the artist joseph cornell (1903–1972) filled small glass-fronted boxes with europe: old hotel labels, star maps, ballerinas. he never went there. he never left the united states. he lived in a small wooden house in flushing, queens, looked after his brother, and at night, while the house slept, made the boxes in the basement, from what he found in new york’s secondhand bookshops and dime stores.
in an old memoir, published in 1892, he read a story about marie taglioni, the star ballerina of the paris opera in the 1830s. on tour in russia, a highwayman gave her a choice: dance for him, or he keeps her carriages. so she danced, on rugs from her luggage, laid over a road ankle-deep in april mud, and he let her go and kept the rugs as a souvenir.
in 1940 cornell made one of his boxes in her honour, a jewel box, and printed the story on its lid his way: a winter night, a panther skin spread over the snow, beneath the stars. in his version, she keeps a souvenir of her own: a piece of ice in her jewel box, melting among the stones. the box he made is that jewel box. its ice is glass, and it never melts.
he made it all at home, on utopia parkway, a street named after a planned colony called utopia that was never built. the pieces here are old prints, as his were: andromeda from a star atlas of 1824, audubon’s birds, taglioni, the 1892 page, and thomas more’s island of utopia.
