Smithsonian.com

Though he was a visual artist, Joseph Cornell seemed more like a literary recluse, a soulmate of Emily Dickinson. Cornell was bird-like in stature, dreamy in temperament and monkish when it came to the artistic fame he found in later years. Between 1903-1972, he spent most of his days in a small home on the aptly named Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. He lived with his mother and took care of his younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. By day, he was an unlikely door-to-door salesman and barely made ends meet; by night, he was an artist of unusual lyrical power.

He made collages from pulpy ephemera such as starlet photographs and astronomical maps. Cornell often juxtaposed such imagery with precious, discarded objects like clay soap-bubble pipes and jars of sparkling pigments. He liked to create his compositions in jewel cases or wood boxes, giving his collages a sculptural feel. For Cornell, these boxes held “eterniday,” meaning the past is ever unfolding into the present. Linear time disappears in favor of a poetic meditation upon the object, and within it, a curious juxtaposition of imagery.

I recently attended Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, a chronological retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which originated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The show covered his well-known work in collages and boxes (it closes January 6th). Amid teeming works, one piece exemplifies Cornell’s poetic nature—a jewel case holding fake ice cubes, dedicated to the 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni. Cornell was extremely well-read and fluent in all things French; he especially appreciated the ballet. Taglioni supposedly kept a fake ice cube in her jewel case, a memento of a time when she twirled in the snow to bemuse a Russian highwayman who had halted her carriage on a starlit night.

Like Rembrandt, Cornell coaxed a more subtle richness from his materials in later years. The original pieces glow with a spiritual light, which can’t be reproduced in photographs. “Medici Princess” (ca. 1952) comes from Cornell’s “Medici” series, dedicated to the ruling family of Renaissance Florence and its more poignant figures. The box features a reproduction of a portrait by the court painter Agnolo Bronzino. In it Bia de’Medici, an illegitimate child of Duke Cosimo I, gazes toward the viewer with eerie prescience and preciousness. Around her neck, she wears a tiny medallion bearing the picture of her powerful father. Cornell seems to evoke the transcendent power of art and memory here. Bia would live only to the age of five, but Cornell has nested her enamel-like image in a dark wood box, behind a glass pane, blurred and deep blue—Cornell’s favorite color. Her image is repeated in smaller vignettes at either side, also encased in glass. Below her, one can see a feather, bound book pages and a floor-plan of the Florentine palace, where once she played ever so briefly, so long ago.

El Dorado, the Garden of Eden, Shangri-La, Nirvana—Utopia has come in many different manifestations over the centuries. But in Russia, the pursuit of paradise offers an unprecedented look at the country’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Russian Utopia [http://www.utopia.ru/english/] is an online museum depository of more than 480 building projects that were commissioned over the past 300 years but never actually constructed. Even though all that remains are the plans, the impact these drawings have is undeniable. They are a testament to how strong the human impulse is to dream of what is possible.

Russian Utopia shows that the pursuit of the ideal (an important part of Russia’s political, social and artistic history) takes many forms, including plans of settlements, bridges, palaces, monuments and mausoleums. But the creators of these blueprints differ vastly, ranging from professional architects to amateur designers, children to adults and senior citizens to college students.

The earliest offering in Russian Utopia is a 1717 city plan of St. Petersburg. The latest is a model from 2003 called Jupiter Tomb. The maker, one Avvakumov Y., describes it as “a monument/testament to ‘all the artists of the world, and those who know me.’”

Although the religious world and the art world are now riven, there was a time when churches, monasteries and the ecclesiastical like were the lifeline of painting, sculpture and architecture.

The earliest iconography in the world is spiritually thematic. Humbly fashioned talismans of resident gods and goddess are some of the first objects fashioned by man on record. During the Renaissance artists’ vied ruthlessly to secure commissions from the Mother Church, and many of the wonders of the world were made under the aegis of religion, from the temples at Machu Picchu to the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

For good or bad (and let’s face it there was a lot of bad), the circumstances that brought these two spheres of influence together in a way that dynamically affected art-making are gone, which is part of the reason why the holdings in the contemporary art and sculpture museums of the Vatican are so fascinating. The art world may have freed itself from the church, but the church has definitely been keeping tabs.

In the contemporary art museum housed in Vatican City, there is an extensive modern collection, with paintings from Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and hundreds of others. And to bring us right up to date, just recently the current pope, Benedict XVI, commissioned his first work for the museum. Claudio Parmiggiani, a leading Italian artist, was approached by church officials and asked to create a work based on his smoke paintings, which he did.

Until January 2008, the National Gallery of Art will host timeless works from an odd couple: JMW Turner, the English romantic painter of the sublime, and Edward Hopper, the quintessential American artist of the quotidian.

Turner painted grand scenes from literary sources: bloody battles and infamous shipwrecks immersed in sensual glowing color, tumultuous brush strokes and thick impastos of paint. The exhibit of his watercolors and oil paintings span his entire career, and only one painting depicts London, Turner’s home, a distant city veiled by the murkiness of a new industrial age. Hopper, meanwhile, paints iconic scenes of early 20th-century New England and New York City: lighthouses, eerily quiet street corners, empty buildings and nighthawks at a diner.

Where Turner preferred a diffused atmospheric light, Hopper painted a light raking over solid forms, which would wash away all fussiness from his imagery. Turner was a maestro with paint, conducting it in ways still unmatched by any human hand. Hopper, however, struggled to find his form until he was in his 40′s, and even his masterpieces have awkward touches that contribute to the undeniable tension in his work. Turner was a member of the official academy by the age of 26 and moved swiftly from watercolor to oil to gain prestige as an artist. Yet Hopper painted a self-portrait wearing a hat and a tie. He could be a salesman or a businessman, and he liked to present himself that way.

JMW Turner courted controversy and fame in England with his daring subject matter and revolutionary painting style. Later, in bustling New York City, Edward Hopper found iconic status slowly and surreptitiously, finding timelessness in the mundane.

In terms of art stewardship, there are a handful of institutions that we simply could not do without. The Louvre, one of the oldest and largest of these museums, is among these precious places.

Not known for its cutting-edge offerings (with works like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, David’s Oath of the Horatii, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, there’s really no need to be trendy), the Louvre has recently taken steps to assure that its “wow” offerings aren’t only historically seated.

German Anselm Kiefer is the first of four contemporary artists who will create permanent installations in the museum since Georges Braque painted an antechamber ceiling in 1953. These new works will not just hang on a wall or move from hall to hall, but will become part of the complex’s interior design.

The other artists who will be leaving a permanent mark on the museum will do so over the next three years. They are Cy Twombly, Francois Morellet and a fourth, yet unannounced, artist.

Kiefer’s offerings, recently finished, are housed in a stairwell leading into the Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities wings. They include a self-portrait riddled with lead, silver and gold, as well as two arrangements of sculpted sunflowers—one surrounded by lead books and the other, titled Danaë, displays a lone flower stalk, sans petals, with gold-tipped seeds at its base.