This past week, the museum's Deputy Director invited me to accompany her to see two newly acquired Joseph Cornell boxes. A real treat. She knew I had written my master's thesis on Cornell and was a long time devotee of the artist. The boxes didn't disappoint. Untitled (Pink Palace) depicts a pale rose colored palace set against a wintry backdrop; and Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet has a cut-out cockatoo parakeet perched atop a branch, with trinkets and clippings of literary text in the bottom drawer.
The meaning of the boxes is still a mystery, but some connections can be made. Both boxes came as a gift from the author and writer Donald Windham, who died earlier this year. The Museum's cockatoo parakeet box has a typed inscription to his new friend, Donald Windham: "Keepsake Parakeet, To Don from Joseph" (signed Joseph).
Cornell first met Windham in the early 1940s at the New York offices of Dance Index magazine, where Windham served as guest editor. An avid collector of dance memorabilia, Cornell was recruited to design collage covers and put together the entire contents of several issues of the magazine.
Just down the hall from the Dance Index offices were the classrooms of the School of American Ballet where Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine held court. Cornell would often sit in on the dance rehearsals and draw inspiration from the dancers, many of whom became his friends and served as muses for his box constructions and collages.
Although more research is needed, our newly acquired Untitled (Pink Palace) box probably alludes to the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, the basis of a famous Romantic ballet revived in the 1940s. Tamara Toumanova, a protégé of Balanchine's, played the role of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. When I interviewed the ballerina years ago for my master's thesis, Toumanova recalled meeting Joseph Cornell and said that he sometimes stood in the wings during her performances and clipped feathers and netting from her costumes to be incorporated into his box constructions.
I think she'd be happy to know that these pieces have made their way into the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
