A collector’s guide to Joseph Cornell, who transformed humble materials into masterpieces

Joseph Cornell, a lifelong New Yorker

Joseph Cornell was born on Christmas Eve, 1903, in Nyack, New York, and was the oldest of four siblings. After his father died in 1917, Cornell spent nearly four years at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied science — although he left the program before graduating, his lifelong interest in the subject would present itself throughout his artistic practice.

Working as a textile salesman between 1921 and 1931, Cornell moved with his family to Flushing, Queens, New York, in 1929. Devoted to caring for his brother who had cerebral palsy and was disabled, Cornell remained at this home on Utopia Parkway until his death in December 1972. While he began exhibiting his work during the 1930s, Cornell decided to pursue art full time the following decade, establishing his own studio, or ‘laboratory’, as he called it, in the basement of his home.”

Notoriously shy and reticent to call himself an ‘artist’ (he preferred the term ‘maker’), Cornell was a prolific diarist constantly chronicling and analysing his practice. Like an extension of his diary’s pages, Cornell’s collages, boxes and films reflect his complex inner world — both melancholic and nostalgic, as well as optimistic and with an insatiable appetite to explore people and places near and far.

Despite a lack of formal training, Cornell became one of the 20th century’s most endearing and important artists, garnering a veritable who’s who of legendary gallerists, including Julien Levy, Peggy Guggenheim, Charles Egan, Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen and William Copley. Though he was not explicitly tied to a single artistic movement, Cornell was featured in the seminal 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was organised by the museum’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. During his lifetime, Cornell was also the subject of a major retrospective — curated by renowned museum director Walter Hopps — at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1966, which then travelled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Mental travelling: how Joseph Cornell cultivated a museum of the mind

‘What’s often been said about Cornell is that he was born on the wrong continent in the wrong century because he had this European sensibility that was anchored more in the 19th century than the 20th century,’ Jasper Sharp, a British curator and scholar based in Austria, tells Christie’s. ‘Cornell had this incredible understanding of time and distance.’ Sharp co-curated the 2015 exhibition, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In 2025 Sharp also collaborated with filmmaker Wes Anderson on a Gagosian Paris exhibition, which recreated Cornell’s curiosity-filled basement studio in the gallery’s street-facing window. Hundreds of objects, shown strewn across his work tables and stored in shoeboxes, provided a rare glimpse into the artist who assembled more than 100 dossiers on subjects ranging from astronomy and art history to ballet and cinema.

While international destinations were frequent subjects of his assemblages, Cornell never left the United States. Instead, he preferred to travel through his imagination, discovering the world through literature, conversations with globe-trotting friends like Marcel Duchamp and visits to book and antique shops, museums and theatres, where he’d amass ephemera for his boxes, which he once likened to ‘poetic theatres’. Particularly revelatory for Cornell, however, was the 1939 World’s Fair, situated near his Queens home. ‘I have been going by the old garbage dumping grounds for twenty years, and thought it just a plaisanterie when I read in the papers that the Fair site would be established there’, Cornell wrote in an enthusiastic note to Charles Henri Ford.

Suddenly the world’s nations were at his doorstep — as were a seemingly endless supply of Dutch clay pipes that would furnish his Soap Bubble Sets throughout his career. The fair’s Masterpieces of Art exhibition was especially formative for Cornell, who’d come face to face with portraits by the likes of Pinturicchio, Raphael and Bronzino that he’d reference in his Medici series. The fair’s emphasis on modern science and technology would additionally inspire Cornell’s enduring fascination with the cosmos.

‘Walter Hopps, a great champion of Cornell, once said that all you need to tell the entire history of art is a painting by Vermeer and a box by Joseph Cornell,’ Sharp recalls. Coincidentally, paintings by Vermeer were also on view at the World’s Fair, and the Dutch Golden Age master’s imagery would later be used in Cornell’s boxes. While Cornell admired Vermeer’s use of colour, light, perspective and attention to detail, perhaps, the artists’ most synergistic quality is how they elevate the everyday to the sublime.

Joseph Cornell’s Soap Bubble Set series

Reflecting Cornell’s newly gained carpentry skills harnessed during the late 1930s, Cornell’s Soap Bubble Sets were his earliest group of mature box constructions. The first of the series was included in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition. Shortly after, it became the first work by Cornell to enter a museum collection when the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut acquired it.

In this wide-ranging series, Cornell combines objects with lunar maps and imagery referring to celestial navigation, his primary visual metaphor for extended travel across time and space. Glass circles and round marbles evoke the moon and soap bubbles — traditionally considered an allegory of vanitas, a reminder of the transience of life — while shells, cordial glasses and more objects conjure 17th-century still lifes.

Joseph Cornell’s Medici series

Largely considered the most important of the artist’s series, the Medici boxes demonstrate Cornell’s penchant for transforming disparate imagery and objects into idiosyncratic poetry. Beginning in 1942, the series centres reproductions of famous paintings of young aristocrats from the prominent Florentine banking family, known for their political dynasty and cultural patronage during the Italian Renaissance. Cornell imagined a fictional romance between the Medici Princess and Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy based on legend that Maria de’ Medici (originally thought to be the sitter in the Bronzino portrait) was killed by her powerful father for falling in love with a commoner at court (the Pinturicchio Boy). This fusion of fact, myth and personal fantasy highlights Cornell’s role as both a creator of stories and objects.

Combining the Medici imagery with small objects that connote prizes, such as panes of glass, wood game markers, jacks, balls and cubes, the boxes reference the penny-arcade slot machines that Cornell encountered during his youth in places like Coney Island or Atlantic City. After inserting a coin, these hand-crafted wooden cabinets would reveal a special scene, providing a fleeting moment of entertainment. ‘Perhaps the definition of a box could be as a kind of forgotten game,’ Cornell once said, ‘a philosophical toy of the Victorian era, with poetic or magical moving parts, achieving even slight measure of this poetry or magic... that golden age of the toy alone should justify the box’s existence.’ Cornell additionally regarded his own imaginative interpretations of the slot machines from his childhood as something ‘that might be encountered in a penny arcade in a dream.’

Meanwhile, the sight lines that are painted on panes of glass in these boxes evoke the moving targets featured in arcade shooting galleries. Like much of Cornell’s oeuvre, the Medici series ingeniously walks the line between childlike amusement and a much darker underbelly. ‘When you look at them, you realise that a lot of these young noble children, who led very tragic, often quite short lives, have targets across their faces,’ notes Sharp. ‘In thinking about how many are made during the Second World War, you realise that Cornell is making a form of lyrical political art, mourning the destruction of things that were so important to him.’

Joseph Cornell’s auction record was established in May 2014 when Christie’s sold a 1943 Medici Slot Machine from the collection of renowned Chicago collectors, Edwin and Lindy Bergman, for $7,781,000. From the same collection, Cornell’s Medici Princess sold for $5,989,000, the second highest price for the artist.

Joseph Cornell’s Dovecote series

While Cornell was creating his Medici boxes, he began his Dovecote series (Cornell also produced variants, combining objects and imagery from both series, as he commonly did with other bodies of work throughout his career). Developed during the Middle Ages, dovecotes were used as compartmented houses for the domestic pigeons that knights kept as a sign of prestige. Cornell became intrigued by the history and meaning of the word ‘dovecote’ while encountering heavily whitewashed colonial versions of them during childhood trips around New England. ‘Dovecote’ could be defined as a settled or harmonious group or organisation, while the Latin term for dovecote — columbarium — additionally refers to a structure of vaults lined with recesses for funerary urns.

Sharp describes the ‘austere’ yet ‘playful’ series: ‘Cornell’s Dovecotes are incredibly spiritual works. These little homes for marbles and other objects have a chapel-like quality to them. Spirituality can often be quite austere, and there is a great economy, geometry and minimalism in Cornell’s work, but there’s always an element of playfulness. When you look at an artwork by Cornell, you never feel that you’re being lectured as you might when learning from someone as invested in history as he was. Cornell’s work is an invitation to dip your toe into the universe of someone that you might not know much about, but there’s never any sense of intellectual superiority. On the contrary, there’s a childlike wonder in the work, which invites you to wonder as well.’

Joseph Cornell’s Pharmacy series

The Pharmacy series brings together capsules of shards, seeds, fragments and powders housed in what appears to be a medicine chest. As a devout follower of Christian Science, which shuns traditional medicine, Cornell offered his alternative: ‘a wonderful Renaissance apothecary for the soul with what you need to keep your spirits afloat,’ describes Sharp, additionally noting the wartime context adds further resonance to this series. Remedies may include sand from a beach, the wings of a butterfly, a map, or the plan of an Italian cathedral cut out from a guidebook. Sharp draws comparisons to Duchamp’s portable museum of his own works, Boîte-en-valise, the first deluxe editions of which Cornell helped assemble.

Joseph Cornell’s generous spirit and legacy in art and film

During his decades of research on Cornell, Sharp observed that a disproportionate amount of the artist’s exhibitions opened just before Christmas. ‘It was Cornell’s favourite time of year because he was a relentless present giver,’ says the curator, adding that the season also appealed to the artist’s serious sweet tooth. ‘Peggy Guggenheim said that Cornell’s boxes made ideal stocking stuffers.’

A ‘North Star’ for many artists and filmmakers, as Sharp describes, Cornell’s generosity extended into artistic support and mentorship. He played an instrumental role in igniting the careers of artists in the avant-garde New York scene, such as Carolee Schneemann and Yayoi Kusama, with whom he was particularly close. Cornell’s assemblages have inspired countless artists, including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Betye Saar, while his experimental films, many of which, like his fine art, utilised collaged material, have gained a cult following.

In many ways a child at heart, Cornell made a point of engaging young audiences. The last show during his lifetime was A Joseph Cornell Exhibition for Children, which was held in 1972 at a gallery at Cooper Union. Children could view his boxes at their height, while also snacking on brownies and cherry soda.

While today works by Cornell can be found across American institutions and increasingly in Europe, the nucleus of his practice is the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Gifted in 1978 by the artist’s sister and brother-in-law (Mr. and Mrs. John A. Benton) and later the artist’s estate (Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation), the collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, newspaper clippings, maps, photographs, postcards, prints, playbills and assorted dime-store trinkets and found objects, from bird’s nests to board games. The Study Center also includes his record albums and over 2,500 books from the artist’s personal library.