Joseph Cornell (1903 – 1972) was born in Nyack, New York and lived his entire adult life in Flushing, Queens. As a teenager, Cornell studied at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, but before graduating he returned home, where he lived with his widowed mother and wheelchair-bound brother. He never left New York City after that; instead, he let his imagination do the traveling.

Although Cornell was not the strongest student, his time at Andover instilled in him a thirst for knowledge that would permeate his artistic career. He was very well-read, and his sophisticated and deep knowledge of literature, science, art, dance, theater, cinema, and music shaped his creations. It is estimated that he owned more than 3,000 books and magazines, as well as a multitude of films and record albums. Cornell also left behind a veritable archive of diaries and letters.

Cornell collected ephemera, memorabilia, and curiosities during his frequent visits to New York City’s museums, bookstores, libraries, and art galleries. He drew inspiration for his famous boxes from displays and dioramas in The Museum of Natural History – these exhibits at the museum originated from 16th-century cabinets of curiosities.

Cornell was not an artist in the traditional sense: he could not paint, draw, or sculpt. His training was unconventional, as he learned how to construct his renowned boxes from his next-door neighbor, a carpenter. Despite his lack of formal art education, however, he quickly became a master of assemblage. He voraciously collected objects while wandering between Queens and Manhattan, and curated collections of seemingly disparate items into cohesive, mystical tableaux.

Cornell’s work was first exhibited in “Surréalisme” at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932. The multimedia exhibition included works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí, among others. While his early work was frequently exhibited alongside that of Surrealist artists, Cornell himself staunchly opposed being classified as a Surrealist.

Both Cornell and the Surrealists rejected traditional representations of reality.However, whereas Surrealists created works through the process of involuntary association that sought to express the unconscious, Cornell saw his art as the result of cataloguing and classifying objects and associating them with fantasies and childhood memories. In other words, his process was deliberate and not one of what the Surrealists termed “chance encounters.” As a devoted Christian Scientist, Cornell believed engaging with the subconscious and memory was a very spiritual undertaking.