Children’s Stories and “Child-Time” in the Works of Joseph Cornell (review)

The American assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell (1903–72), who nurtured a fascination with children throughout his life, turned increasingly to an audience of young people as he aged. In her study of Cornell’s interest in childhood and children’s literature, historian of art and visual culture Analisa Leppanen-Guerra reports that Cornell often invited neighborhood children into his Queens studio for afternoon tea; lent several of his famous box constructions to the Central Children’s Room of the New York Public Library in the 1950s; and, in 1972, staged an exhibition called “For Children Only” at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York. At this exhibition, “all 26 works were displayed at children’s eye-level, and the opening reception eschewed the traditional wine and cheese in favor of cherry cola and brownies” (7).

Cornell loved children for their “unfrozen” minds, reveling in what he saw as an innocent ability to play with the boundaries of time and space. Leppanen-Guerra writes that Cornell’s adherence to the Romantic vision of innocent, uninhibited childhood, along with his devout Christian Science beliefs in childhood as “a return to an original state of grace,” meant that he viewed the cultivation of childlike qualities as an escape from bourgeois conformity (4). In choosing “child-time” as her major theme of this book, Leppanen-Guerra emphasizes Cornell’s investment in the libratory potential of this internal escape. Leppanen-Guerra suggests that in his own somewhat eccentric life, Cornell “consciously chose to play the part of a Sleeping Beauty, turning away from the mundane adult world in order to cultivate a life of the mind based on the imaginative capabilities of the child” (212).

Scholars in the field of children’s literature are increasingly interested in the reciprocal relationship of children’s literature and culture and avant-garde art movements in the first half of the twentieth century. The September 2012 European Science Foundation conference on Children’s Literature and the European Avant-Garde, for example, scheduled speakers addressing avant-garde-inspired changes in children’s picture books produced in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Brazil, Russia, and Sweden. Leppanen-Guerra’s book does comparative work by situating Cornell’s oeuvre alongside that of such European Surrealists as Max Ernst and Andre Breton, while also showing how Cornell’s work used iconic children’s stories—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Little Mermaid,” among others—to explore the potentially flexible nature of time and experience.

While Cornell did produce some works specifically for children, as described above, in his case the reciprocity between children’s literature and his art was largely a one-way street. His work was heavily invested in themes inspired by childhood and children’s literature, and he viewed his work as appropriate for both a child audience and, as Leppanen-Guerra writes, “those adults who attempted to maintain what Cornell considered child-like qualities: playfulness, innocence, and curiosity” (6). Yet he never produced a work, like a picture book, that could be widely consumed by a child audience.

The major subject of this monograph is Cornell’s pursuit of the theme of “child-time” across multiple media. The artist, informally allied with the Surrealist movement, is best known for his box-constructions—displays filled with elaborate arrangements of found objects, fabrics, photographs, and natural elements. However, he also created dossiers (folders of documents related to a subject), collages, scenarios for films and theater productions, and “book-objects” (books altered by the insertion of photographs and text). Leppanen-Guerra concentrates her analysis on the latter, less well-known group of artworks, and centers each of her chapters around one or more of Cornell’s pieces that she connects to a particular children’s story. Sometimes the relationship between the story and the artwork is explicit. Elsewhere, Leppanen-Guerra constructs more ambitious—and generally convincing—interpretive arguments to connect the themes and concerns...