Betye Saar
When Magazine invited us to write about artworks at MoMA that moved us, we were halfway through a joint memoir about two women writer-critics and teachers of different races who’ve been close friends since the early 1980s. We’d already earmarked a substantial part of Two-Part Inventions: Scenes from a Cross-Race Friendship to exploring our collaborations in the classroom and in life: the way we’ve used comparisons of certain Black and white American writers to further elucidate what the other was doing, and how each interacted with their times—times marked as much by hybridity as by separation. We try to invoke a territory in which Black and white cultures meet, mingle, and overlap, albeit with some clashes. This hybridity is what drew us to collaborate in the first place: two voices, two sensibilities trading opinions and descriptions, questioning each other and themselves, dividing here, combining there. We’ve been inventing various rough-hewn literary devices as we proceeded along in our narrative. So we decided that applying our still-evolving, semi-impromptu methodology to a pair of visual artists would be fun, too, if a little scary.
At first, we thought about some early silent films. We considered Agnes Martin’s golden grid of a canvas, Friendship, which we’d seen together several years earlier in Grace Wales Bonner’s gorgeous MoMA show, Spirit Movers. We looked at the intriguing and provocative work of Howardena Pindell and Adrian Piper but couldn’t find an artist to match them with. Our indecision sent us to the Museum, where we wandered for several hours last spring, following our instincts. As soon as Elizabeth came upon two Joseph Cornell boxes that she’d known earlier, Untitled (Bébé Marie), and Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, she was all in. Margo hesitated. She admired the Cornells but felt less absorbed and less knowledgeable than Elizabeth. And who to pair him with?
Then Margo thought of Betye Saar, whose work, like Cornell’s, is marked by a roving spirit of wonder. Elizabeth hadn’t known about Saar before Margo mentioned her, but a quick internet search revealed what Margo meant. Although born a generation apart (Cornell in 1904, Saar in 1926), the two artists share a childlike quality that transforms itself in their work into an eerie wisdom. It’s a quality that has long attracted us both as admirers of Paul Klee, Isadora Duncan, Romare Bearden, Marianne Moore, Isamu Noguchi, and other artists whose thinking seems to be at once simplified and revelatory.
Then, almost by chance, we discovered a direct link between Cornell and Saar. In 1967, the 41-year-old Saar came upon an extensive exhibition of Cornell’s work at Pasadena’s Huntington Museum; it delighted and inspired her. Even now, in her late 90s, Saar still speaks about this exhibition as crucial to her artistic practice. “Things came together for me when I saw the work of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Museum in 1967,” she said in an interview in 2024. And in 2000: “I learned early on that you can make art out of anything. Growing up during the Depression, my family was always making things, so being creative came naturally. As a child, I was interested in looking through trash containers, looking at the ground as I walked, searching for something unusual—a scrap of colored paper, a broken necklace…. Then I saw the assemblages of Joseph Cornell for the first time at the Pasadena Art Museum and I thought, ‘Wow, I want to make art like that! He took all this junk and made it into beautiful things.’”
We’d found our artists, or so we thought. With the help of MoMA’s curators and collection specialists, we set out to immerse ourselves in their work at close quarters, and to find out whether our matchmaking exercise was on track.
Unboxing
Margo Jefferson: I’m smitten but feeling insecure. The bountiful daring of each Cornell box, intensified by the newspapers they sit on and the storage cabinets around them, makes me fear I might miss vital details. I’m with a curator and a dance critic who knows his work in ways I don’t. The Common Reader can feel like an anxious participant in a close-reading seminar. But the Common Reader, wrote Virginia Woolf, “is guided by an instinct to create for himself out of whatever odds or ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing." I could create my own Joseph Cornell. And wasn’t he a kind of common viewer, walking through New York’s stalls and stores, gathering buttons, shells, stamps, wallpaper samples—all manner of odds and ends—to create a theory and practice of art making? Let me take heart from him.
His boxes are spaces where objects and images mate in improbable ways. So much beauty: delicate beauty, mournful beauty. But also, the beauty of ecstatic nonsense, beauty that discards and reorders the normal, cheekily inventing its own systems and structures. “What is more precise than precision?.../ Illusion,” Marianne Moore declared. How many kinds of illusion can an artist bring imaginative precision to?
Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, which I’d seen earlier at MoMA, reminded me of the ballet books of my childhood: of how I read them and daydreamed, how I studied the illustrations of Marie Taglioni in white tulle, rising to her toes as no dancer had before her. But that was ballet history for young girls. Cornell turns exposition into legend and illustration into vision. Boxes like this are poetic theater, he says, settings “wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime.”
The casket is a wooden box lined with blue and black velvet. Twelve pieces of glass signify ice cubes; a diamond necklace is displayed above them. And inside the lid—tantalizingly visible and barely, if at all, readable, Cornell has written (beautifully):
“On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie Taglione was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for the audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, Taglione formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.”
Cornell was a religious man (a Christian Scientist) and must have intended the double meaning of “casket.” “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” asks Paul in Romans 7:24. Cornell delivers Taglioni—her body, her legend, her art—from the death of being minimized: taken for granted or reduced to a textbook fact. He has given her an eternal life worth waiting for. I can only read the words inside this box because a MoMA curator transcribed and sent them to us. In the museum, when one stands before the box, these words are visible only as tiny scribbles. They could be a galaxy away. And no less present for that.
I go next to Cornell’s Beehive (1934): A hatbox is painted red. On top of it is a sheet of newsprint with pictures of shop fronts, shop owners, and visitors. Seven hexagons have been cut into the hatbox. Beehives are hexagonal. But inside Cornell’s there are seven gold thimbles, each balanced on a needle. Balancing, I should say, because they vibrate, especially when Elizabeth blows lightly on them. The paradox of needles, tiny instruments that pierce, stitch, make and remake. No wonder the Three Fates determined human lives by spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of each. No wonder a queen pierced her finger while sewing, and the three drops of blood that fell led to the birth of Snow White. These thimbles are gold. Treasured instruments of labor, reproduction, and creation.
Elizabeth Kendall: Margo has already discovered this box’s secret: the seven thimbles balancing on unseen needles. Here, I think, is an ingeniously constructed, slightly interactive toy-thing. It’s one of Cornell’s earliest pieces, built, apparently, to mimic a beehive, though not an actual beehive with bees. It seems to be a human beehive, where behind the urban facades implied by the yellowed newsprint you can find mindless, ceaseless activity (and trembling?).
Margo is lingering by the Beehive, which delights her. I am drawn to the middle box, In Memoriam: Central Park Carousel, which doesn’t resemble a carousel. But it’s not supposed to: it’s a memorial. And according to our curator-guide, a carousel in Central Park really did burn down in 1950 (and was replaced, according to the internet, by an old carousel brought from Coney Island, still there today.) But the burnt carousel is the one Cornell apparently knew and loved.
Inside the box, a white frame encloses a horizontal rod with a silver ring attached (an allusion to a carousel’s brass ring?) from which emerges a round disc with the dark-blue night sky on top and a swirl of whitewash and blue on bottom. It’s laid over a mirror. Is this disc the lost carousel? Is the lost carousel the earth itself? Maybe, since one of this box’s secrets is located on the underside of its top panel: a slice of night sky with white stars painted on it (you have to squinch your head close in to see it). Maybe the box is saying that the remains of a burnt carousel/burnt earth are blue and white, like heaven.
It’s easy to link In Memoriam with those “elements of a childhood pastime, metamorphized” in his boxes. Cornell’s childhood was cut short when his father died, leaving him, at 14, the sole breadwinner of his family (mother, two sisters, and a disabled brother). No more carousels or childhood games. The theme of lost innocence is easy to trace through Cornell’s body of work: from the first, mature boxes, the Soap Bubble series, with their clay pipes and old maps and goblets; through the middle boxes of the 1940s, dedicated to young movie stars, dancers, and child-royalty; to the late Aviary boxes, featuring exotic parakeets paired with allusions to grand hotels and a bygone kind of elite travel. The third box on this table, Hotel Beau Sejour, is one of the Aviaries, featuring a white parakeet perched on a twig, in front of a collage of newspaper ads for grand hotels—hotels the Cornell family might have visited if Joseph’s father had lived.
Another Cornell box—Untitled (Bébé Marie), which we’d seen while roaming the Museum and are revisiting—is a nearly literal presentation of lost innocence. Inside is an antique child-doll (Bébé Marie), half-hidden in a forest of twigs. Her molded bisque face is visible through them, as are her large straw hat and faded white dress. She would look like Moses inside the burning bush if these twigs weren’t partly painted silver. It’s a winter forest, not a burning desert. A Northern European fairytale forest, within which a child is lost (or hiding). I’m riveted by Bébé Marie’s lustrous brown eyes, which seem alive (the French toy firm Jumeau, which probably made her, was known for its dolls’ lifelike eyes). Might these eyes be daring us to rescue her…or condemning us because we’re not?
MJ: Something in me wants Bébé Marie’s vulnerability to take another form. If Shakespeare had a lost sister, why shouldn’t Jesus? And why shouldn’t she be Baby Mary, named after her mother, but (like Shakespeare’s sister) permitted power in the world of men? In Christian Science, young girls are valued as much as boys; they lead services and become healers. Why wouldn’t Cornell draw on this aspect of the religion he loved? Could Bébé Marie’s white dress be feminine swaddling, and her flowered, wide-brimmed hat a kind of crown? Could the icy forest of twigs and branches be her own private, sanctioned realm? Cornell gives her dark, adult eyes: What are they seeing and signaling? They are not blank; they are not frightened. Mary Baker Eddy called eyes instruments of “spiritual discernment”: are those Bébé Marie’s eyes?
EK: Now that you say it, I admit that Bébé’s eyes don’t look accusatory. They look…intelligent and, yes, eerily discerning. But couldn’t Mary Baker Eddy’s “spiritual discernment” coexist in Cornell’s mind with that state of lost innocence?
Maybe one of the reasons I respond so deeply to Cornell’s boxes is because I, too, took refuge as a child in this kind of dreaming, in mysterious things that were semi-opaque to me yet which I knew were somehow important. And, like Cornell, I was saddled with early responsibilities. The oldest of six, I became a deputy-mom early on, an identity that often precludes childhood dreaming. But I didn’t stop. Cornell’s kind of dreaming was my refuge from drab Midwestern surroundings and an adult identity pressed on me in a large, cash-strapped family.
Cornell is sometimes disparaged for being a kind of eunuch, living in Queens with his mother and unhealthily obsessed with young women. What’s wrong with such an obsession if it (or he) doesn’t harm any actual young women? What if it inspires other people to get in touch with their lost innocences and the accompanying enchantments? This disparaging of asexuality comes with the implication that sexually active people don’t dream. But for better and for worse, isn’t sex always connected with dreaming?
For me, Cornell is one of those odd dreamer-artists who seems to emerge improbably, even painfully (for him), from our American culture of doing. As scholar-critics like Marci Kwon and Ellen Levy have recently pointed out, Cornell represents another kind of modernism from that of the Abstract Expressionists. Unlike them, he privileges found objects—which are by nature figurative.
I like this view of Cornell. I think of him as much as a choreographer as a visual artist—an ingenious choreographer who uses previously inert found objects and pictures as his “dancers.” He makes them seem to move, in our minds, across time and space. That makes him simultaneously a throwback to puppeteers and a precursor to performance artists. Along with Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Isadora Duncan, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Sabato Rodia, Isamu Noguchi, and others, Cornell belongs to a group of American artists who defy genre classifications and who choose their own materials, methods, and language systems to universalize very private obsessions.
At the Window
MJ and EK: So we ask each other: Is Betye Saar, the Los Angeles artist who’s a generation younger than Cornell, something like an outsider artist, too? One who, like him, evolved her own belief system, found her materials, made up her methods, even as she joined forces with other emerging Black and women artists? (Cornell had on and off-again alliances with the Surrealists). We don’t use “outsider” here as a synonym for “intuitive” or “untrained.” Both Cornell and Saar were impeccably knowledgeable. We see them instead as solitary travelers; outsiders by temperament who helped redefine the Inside.
Even with Cornell’s loose connections with his Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist peers, Elizabeth notes, he went his own way, not using his body or physical instruments (like paintbrushes) to create his art, but instead letting real found objects speak for him.
And Saar, as Margo points out, belongs to a younger generation of temperamental outsiders. Billie Holiday, Mary Lou Williams, and Thelonious Monk carefully chose their mentors and influences, then made a wholly original language, one that didn’t so much universalize as codify their private obsessions. All were eccentric: mischievous, otherworldly, mournful. All heard, saw, or turned their attention to thoughts, notes, lines, and images that no one else had noticed or known what to do with. But how are they connected, in spirit as well as practice?
We spent an intense stretch of time with the two Saars in MoMA’s collection made after she encountered that Pasadena Cornell exhibition: 1969’s Black Girl’s Window, and the 1991 box-assemblage, The Invitation. The earlier Black Girl’s Window might be considered the “hinge” piece in Saar’s career, as a direct response to that Cornell exhibition as well as to the political and personal work of Black and feminist artists. It shows how after 1967, found objects for Saar seemed to become a conduit to a more subjective history and autobiography than she’d used before. But what struck us right away while looking at Black Girl’s Window was how it combines Cornellesque methodologies with Saar’s already-developed rich inner world of signs and symbols.
Betye Saar. Black Girl’s Window. 1969
Like the Cornell boxes, it is a 3D object. But being nearly three feet tall and a foot-and-a-half wide, it is bigger. Not only that: Saar has filled most of the window’s panes not with Cornell-like objects, but with pictures drawn from that already-existing mythology she’d adopted, including ancient systems of spiritual wonder such as Tarot cards and palmistry. She’s not borrowing wholesale from these systems any more than she’s borrowing wholesale from Cornell. She’s questioning them, too, and exploring—through reproduction, placement, color, texture, etc.—how race and femaleness may, or may not, interact with these systems.
EK: The Black Girl in question occupies the bottom half of the window—a black silhouette of a face (with lifelike eyes) with hands pressed against it, palms-out. Those black palms are inscribed with magical red and yellow symbols: sun, moon, stars. In the top half are nine windowpanes framing different Tarot-like picture-symbols and one “found object,” a miniature framed portrait of Saar’s Irish grandmother. Even as the Girl seems to look out of the window at us, we also see above her the various forces that, for better and for worse, rule over her life. Is she imprisoned? Is she dreaming? Is she revealing her inner power? Does she know about it?
Though I’m not a Black girl, I connect this work with my own experience. Of course a Black girl might feel herself to be more imprisoned than a white girl. But implied imprisonment...isn’t that a part of any American girl’s inner world? “I’m stuck here now. Where will I be when I grow up and get out?” And this Girl’s interior world, embodied by the pictures above her and the power contained in her hands, is so beautiful that I remember my young self, feeling both imprisoned and empowered as I looked out of windows.
MJ: The Black Girl’s eyes are blue and uneven in size. They seem to move. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a Black girl’s tragedy, would be published a year later. Morrison’s Black girl went mad craving the racial perfection of blue eyes. The blue eyes of Saar’s s Black Girl eyes are uncanny and unafraid. They see through, and past, the punitive markers of racial identity.
The Black Girl is a silhouette in a window frame: her skin color is a formal given, not a subject for debate. She has eyes, ears, and hands but no visible mouth or nose (those traditional markers of racial difference, so often scrutinized and criticized). This visually packed window with the Black Girl in the bottom half is a portrait of her mind, not her body. She holds the palms of her hands up for us to see, a gesture that might signify alarm—STOP—but for the stars, half-moons, and tarot symbols on them. The symbols protect her. They offer ways to interpret life as autobiography and cosmography. So do the nine chambers in the frame’s upper half: The galaxy with its dazzling blues, orange half-moons cradling yellow stars, blue stars on a round yellow sun. (Saar’s work often brings song fragments to mind: I changed Irving Berlin’s line so I could sing, “Blue stars /Smiling at me…”.)
Racial history fills the second panel: a head marked by the phrenology chart that claimed to prove black inferiority: a painting of her parents as children, carefree and beautifully dressed, dancing together like child stars. Death sits between the children and the head trapped in phrenology: death is a white skeleton holding fast to a black body. Modes of salvational power reappear in the bottom panel: a full-maned lion chewing on the sun and an American eagle freed from the government’s “Strength and Freedom” motto to bear the word “LOVE” on its breast.
One can research Saar’s spiritual vocabulary—palmistry, astrology, tarot—without forgetting that art itself is a form of divination. So much of her work uses everyday objects (often discarded) and occult rituals (often belittled). These symbols are her materials as much as paint, paper, or figurines. They are repurposed and reimagined. An assemblage is a spiritual practice and a form of alchemy.
So much art centered on women depicts their social and sexual roles as immutable destinies. Black women who have appeared as subjects in art—when they appear at all—have usually run a gamut from downtrodden to fetishized. For Saar, roles are experiments and destinies hold possibilities. This Black Girl looks at the cosmos through her window. And we look at her window, with its chambers of Black history, women’s history, white history, and spiritual history. “By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released,” Saar has written. “Free to create. Shifting without excluding.” (Italics mine).
MG and EK: Saar’s The Invitation reveals even more clearly how she was emboldened by Cornell’s influence to enlarge an already established artistic practice. The Invitation came 22 years after Black Girl’s Window. It’s smaller but it seems to us even more mysteriously complex. It contains multiple frames—actual picture frames. But its narrative takes us ever deeper into the shadowy, purplish interior of several rooms, ending in a green-lit window that is somehow connected with a Black gentleman pictured cartoon-like below. He’s holding a fanned-out deck of cards as well as various 3D hearts made of stone, strewn around within these multiple frames.
We find ourselves wishing we could see the Saar work in between Black Girl’s Window and The Invitation, as well as her work after the 1990s. After all, Saar, now aged 99, is still producing art. Most recently, she’s blown up her scale into room-sized installations (the latest pictured include life-sized canoes hung from an exhibition hall’s ceiling, out of which spill various fauna and flora). Instead, what awaits us in the final leg of our art-immersion day is a rich collection of work that Saar made before encountering that art-changing Cornell exhibition in 1967. This body of work makes clear that she’d already found the artistic territory she would make hers, her own private “language” of images and words (her titles are sublime), even before she released herself into making assemblages.
The mythic territories of Saar and Cornell were markedly different. Both artists, however, had opened themselves to The Mythic (writ large). Boldly, and despite a climate which did not altogether welcome this emphasis.
Sorceress
EK: I face the table ringed with Saar’s prints, mostly from the 1960s, and feel their texture emanating from all those scratched ultra-thin black lines. That texture gives them the volume of the objects she would collect after her Cornell encounter. And then the colors.
The first two prints I look at are from 1960: To Catch a Unicorn and El Gato. In the former, a lovingly etched Black woman, almost naked, stands in front of an alert white unicorn against a blue background with a yellow sun in back. In the second, a large white cat fills the scene, backed by a black-and-white landscape with a moon.
These prints say something about the mysterious connections, in Saar’s art, between women and animals. And there are more noteworthy animals—and sometimes women too—in this 1960s slice of Saar’s body of work: there’s the congenial bull from 1964’s The Beast that Pounds the Devil’s Dust (Saar’s eye-opening titles are part-Biblical and part-Blakean). Or the smiling white elephant from her two 1964 etchings, The Beastie Parade, or the woman riding a large green bird, followed by a rearing red lion and other talismanic beasts, in the jewel-aqua-tinted The Big Beastie Parade.
This period of Saar’s work is not as well-known as her later art containing references to Black-themed objects and Black identity, such as Black Girl’s Window, or her Aunt Jemima assemblages (in one Jemima holds a gun in one hand and a broom in the other). It’s as if we’re looking here at the staging ground for that mature career and watching the artist explore what’s somehow basic and primeval for her: not just stylized animals, etched as if in children’s books, but women, children, and landscapes.
When she made this work, Saar was 34, already had two small daughters, and was pregnant with the third. There’s an aura of fertility in these etchings, such as the dark and compelling Les Enfants d’Obscurité, showing what looks like three fetuses lolling about in hollowed-out pockets of darkness. The unpeopled landscapes are also mysteriously exciting, or rather filled with some kind of luminous promise. The one that haunts me most is Lo, the Pensive Peninsula, from 1961. It’s a straight-on view of a forest shown with all the differently etched textures of trees, branches, bushes, leaves, through which an orange-golden light is breaking. Ever since viewing it at MoMA, its beauty has welled up in my mind, almost bringing tears.
Proceeding around the table, I see that somewhere in the mid-1960s, the artist as woman, with her secret powers, reasserted itself as a preoccupation for Saar. In Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress (1964), we get the earlier symbols now placed, almost floating, in a grid, in which the eye goes to a stylized Shakespeare image in the center. He’s framed on all sides by the various symbols (coats of arms, starfish…), a Shakespeare whose body also seems to contain, as if pregnant, other potent symbols (a sun, a snake…), and whose raised left palm is also covered with barely visible tarot markings. It’s obscurely wonderful to find Shakespeare in the middle of an Enchantress’s chart. At least from the viewpoint of today, 60 years later, his presence telegraphs that Saar isn’t simply a casually new-age artist. On the contrary, it’s as if she embraced, almost prematurely but with extreme clarity, everything and anything she loves, and is inviting these figures and symbols to mingle within her art.
MJ: These prints invite us to watch a young artist testing her chosen medium: its expressive possibilities, its patterns and tonal surfaces, its visual subtlety and bravura. How will it serve the cosmos she is starting to imagine in detail? She has been studying printmaking. And looking at these works I realize she’s more of a literary artist than I’d thought. She has a poet’s ability to be visible and invisible, to dramatize the natural and supernatural without pointing us to the “correct” interpretation, and to merge the facts of autobiography with images and symbols.
Myth and legend are Saar’s habitat, as well as folklore and religion. The Bible—specifically Genesis, with its destruction/creation story of Noah and the Ark—is a source for Two of Every Sort (1966). Saar’s country is a peaceable kingdom. Sea, land, and sky are calm. Lions, fish, birds, and other animals march in a staggered linear formation. Are the animal pairs male and female, as the Bible decreed? No, here’s a solitary butterfly, here’s a small dog, and here are three birds, one an eagle with the word LOVE on its breast. (Three years later that eagle will appear in Black Girl’s Window). Tiny animals line the picture frame. There is no apocalypse here, only an orderly abundance and playfulness. For me, every Saar work has its tempo or tempi. I’d score Two of Every Sort with a ragtime march.
Saar has managed to supplant both God the Creator and Noah the ark-building patriarch. In Genesis, once the humans and animals on the ark are saved, Noah’s three sons go off to perpetuate the human race. Saar has three daughters. And all of them will go on—have gone on—to perpetuate their mother’s work.
Saar began as a printmaker. I see the tools of lithography as the objective correlative of the sorcery, the task of magic-making, that is her constant theme. Both demand exacting labor and calculation. The etching needle, the metal plate, the scratches and incisions. Etching? Aquatint? Embossment? A combination? The acid, the preliminary sketches; the emergence, gradual and sudden, of images; the additions and alterations; the buttons, feathers, and other found objects. Saar’s women are hard-working practitioners of sorcery and magic. They are her alter egos, her daemons. And they are never without the materials of their work: They have the tools of palmistry, tarot, and astrology, tools of natural and supernatural worlds.
Look at Enchantress and Twilight Bird. See the owl nesting on her head. Behind the owl, another bird leans down, its beak touching her dreadlocks. The Sorceress with Seven Assorted Birds has a cluster of owls sheltering on one side of her body. The other side is naked. She looks down as if in thought. Call it purposeful dreaming. Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress is frenetic with images, as if the oracle was desperate to surround herself with all possible tools of enchantment.
But if a sorceress is unemployed, have her powers declined, or is the world ignoring them? You are a young woman artist, you are a young Black artist, you are working in the early ‘60s and you are plagued by these questions. Another question: do these sorceresses have a race? If so, what is it? And why do I ask?
I ask because the ’60s were an urgent and tempestuous time of racial consciousness and struggle. I ask because Saar is herself of mixed descent and keenly attuned to the range of skin colors among Black, multiracial, and white people. And I ask because the sorceress of 1960’s To Catch a Unicorn embodies Saar’s resistance to the racial exclusions of Western art. Here, a triumphant huntress leans comfortably against the tamed animal’s side. Her skin is beige, her drapery is brown. The unicorn is white with a brown mane. Is this huntress a virgin, as centuries of unicorn legend have insisted? If so, she is a virgin of color (a rarity in Western art) and is naked to the waist (a rarity among the white virgins of Western art). If not, she is a graceful, sensuous woman of color who has, thanks to Saar, pulled off a miracle.
The sorceress with seven birds is pale skinned. Does that mean she’s white? Could she be a light-skinned Black and/or multi-racial enchantress, like the pale sorceress with dreadlocks? Saar’s work is filled with signs and symbols of race as history, culture, and aesthetics. But it’s no contradiction to say that her passions and allusions are multiracial. Her imagination is unceasingly receptive. Her mystical signs urge us to find our own tools of transformation. “It is my goal as an artist to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty,” Saar has written. Works like these expose injustice by mocking the barrenness of fixed hierarchies. They revel in the beauty of multiple realities. This is why Saar has used so many forms through the years: prints, shadow boxes, assemblages, sculptures, and installations. In other words, she’s found beauty and power in American, European, West African, and Caribbean art.
Anger and terror too. Saar began collecting derogatory Black images in the late ’60s: dolls, household accessories, book illustrations, food brands, and grinning, big-lipped images on buttons, cards, and sheet music, popular since the 19th century. Then she set about dismantling—maybe the word is dismembering—their forms and functions. Redistributing their power.
Aunt Jemima and Hoo Doo Doll was made the same year. Here, the source of metamorphic power is a black doll. She stands against torn paper with Aunt Jemima’s eyes on either side of her head. She wears an ebulliently patterned dress and bandana; her legs are festooned with buttons. Her mouth is partly open: Is this an enigmatic smile or a rictus? She stands very straight looking out at us and—I suddenly think of Black Girl’s Window—daring us to look straight back at her.
The Hoo Doo doll joins Saar’s gallery of women muses with supernatural powers. Both Saar’s and Cornell’s objects have supernatural powers.
EK: Notwithstanding the labels or eras they’ve been assigned, major artists like Saar and Cornell inevitably focus on positioning themselves in contexts both subtler and larger than social identity. It’s as if the artists I love (and the poets I love, too) work at discovering their individual selves in a wider frame, a frame that takes in history, myth, and the cosmos but encloses as well the literal and particular details of their lives.
For better and for worse, Cornell may be the more cerebral of the two. He’s not allowing corporeality, neither of humans nor of animals, into his work. Those parrots adjacent to those grand hotels make sense symbolically. Yet they don’t have any jungle world of their own; they’re just pieces of Cornell’s dream-world. That Central Park carousel was real (before it burned down), and now it’s universalized in a wheel and mirror and a swirl of blue, white, and gray. His maps and charts and goblets and ice cubes are real, too, objects precisely and lovingly deployed. But as objects they’re long gone, or their worlds are. They’ve become part of the artist’s dream of what might have been.
Because they’re gone, yet live on in his art, they’re both precise and mystical, both personal and universal. As are Saar’s object-symbols, discovered by her a generation later.
I still think of these two artists as a pair, even if a wildly disparate one. Saar is as palpably mystical as Cornell, even if her mysticism belongs to a whole other planet: not a male aesthete’s cosmic dream planet, but a woman’s corporeal-imaginary planet. And yet, both of them were brave enough to discover a world of symbols that are unashamedly personal and unhesitatingly universalized. Ultimately, they used the same means: They collected objects that could show something about what was inside their psyches, their longings. And they made art from these objects—art that speaks to us across time and space.
MJ: I want to end with the words of each artist:
“I collect anything of human interest. There are no elite kinds of things in my work.” —Joseph Cornell
“I am intrigued with combining the remnants of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge.” —Betye Saar
Cornell’s art makes categories like “elite” and “minor” irrelevant. A Renaissance painting, an assortment of stamps: map, teapot, carousel, castle. What matters is how they cohabit in his mind. Looking at his work, did I ask myself if there were Black or otherwise non-white images there? I did and I found none. I wish I had. But we take what we need from an artist. And like Saar, I need the eccentric beauties of his art.
Saar’s work also refutes predictable categories, social and aesthetic. The list of these is no surprise: standardized definitions of race, sex, gender, and age; standardized prescriptions of which artistic form best suits which category. “Junk” aptly describes the racist objects and images enjoyed for centuries by white culture. Saar has turned this kind of junk into powerful, retaliatory art. It’s also worth noting (with tiresome irony) that much of Black culture—jazz, popular dance, language—was initially dismissed as “junk.” Think of her art as a galaxy. Its elements are literal and spiritual, exact and mysterious. They are held together by the pull—the gravity and the playful daring, the exorbitant discipline—of her imagination.