Cuckoos, kindred spirits, flying machines, and Lauren Bacall all crop up in Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, windows into his exquisitely finite yet infinitely malleable world, now on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We asked three Guardian writers to piece together a few thoughts on the boxes that resonated.
JOSEPH CORNELL: NAVIGATING THE IMAGINATION Through Jan. 6, 2008. Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
Untitled (Renee JeanMarie in La Belle Au Bois Dormant)
Framed by the tangled branches of a darkened wood whose blue-tinted foliage alternately resembles billowing clouds and tufts of feathers, a hazy image of a ballet dancer appears within a cerulean haze, her feet and hands extending into a Y whose end points — right hand, both feet — disappear into the blue ether. Have we come upon Titania in her bower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Venus in her mountain stronghold in Tannhäuser?
As the title of Cornell’s 1949 piece informs us, the dancer is Renée "Zizi" Jeanmaire, a glamorous ballerina of the 1940s known for the daring exuberance she brought to her roles. Cornell was a balletomane who compiled personal dossiers and dedicated shadow boxes to ballerinas both living and dead. Although he never met his beloved 19th-century diva Fanny Cerrito, Cornell made Jeanmaire’s acquaintance, but the 25-year-old remained aloof to her shy fan’s platonic advances. It is fitting, then, that the image of Jeanmaire used by the artist for this box is from her appearance in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Behind a veil of briars, in her crepuscular crystal cage, the dancer is transformed into the slumbering heroine of the Charles Perrault tale: an ethereal beauty suspended in time and inaccessibly distant. Only in Cornell’s retelling there is no prince to break the enchantment. (Matt Sussman)