 1930s he became acquainted w/ the Julien Levy Gallery, a center for the display of European surrealism. Here he met many of the surrealists, exiled in the US as a result of Nazism and WWII. His first experiments with collage were inspired by the works of Max Ernst, and soon Julien Levy was exhibiting his small constructions along with the European surrealists. BY the mid-1930s Cornell had settled on his formula of a simple box, glass fronted usually, in which he arranged objects, photographs, maps. With these he created a personal dream world related to surrealist assemblage, but also to Renaissance perspective paintings and to 19th century American tromp l’oeil paintings–in the last case translated back into three-dimensional objects which first inspired them.

Cornell’s boxes are filled with associations–of home, family, childhood, of all the literature he had read and the art he had seen. The only proper analogy to them is Proust. His entire life seems to have been devoted to the remembrance of things past, a nostalgia for a lost childhood or a lost world.

Day five: Little man, 1986

Many of the collages I’ve made use photography. In the back ground of this image is the negative space created from cutting out two of the Three Stooges for a collage made for an article in the Washington Post. I’ve always liked this little guy and his repeated image. In literature the use of a repeated image often underscores some larger construct that the author has in mind. There is no larger construct here.

Day four: technology, 1986

This is a good example of the interplay of imagery, the juxtaposition of lines meeting lines, abstract meets representational. I just got off on putting all of the golden tones together and then breaking the color up w/ bright blue and red. At the time I was referencing Max Ernst. i wanted the image to be machine like and organic at the same time.

Day three

I am someone who got a college degree by always having something to say about art or literature. I believe that it involves the search for identity, and that figuring out who you are somehow frees up the the ability to appraise all kind of art, music, literature. I have no idea if this is true, it’s just something I believe and I’m going with it. The exception to this opinion is that when it comes to my own work, I don’t necessarily have as much to say. I like the composition of this collage. It was made in 1986 & I have kept it around all these years, never in my portfolio, but just sitting on a shelf where I can see it.

Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1887-1948)

Kurt Schwitters was a collage artist living in Hannover, Germany, creating two dimensional collages from found objects, gum wrappers, ciggarette papers, newspapers, ticket stubs, whatever caught his eye. But what Schwitters called his life’s work was the Merzbau which he began in his home in 1923.

The walls and ceiling were covered with a diversity of three – dimensional shapes and the room itself was crowded with materials and objects – or “spoils and relics”, as Schwitters himself put it – which were contained in countless nooks and grottoes, some of them totally obstructed by later additions to the work, with the result that their contents then existed only in one’s memory of the Merzbau in one of its former states. –Zvonimir Bakotin from http://www./merzbau.org

Schwitters began his first Merzbau in his home in Hannover, Germany in1923. It began as an abstract plaster sculpture with apertures dedicated to his dadaist and constructivist friends and containing objects commemorating them: Mondrian, Gabo, Arp, Lissitzky, Malevich, Richter, Mies van der Rohe, and Van Doesburg. The Merzbau grew throughout the 1920’s with successive accretions of every kind of material until it filled the room. Having then no place to go but up, he continued the construction with implacable logic into the second story.

H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art, 1984.

The most amazing part of Kurt Schwitters story is that he was excluded from the German Dadasts (1918-1923), as though what he was doing was somehow not within the realm of the Dadasts. A listing of the German group includes Raoul Hausmann, & George Grosz, but no others that are particularly well known.  Both Hausmann and Grosz would later go on to claim that they had also created photomontage along the way. This was not the case, as the French had papier colle derived from cubist collage. See Pablo Picasso’s chair w/ caning from 1912, on this site. ABOUT PAGE.

Romare Bearden 1911-1988

Collage is the most modern expression of art. Combining static images to create a kind of kinetic image, albeit a technically motionless image, that achieves motion through the strategic placement of the individual components, creating tension. Look at the work of Romare Beardon, 20th century collage artist. His piece Train Whistle Blues from 1964 is so full of motion that it practically jumps off the page.  How does he do it? Beardon uses the contrast of proportions to make his collage move by aligning the segments to create a kind of visual tension between the elements. Your eye is drawn through the  page following the motion, attempting to make sense of it all.

This second collage is Train Whistle Blues II, also from 1964. Again, Bearden creates such surprising juxtapositions by varying the scale of his elements. He also incorporates paint or chalk or even pencil markings right on the surface of the collages, enhancing the effects. His collages are very cubist in style, the elements of time and space are exposed from many facets, yet all contained within a single frame. And that is what makes collage so essentially modern, that rush of layered information coming at you, bombarding you non-stop. Bearden also uses photography and photo copying to repeat and exaggerate the images.

One last collage, Pittsburgh Memo, another from 1964, the year of his best work. Here you can really see how Bearden manipulates scale, breaking down the all the elements of facial features and reassembling them into something completely unexpected, yet still familiar enough that we’re able to see ourselves in these images.