The cult of Cornell

Dutch clay pipes and Victorian doll heads. Remnants of antique maps and snippets of theatrical handbills. Parrots and cockatoos, starlets and ballerinas, apothecary vitrines and penny-arcade gewgaws. Seashells and postage stamps, thimbles and corks, bric and brac. Found objects from lost worlds. It's the stuff that one man's reveries were made of -- and the raw material for an exquisitely enigmatic body of work that still casts a spell in mint condition.

In these image-saturated times when fanciful visual manipulation is a picnic for anyone who can point and click, you might think that the antiquarian assemblages and old-school cutouts of Joseph Cornell would have taken on the look of cob-webbed knick-knacks hauled out of granddad's attic. Not so: Thirty-five years after his death at age 69 in the plain frame house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, where he had dwelled monkishly since the onset of the Depression years, it's abundantly evident that Cornell's uncanny handiwork has lost none of its power to mesmerize.

It's even safe to say that his mystique has never been stronger: Although he gained a fair share of prestige in Manhattan art circles during his prime, Cornell's posthumous canonization as a touchstone modern visionary and an American master of vernacular iconography far surpasses the modicum of fame he attained in his lifetime. Fantasist, surrealist, avant-garde savant, anatomist of melancholy, the pack rat's pack rat -- call him what you will, this fanatical collector of ephemeral curios seems well on his way to being installed as one of the principal caretakers of our collective unconsciousness.

"Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" is a suitably ceremonious rubric for the major retrospective opening Saturday at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum following its opening run at the Smithsonian last fall, but it could just as easily have been billed Joseph Cornell, Superstar. Orchestrated by chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, a prominent Cornell maven who helped found the Smithsonian's Joseph Cornell Study Center, it's the most lavish exhibition of Cornelliana to be mounted since the landmark 1980 show at the Museum of Modern Art that certified his critical reputation as a seminal figure who permanently altered our ideas about what art is and what artists do.

Not to say it's only the cognoscenti who can't get enough of this "Edison of the ineffable," as the critic Carter Ratcliff has hailed him. Recent years have seen a flourishing Cornell cult spring up among writers and poets raring to channel his eldritch spirit into their own work, and the best gauge of his popular appeal is the steady stream of tribute volumes that champion him as an all-purpose muse for contemporary sensibilities: Among others, poet Charles Simic's recently reissued "Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell"; "Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell," edited by Jonathan Safran Foer; and "The Joseph Cornell Box: Found Objects, Magical Words," by Joan Sommers and Ascha Drake, a primer for precocious kids that comes complete with a prefab do-it-yourself kit.

Why all the adulation? The simplest explanation may be that Cornell's creations continue to prove they're everything they were ever cracked up to be: Supremely original, masterfully wrought, and fathomlessly provocative, betraying no anxiety of influence and transcending all flattery of imitation. With their lapidary jumble of commonplace objects and fetishistic images, the multifarious shadow-box dioramas that made his name -- such as "Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall" and "Medici Slot Machine" -- induce an atmosphere at once homespun and hermetic, hovering in some charged void where language catches its breath before branching off into a hundred different conversations. Cornell wasn't the first genre-bending modernist to seize on the devices and designs of mixed-media montage and the found object as a paradigm shift in conceptual art, but it's hard to think of anyone else who came out sitting as pretty on that cutting edge or broke new ground with such resourceful wherewithal.

But it's not just Cornell's singular prowess that has so many agog -- it's the disarming unlikelihood of it all. Cornell didn't draw or paint. He didn't sculpt or etch. He was no great shakes with any of the customary tools of the trade. He was nobody's disciple and wouldn't have belonged to any salon that would have had him. All he did nevertheless -- most magisterially in the box constructions that Arthur Danto has extolled as "reliquaries infused with deflected eroticism and the magic of hopeless wishes" -- was obsessively fashion handmade totems in his cluttersome basement workshop that were destined to be enshrined as national treasures, relying on little more than maximum-strength elbow grease and a mind's eye like none other.

Outwardly, at least, it was an altogether inauspicious life. Born in the shabby genteel Hudson River resort town of Nyack in 1903, Cornell was the first child of a moderately prosperous mercantile family with an avid interest in music and the arts. His was a latent Victorian upbringing enlivened by the unfolding spectacle of American popular culture in the nearby metropole, and Cornell seems to have had a foot in both worlds forever after, combining a cultivated passion for opera, ballet, and French poetry with an incurable infatuation with movie houses, penny arcades, Woolworth's doodads, and cunning gadgetry of all kinds.

There were also hard knocks: Cornell's father died of leukemia in 1916, his younger brother contracted cerebral palsy, and his mother relocated the family to Queens and took odd jobs to make ends meet. After two years of posting mediocre marks at Phillips Academy in Andover, Cornell returned to New York in 1921 and helped support the family by peddling textile samples in the lower Manhattan garment district. By the time his mother purchased the home on Utopia Parkway in 1929 where he would live out the rest of his days, Cornell's obscurity looked to be complete: A gaunt salary man stealing away time to rummage around Gotham's secondhand grottoes, a preternaturally wistful hoarder of trinkets apparently bent on pickling away in a brine of feckless nostalgia and voyeurism.

Yet if all that makes Cornell sound like a poster child for arrested development, aesthetically he was anything but a naif. His work materialized fully formed from the start, and despite his unmistakable debt to the surrealist montages of Max Ernst and the subversive ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, even his earliest efforts radiated an aura all their own. Never facile or archly derivative, his craftsmanship makes its presence felt with a purity of conception, rigor of execution, and economy of scale that places it in a league unto itself. You can see all the hallmarks of that sovereign aplomb in his very first surviving collage, "Untitled (Schooner)," dating from 1931: A picturesque engraving of a clipper ship delicately outfitted with a monstrous blown rose, inside of which a mutant spider has neatly spun its web into the rigging, as trippy an apparition as ever graced a psychedelic album cover.

Even more arresting is the 1936 masterwork, "Untitled (Soap Bubble Set)," the first of his box constructions. Here is Cornell at his most radically lyrical, making it new and already at the top of his game: A sumptuous French lunar map, four antique wooden blocks suspended over azure fabric, an egg in a cordial snifter, a doll's head perched on a miniature plinth, four specimen discs and a vintage soap-bubble pipe, all fastidiously arrayed in tidy compartments behind glass.

But what exactly does it represent? An occult allegory? A moony ode to vanished childhood? An anchorite's archeology of dreams or cartography of desire? A "theater of the spirits" and "cage for infinity," as the poet Octavio Paz would have it? All these things and none of them, and your wild surmise is as good as anyone else's: Cornell himself is everywhere and nowhere in his talismanic assemblages, a ghostly demiurge of oblique symbolism and runic configurations stealthily compelling the viewer to think both inside and out of the box.

To many eyes these days that's ultimately what makes Cornell such a hot commodity: For all his quixotic idiosyncrasy, he now looks like the herald of a zeitgeist hopped up on the sensory overload of virtual reality and viral allusion, an avatar of our going mania for the mixing and matching of appropriated images and hodge-podge artifacts and for blurring the boundaries between fine art and the flea market. Maybe so, but perhaps Cornell's most exemplary legacy is that his unreconstructed faith in the serendipity of art continues to win converts. Whatever else can be said for his enduring cultural significance, the entrancing little boxes he often conceived of as tokens of sublime affection and devotion are best thought of as holy relics, the ragtag material world redeemed.

David Barber is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. His new book of poems is "Wonder Cabinet."