untitled (pharmacy) moma cut up #7

Cornell is desperate to sustain the network by spinning it out to the far reaches of the historical past and the astronomical future.
We all live in an enchanted forest.




His favorite colors suggest provincial European hotels: white, parchesi yellow, pink, and French blue gray.

Even the most severely Euclidean box by Cornell looks like an inhabited place--though its only resident may be the shade of a departed spirit. Minute variations of his ritual come to stand for all the richness of a fully lived life, especially since the ritual's contents are determined by the anxieties which drive him to loathe death in the first place. Yearning for wholeness, the picturesque grows more agitated amid the early modern period's numerous complementary agitations--social, economic, technological. Yet ruins come to rest.

Untitled (Pharmacy), ca. 1942
Box construction, 35.5 x 30.6 x 11.1 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 128
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, by SIAE 2008

MoMA catalog 1980 cut-up #6 (Medici Princess)

Cornell's was a dream voyage.
And yet for Cornell the hotel is ambiguous.
The night window also appears in connection with another theme:
the hotel.
Hotels often have names evocative of the sky
and imagination. His extensive library contained volumes complete with hotel and travel information. The hotel as a microcosm of life has been explored many times. At the same time it is hollow and lonely.
Partly through visits to monuments of Renaissance Italy, Roman and Florance Cornell established his link with Medici Princes and Princesses, cultural totems as precious to him as his Renaissance statues and paintings were to the expatriate American Gilbert Osmond. The hotel is infinitely alluring and rich in historical and geographical extensions, its grand facade often culled from Renaissance palaces, its very name derived from the great private residences of the past: the hotels particuliers.