JOSEPH
CORNELL BASEBALL COLLAGE
In an exhibition catalog, curator Walter Hopps wrote,
“Imagine making beautiful and important art without
drawing or painting or sculpting in any of the obvious
classical ways. Miraculously, and even magically, the
self-taught American artist, Joseph Cornell, achieved
this with his intimate box constructions and
collages.” In 2000, the Baseball Reliquary announced
the acquisition of a photo collage believed to have been
executed by Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). This previously
unknown collage, with dimensions of 10-1/2” high by
8” wide, surfaced in the fall of 1998 and is purported
to be the only work in Cornell’s oeuvre which
incorporates images from the national pastime.
Typical of much of Cornell’s artwork (and a
circumstance that has frustrated art historians over the
years), the collage is not dated or signed. Research,
however, indicates the work is from approximately 1962,
as it is similar in construction and technique to many
of the collages emanating from Cornell’s studio at
that time. Cornell introduced often startling subject
matter into the collages of this period, including the
first openly erotic images of his career and, with this
discovery, the first use of baseball as a thematic
element.
The framed and untitled collage (which, for
cataloging purposes, will be called U.S. Man in Space) posits four baseball players, each encapsulated
inside their own baseball, traveling through space in
the direction of an ancient sun calendar and a four-cent
postage stamp commemorating Project Mercury, the
pioneering series of manned suborbital and orbital
flights. With their spherical shapes and solitary
passengers, the baseballs become an amusing metaphor for
the historic Mercury capsules. These baseball images are
placed against the backdrop of a vibrant sunset taken
from the pages of Arizona
Highways, a popular source of material for
Cornell’s collages at the time. In light of this
work’s whimsical nature, art historians have
speculated that U.S.
Man in Space might well have been inspired by the
zany play of the New York Metropolitans. Cornell, after
all, lived his entire life in Flushing, New York, and in
their first season as an expansion team in 1962, the
woeful Mets set a modern futility record by finishing
40-120, inspiring Casey Stengel’s frequent lament,
“Can’t anybody here play this game?” On another
level, Cornell’s montage elicits a comparison between
America’s patriotic allegiance to baseball and the
nationalistic fervor with which it embraced the “space
race.”
Cornell devotee Keith Ullrich is credited with
unearthing U.S.
Man in Space, and the process of identifying and
acquiring it for the Baseball Reliquary took nearly
fifteen months. Ullrich believes that it escaped
tracking by Cornell’s estate and art historians
because it was one of many different works frequently
lent to friends and acquaintances by the artist. In his
desire to communicate with young people, Cornell, a
lifelong bachelor, often let children in his Flushing
neighborhood take boxes and collages home with them. U.S.
Man in Space, based on Ullrich’s research, was
apparently loaned to a girl and her younger brother who
often rode their bicycles by Cornell’s home at 3708
Utopia Parkway. The children’s family moved from the
neighborhood shortly thereafter, and the collage was
never returned.
Cornell was, in fact, almost compulsively focused
on children, to the point of presenting, in 1972, what
was probably the first avant-garde art exhibition in New
York for children only. At the Cooper Union gallery,
Cornell displayed 26 boxes and collages at child’s-eye
level, no more than three feet off the ground, and at
the opening reception, children dined not on champagne
and caviar but on cherry soda and brownies.
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The renowned American artist Joseph Cornell.
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