‘The House on Utopia Parkway’ could be the title of a Wes Anderson film. The camera would pan across a row of cookie-cutter wooden houses with sloping Dutch gables and modest front yards: an imitation of old Europe in a distinctly New World suburbia. Inside, a gentle, grey-haired man sits at the kitchen table, cutting pictures of exotic birds from a reference book. His mother scolds him for leaving paper trimmings everywhere; his disabled brother watches the garden from the window.
The man is always dressed in the same grey suit, venturing into the city to glean strange treasures – theatre playbills, stamps, marbles, bird feathers, wiffle balls – and returning to arrange them by night in a blacked-out basement, patinating his dreamlike compositions in an oven that has never cooked a meal. (A visit to the fridge reveals it to be filled with ice cream and cake.)
There would be a thwarted romance with another artist and endless infatuations with film stars, ballerinas, waitresses, young girls trailed from a distance through Flushing five-and-dime stores. But the man would remain alone with his Mozart records and books of French Symbolist poetry. And, above all, his imagination, which would take him into the cosmos, back in time and across oceans: journeys mapped in a cartography of mundane things, pinning dreams like butterflies in cases hardly bigger than shoeboxes.
If Joseph Cornell – sensitive, self-taught, strange, brilliant – had not existed, Wes Anderson might have had to invent him. So it makes wonderful sense that, at Gagosian’s first-arrondissement outpost, the director has restaged the basement at 37–08 Utopia Parkway, Queens, where the mysterious artist lived from 1929 until his death in 1972, aged 69. The exhibition is the brainchild of Jasper Sharp who, in his former role as curator at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, both co-curated the last major European Cornell show and oversaw Anderson’s curatorial debut. Sharp describes Cornell as ‘born on the wrong continent at the wrong time’ – a 19th-century European manqué. Anderson, who has been based in Paris since 2005, might feel similarly.
The recreated studio layers accuracy and artifice with obsessive attention to detail. Punctuated by 15 of Cornell’s miraculous ‘shadow boxes’, it assembles more than 300 objects – some belonging to the artist (now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum), others indistinguishable copies: the same editions of books and records Cornell owned; antique pill boxes sourced from the Clignancourt flea markets where Julien Levy, Cornell’s first gallerist, bought those the artist used.
A team of sign painters with whom Anderson regularly collaborates spent four months learning Cornell’s handwriting to recreate the lettering on his storage boxes: ‘Sea Shells’, ‘Dürer’, ‘Springs’, ‘Flotsam’, ‘Love Letters Jennifer Jones’. Cornell called his files and dossiers – some, like one devoted to Lauren Bacall, compiled over decades – ‘a clearing house for dreams and visions’. He worked slowly, setting pieces aside when inspiration failed. ‘I have to let the spiders work on it for a while,’ he told David Saunders, who assisted him in the last years of his life.
That the exhibition can only be viewed from the street is fitting, as the artist’s basement studio was famously hard to access. Cornell welcomed a roll-call of cultural luminaries to Utopia Parkway, from Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning to Robert Motherwell, Yoko Ono, Marianne Moore, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag. Some were shown into his workspace; others were not. And the man himself is so elusive, so difficult to see through the fog of myth surrounding him, that a proscenium distance feels right – necessary, even.
The House on Utopia Parkway was the result of tragedy, not aspiration. When Cornell was 13, his wealthy father died, obliging his mother to sell the family home and move to a series of more modest accommodations. Joseph had been promised a trip to Paris for his school graduation. He never left the United States. Paris remained as longing, more real than any visit could have been: an image, a fantasy, a stage set awaiting its actors. A replica, glimpsed through glass.
‘The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson’ runs until 14 March at Gagosian, Rue de Castiglione, Paris. For more information, visit gagosian.com
