Chocolat Menier

This 1949 box should've been placed with Cornell's homages, for it pays tribute to friend Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. The Large Glass). Decoding it is a lesson in Cornell.

The label Chocolate Menier — glued to the box's backdrop — names a French chocolate manufacturer. Add a u, and it becomes Chocolat Meunier, or chocolate grinder, a Duchamp painting incorporated into Bride. The mirror shard at the upper left, shaped like the abstract bride at the top of Bride, is "reflected" by the shape of the shard, and its brokenness signifies the shattering and reconstruction of Duchamp's work. A diagonal string alludes to Duchamp's units of measure created by dropping strings, and the piece incorporates the string's shadow — another recurring Duchamp motif — except the shadow is fake, a thin stain in the wood. Two real shadows of the peg in the lower region where the bachelors live symbolize erect and flaccid penises.

There are too many allusions to describe, but it's worth suggesting Cornell anticipates the work of later conceptual artists, who required rooms to achieve similar effects. Viewers must experience the box — some of which is recessed behind a panel — from several vantages, and in the end spectators will find that their reflection completes the work. (Garrett Caples)

Untitled (Multiple Cubes)

Cornell's 1946–48 work seems to stand in stark contrast to the vast majority of his other exhibited boxes. Not only is it a departure from his mécanique and naturalistic dioramic tableaux, but it also expresses a minimalism, an innate formalism, that is, in some ways, more elegantly attained here than in his characteristically elaborately bejeweled, feathered, and glittered scenes.

The simplicity of form and imprecise geometries are what single out Untitled (Multiple Cubes). Yet simultaneously, the piece reinforces the nostalgic precision of its "gaudy" cousins: it recalls Cornell's need to classify the unclassifiable, the invisible, the imagined, the longed for. It is, all at once, a Malevichian study in white, a museum, a card catalog, a film sequence. His placement of 42 white wooden blocks within a framework of regular square openings, also painted white, seems a simple action — perhaps even an arithmetic exercise — yet Cornell's work isn't so easily parsed.

Instead, the blocks are organized as abstracted concepts, substitutes for small vials of pigments, magazine cutouts, or moons and stars. They lie slightly askew, some on end and some not. Cornell decides not to pay direct, pristine homage to the exacting angles and lines of modernism. Rather, he creates a sculpture that allows for the injection of curiosity into each block or cube. (Ava Jancar)