'Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell's Homage to Juan Gris' Review: A Soaring, Feathered Tribute

It wasn’t uncommon for the poetic and pioneer assemblagist

Joseph Cornell

(1903-1972) to create a work of art—or at least give it a title—in homage to a famous artist from history. But after seeing “The Man at the Café,” a 1914 painting by the Cubist

Juan Gris

(1887-1927), at a New York gallery in 1953, Cornell embarked on his largest tribute to a fellow artist, creating 21 works over the next 13 years celebrating that bellwether picture.

The medium-size painting—part of a gift of Cubist works given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 by

Leonard Lauder

—is now on its own wall between two windows at the Met. It presides over a dozen of Cornell’s iconic, delicately weathered, glass-front boxes (each just under two feet high, a foot across and four inches deep) austerely encased in four large vitrines. This lovely exhibition, “Birds of a Feather: Joseph Cornell’s Homage to Juan Gris”—the leitmotif throughout is a white-crested cockatoo, and Cornell and Gris, you see, were both neat-and-clean artists who loved dropping clues—is the first of a planned series of “dossier” shows emanating from Mr. Lauder’s eponymous Research Center for Modern Art at the museum.

Cornell didn’t have it easy growing up. His younger brother, Robert, had cerebral palsy, and when the artist was 14 his father died of leukemia. Although his father’s former employer enabled Cornell to attend Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, he left, shy and homesick, without a diploma and started working to help care for his mother and brother.

Helen Cornell

managed to buy a house on Utopia Parkway in Queens that eventually became the famous home and basement studio for her hodophobic son, who nevertheless thought of himself as a “voyageur” of the mind. The artist did hang out, though, in the art world and was on conversational terms with the likes of

Marcel Duchamp

and

Robert Motherwell.

By the time he started his homages to Gris, Cornell was a fully established artist with exhibitions at top-flight galleries.

Cornell wrote in his diary that the man in Gris’s picture was “covered almost completely by his reading matter.” In response, he coated many of the back planes of the inside of his boxes with fragments of old French texts he got from booksellers on the street. The image of a white-crested cockatoo, lifted from an 1884 book, “Parrots in Captivity,” appears repeatedly in the boxes, and comes from the artist’s fascination with birds (a 1949 show was called “Aviary,” and he once made a film of a woman watching pigeons in a park). He also loved the way a crisp black shape suggesting a bird’s shadow could simultaneously refer to the black shadows in the Gris painting.

Half the boxes in the exhibition were tentatively finished in 1954, after which Cornell apparently took a hiatus from the project. In 1959, inspired by the publication of

John Golding’s

foundational book on Cubism and a Gris retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the year before, he returned to it.

My favorite box (they’re all gorgeous in an antiquarian, philatelic way) is “Grand Hôtel Bon Port” (1959-60), a crackling departure from Cornell’s trademark quietude. The cockatoo is absent, seemingly dissolved into clouds in a light-blue sky, and announces its presence only by a thin black vertical shadow and a cork “perch” where its feet ought to be. The pasted fonts for Grand Hôtel Bon Port and the newspaper Le Soir (a play on a snippet of Le Matin in Gris’s picture) are headline-bold. Three rolls of postage stamps punctuate the top of the composition, and a block of dark-blue ocean and a row of white finishing nails anchor the bottom. A vertical chunk of pink accentuates the bird’s shadow and gives the work a chromatic boost.

What do all these boxes mean, other than providing a way for Cornell to celebrate a kindred spirit and for the curator,

Mary Clare McKinley,

to produce a catalog that’s as much crime-scene dot-connecting as it is aesthetic analysis? (For example, the catalog tells us that “A Serenade for Juan Gris, Romantic Hotel,” 1953-60, contains a clipping about the Hôtel de la Ville, which is near the La Scala opera house in Milan, at which a past star soprano,

Julia Grisi

—a name similar to Juan Gris’s—appeared.) Perhaps the best appreciation of Cornell’s work came from the poet and art critic

John Ashbery

more than a half-century ago: “Cornell’s boxes embody the substance of dreams so powerfully that it seems that these eminently palpable bits of wood, cloth, glass and metal must vanish the next moment, as when the atmosphere of a dream becomes so intensely realistic that you know you are about to wake up.”

Amid the Met’s current blockbusters (

Michelangelo

drawings, a

David Hockney

retrospective), “Birds of a Feather” offers a major “minor” exhibition. It’s solidly researched, impeccably installed and—most important—beautiful in its parts as well as its whole. Break from the crowd’s flow and don’t miss it.

—Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.