The world traveller who never left home

With artist friends and collaborators from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Cornell was a major figure in the New York art scene from the 1930s onwards. But unlike his contemporaries, Cornell never left New York. Devoted to the care of his mother and brother, Cornell instead returned each day to the cluttered basement studio he worked from in Queens. It was crammed with boxes, files and tiny objects – stacks of feathers, piles of old pipes, shells, marbles, stamps and more – and it was from this eccentric collection that Cornell created some of the most original art of the 20th century. His magical shadow boxes are just one part of an unusual oeuvre that also included influential montage film and collage.

So what is a shadow box? Simple, glass-fronted, hinged display cases, "shadow boxes" have their origins in Victorian crafts. Throughout the 19th century, across Europe and America, it was a common hobby for women to fill these cases with keepsakes: shells, ships and dried flowers. They were sentimental objects, intended to preserve an atmosphere or a particular time or person.

Putting things in boxes – both bought boxes and later ones he constructed himself – first occurred to Cornell during his city jaunts in the 1930s. He would scour the dime stores and antique shops of Manhattan, looking for second-hand books and unusual objects to assemble; he bought buttons from haberdashery counters and coloured sand from pet shops. In an interview for Life magazine in 1967, Cornell said: “I collect anything of human interest. There are no elite kinds of things in my work.”

As the curator of the RA’s exhibition, Sarah Lea, explains: “Boxes allowed Cornell a structure to frame many poetic connections between disparate times, subjects and places that he sensed in the world. Given the extent of his collection, his shadow boxes are a really concise form of expression; the objects in the boxes take on metaphorical meanings.”

Joseph Cornell: Naples, c. 1942

Through his shadow boxes, he travelled to distant realms, collecting imaginary souvenirs from imaginary voyages

Among an array of interests – which also included theatre and ballet, astronomy and nature – Cornell repeatedly returned to the idea of travel in his boxes, using words like “exploration” and “voyaging” to describe his work. He used fragments of maps, compasses, postage stamps and hotel advertisements of places he would never visit. Take Naples (1942), a narrow box containing a wine glass backed by a print of an Italian street scene, a microcosm of a distant city.

He was also interested in the freedom of birds to travel vast distances and in their migratory patterns – as in Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1943), his interest in and knowledge of the natural world visible in his work. Through his shadow boxes, he travelled to distant realms, collecting imaginary souvenirs from imaginary voyages.

Cornell described himself as an “armchair voyager”. Through his assemblage of images and objects, he created faraway and exotic worlds in small wooden frames.

This article was written by Harriet Baker from the Royal Academy and a longer version appears on its website. Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust is at the RA from Saturday 4 July to 27 September. Organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.