OBJECTS BY JOSEPH CORNELL / BOX-VALISE /BOTTLES
Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp / Lawrence Vail
Art of This Century
Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp / Lawrence Vail: OBJECTS BY JOSEPH CORNELL / BOX-VALISE /BOTTLES. New York: Art of This Century, December 1942. Exhibition announcement printed offset litho on both sides. 5.5 x 4.85 trim size. A lightly handled, nearly fine example.
Reproduced on page 183 of JOSEPH CORNELL/MARCEL DUCHAMP . . . IN RESONANCE [Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1998] item 65.
Excerpted from Peggy Guggenheim A Celebration by — Karole P. B. Vail: In 1942, Peggy [Guggenheim] still trying to get her museum started, finally leased space on the top floor at 30 West Fifty-seventh Street. At Howard Putzel's recommendation, Peggy asked the avant-garde architect Frederick Kiesler to design the galleries. In her first letter to Kiesler, dated February 26, she wrote, "Will you give me some advise [sic] about remodelling two tailor-shops into an Art Gallery?" He felt challenged by the project, submitting a proposal on March 7, in which he acknowledged, "It is your wish that some new method be developed for exhibiting paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages and so called: objects." As the curator Lisa Phillips would later write, Kiesler was given a unique opportunity to test "unorthodox ideas about the presentation of art in a fantastic Surrealist environment that merged architecture, art, light, sound and motion." He was intent on breaking down barriers between viewers and works of art. The displays were constructed to be "mobile and demountable," in Kiesler's words. Most important, all the paintings were to be exhibited without their frames, free of yet another level of confinement. Kiesler wrote:
Today, the framed painting on the wall has become a decorative cipher without life and meaning. ... Its frame is at once symbol and agent of an artificial duality of "vision" and "reality," or "image" and "environment," a plastic barrier across which man looks from the world he inhabits to the alien world in which the work of art has its being. That barrier must be dissolved: the frame, today reduced to an arbitrary rigidity, must regain its architectural, spatial significance. The two opposing worlds must be seen again as jointly indispensable forces in the same world. The ancient magic must be recreated whereby the God and the mask of the God, the deer and the image of the deer existed with equal potency, with the same immediate reality in one living universe.
Kiesler had already begun to develop a method of spatial exhibition in Vienna in 1924, and Peggy's commission presented him with the perfect forum for fully bringing his ideas to fruition. Art of This Century, as the museum/gallery came to be called, contained four exhibition galleries, and a satisfied Peggy considered it "very theatrical and extremely original." The abstract gallery "had movable walls made of stretched deep- blue canvas, laced to the floors and ceiling. . . . The floors were painted turquoise, Peggy's favorite color. Unframed pictures 'swaying in space' at eye level were actually mounted on triangular floor-to-ceiling rope pulleys resembling cat's cradles."
The walls and ceiling of the Surrealist gallery were painted black. Unframed paintings were mounted on cantilevered wooden arms that protruded from the curved gumwood panels attached to the walls. Viewers were free to adjust the angles at which they viewed the paintings. The kinetic gallery featured interactive displays. Works by Paul Klee were mounted on a mechanized belt that was set in motion by an electric eye. In order to see fourteen reproductions from Marcel Duchamp's Box in a Valise (1941), viewers had to peep through a hole and turn a wheel. A third kinetic object was a shadow box that displayed Andre Breton's Portrait of the Actor A. B. (1942); after lifting a lever, a diaphragm imprinted with Breton's image opened to reveal the poem-object within (the object was either destroyed or is lost).
The daylight gallery and painting library shared one space. This gallery, more conventionally designed with white painted walls, was used for temporary exhibitions, and the windows along Fifty-seventh Street were covered with transparent fabric to filter the daylight. Within the same space, visitors could sit on folding stools and study the library of paintings that were stored in and could be displayed on open bins specially designed by Kiesler.
Throughout Art of This Century were Kiesler's furniture units— in the form of biomorphic objects— that could be used for seating or for the display of artworks. Sculptures sat on some of the units, and paintings were mounted on sawed-off baseball bats that protruded from others. Kiesler believed that "no matter what the success of the enterprise— these galleries represent the result of a splendid co-operation between the workmen, the owner and the designer."
Elsa Schiaparelli asked Peggy to help organize a Surrealist exhibition to benefit the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies. Peggy sent her to Breton, who, with the help of Max Ernst and Duchamp, organized First Papers of Surrealism, which was held in the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue. Duchamp decorated the interior with miles of string forming a huge web; viewers could hardly see the art, but the effect was stunning. Peggy headed the list of sponsors for the exhibition, which opened on October 14. Less than a week later, on the night of October 20, Art of This Century opened; one-dollar entry tickets benefited the American Red Cross. The opening— for which Peggy said she wore "one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by [Alexander] Calder, in order to show my impar- tiality between Surrealist and abstract art" 80 — was a huge success with favorable articles appearing in the press.
Art of This Century came on the scene at a time, when, as Sidney Janis would recall, "there were maybe a dozen galleries in all of New York." It became such a popular meeting place for casual visitors, as well as for European and American artists, that Peggy took the unusual step of charging an admission fee of twenty-five cents, which she herself often collected. Eventually, she gave in to criticism from Putzel, as well as from Bernard Reis and Laurence Vail, against the practice and reverted to free admission. Peggy left her troubles with Max at home in the morning and spent the day at the gallery greeting visitors and planning exhibitions. Her relations with Jimmy Ernst continued to be friendly— indeed far more pleasant than those with his father— and for a short time he worked as her assistant. Peggy had decided, on the advice of Reis, that Art of This Century should not only be a museum space that exhibited European masters but also a commercial gallery that sold the paintings of young American artists.
The temporary exhibitions held during the first season began with a triple presentation in December: Objects by Joseph Cornell; Marcel Duchamp: Box-Valise; and Laurence Vail: Bottles. Five of the Cornell objects exhibited, including Fortune Telling Parrot (Parrot Music Box) (ca. 1937-38), entered Peggy's collection. Duchamp's leather valise contained replicas of his works and included one original photographic reproduction. The collage bottles by Laurence— a "greatly gifted artist," according to Greenberg — were pioneering examples of assemblage. Wine bottles turned into works of art, they are intimate, often humorous objects onto which he pasted scraps of newspaper and magazine pictures, tattered materials, found objects, and shells.