Art: Linking Memory and Reality

In New York, the eccentric, poetic boxes of Joseph Cornell

After the queues, the scalpers and the heaviest mortaring of publicity ever aimed at an exhibition of modern art, the Pablo Picasso show left New York's Museum of Modern Art Sept. 30; and what could MOMA do for an encore? Very sensibly, it has gone to the other end of the scale, returning to normal institutional life with a retrospective of an artist so unlike Picasso as to be his polar opposite: the American Joseph Cornell. Cornell died in 1972, at 69, but his association...