Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism by Marci Kwon (review)

Marci Kwon’s book on American painter and Christian Scientist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is both a superb achievement and a missed opportunity. From the point of view of art historians, it emerges from what is now a significant production of studies of Cornell as the best treatment of the artist’s career, milieu, and work to date. This is no minor achievement, as Cornell is an enigmatic character, and his work is not easy to decode. He is mostly well-known for his collages and boxes full of strange objects found in flea markets and bric-a`-brac shops, with the occasional quality print bought in one of his beloved New York antiquarian bookstores. Historians have generally agreed that Cornell played a crucial role in a revolution leading to a new kind of modernist, or perhaps postmodern, art. But the ultimate meaning of his works often remains elusive to the general public, and Cornell has never become as popular as other modernist luminaries.

Kwon deserves praise not only for her unimpeachable formal analysis of Cornell’s artistic strategies, which had been explored before, but for her innovative and exhaustive study of his multiple, often contradictory, sources—from Surrealism to Romanticism, Symbolism, and folk art— and his interactions with the milieus of avant-garde poetry, cinema, art, and ballet. She also rediscovers an often-ignored but significant part of Cornell’s production, his contribution as illustrator to various magazines. Perhaps the best chapters of the book are those dealing with Cornell’s fascination with ballet dancers long since deceased. Kwon goes beyond the easy psychological explanations that reduce the artist’s gaze on the bodies of young women of a bygone age to voyeurism, and shows how Cornell’s ballerinas are a synthesis of a larger aesthetic project that, Kwon argues, can only be properly understood within the framework of the enchantment/disenchantment paradigm.

Aware of the debate among historians and sociologists of religion whether disenchantment really ever happened, Kwon does not offer a clear-cut answer to this question. Instead she guides us into the enchanted world of Cornell, leaving it to the reader to decide whether it is evidence that the world was never disenchanted, or that modernist art was part of a re-enchantment process, in its own way. It is a world we would not be able to discover without a visual experience of Cornell, and both the author and publisher offer just this—a feast of high-quality images leading us from the artist to his multiple sources.

Kwon succeeds admirably in showing that Cornell’s relevance for art history lies precisely in his role in the process of re-enchantment (or, as some may prefer, in the process of showing that enchantment might have gone underground, but never went away). However, the book misses the opportunity to explore more in-depth Cornell’s relations with Christian Science. Not all forms of re-enchantment are created equal. Cornell was a pious Christian Scientist, and he largely saw the world through the lenses of his religion.

Having written on the subject myself, I agree with Kwon that for the artist, Christian Science was “an epistemological structure that shaped Cornell’s worldview rather than a set of principles he sought to illustrate” (221). But how did Christian Science shape Cornell’s worldview, exactly? Here, a religion scholar would expect more details than those Kwon offers. She mentions some other artists who were Christian Scientists, but does not place Cornell within the long tradition of artists inspired by Christian Science—from James Franklin Gilman (1850– 1929), Violet Oakley (1874–1961), and Evelyn Dunbar (1906–1960), to Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981), Hilda Carline (1889–1950), and Franz Johnston (1888–1949), to name only a few.

Familiar with the work of Sandra Leonard Starr, Kwon may or may not agree with her assertion that “all of Cornell’s work is ultimately a variation on the single theme of Christian Science metaphysics...