It’s not often that a man known for dwelling in his mother’s basement becomes a revered cultural icon, but Joseph Cornell has long enjoyed cult status among the of the 20th-century art world. Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Yayoi Kusama, and Peggy Guggenheim were among the many artists and collectors who turned up to the New York artist’s family home in the hopes of gaining access to the highly secretive studio where he made his eccentric assemblages. Few made it past the kitchen table.
“He didn’t let many people in, but the people he did were really interesting,” said Jasper Sharp, ex-curator of modern and contemporary art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In this way, the humble workshop became something of a microcosm of its era’s most radical ideas, pre-empting pivotal postmodernist movements like Neo-Dada and Pop Art.
Cornell continues to inspire creatives to this day, including the legendary film director Wes Anderson. He has teamed up with Sharp to recreate Cornell’s studio, complete with some of his best-known works, at Gagosian in Paris next month. “We thought, wouldn’t it be fascinating to bring it back to life?” Sharp said.
An Artistic Affinity
Growing up in Houston, Texas, Anderson first encountered Cornell’s work at local museums like the Menil Collection, which owns (1943). Typical of the artist’s “shadow boxes”—glass-fronted boxes containing assemblages of found objects, often with a surreal effect—the work contains a palatial building set before a forest of twigs. Its attractive symmetry echoes that of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Anderson’s 2014 film of the same name.
Sharp has not been the first to note an affinity between the director and Cornell, both of whom are admired for their highly original approach to creating stylized and antiquated, diorama-like worlds. “They both can take quite simple things and have an alchemical effect on them,” he noted.
Joseph Cornell’s studio in the basement of his family home in Queens, New York, 1971. Photo: © Harry Roseman.
Anderson and Sharp, another longtime Cornell head, have based their reconstruction of the artist’s studio on surviving black-and-white photographs. These reveal one wall of shelves stacked with shoeboxes full of found objects. The artist was a regular at flea markets and antique shops, obsessively hoarding a vast array of items from feathers and seashells to discarded toys, marbles, and maps. Other walls of his studio were lined with curiosities, unfinished constructions, or craftsman’s supplies, from glue and tape to saws and drills.
First stop for Sharp and Anderson was the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the contents of Cornell’s studio were preserved some years after his death in 1972. Objects borrowed from the Smithsonian have been bolstered by the collection of a U.S. artist and close confidant of Cornell’s who received many of his books, shoeboxes, and collages by mail. They will be loaning several hundred to the Paris show. Meanwhile, Sharp and Anderson’s team are scouring markets across Paris and New York for thousands more objects to complete the set.
Labor of Love
At the center of the reconstructed studio will be Cornell’s work table, littered with his X-acto knife, gluing paste, and old magazines from which he cut material for his collages. The time capsule will also feature several unfinished shadow boxes from the Smithsonian. “It will be almost as if he’s just gone out to lunch,” said Sharp.
Some details of the reconstruction could only be described as a labor of love. A galvanized metal sink just like Cornell’s will be decorated with the same cleaning detergent he used. Anderson’s set designers are learning the artist’s handwriting so that they can scrawl true-to-life labels over the white-washed shoeboxes that will replace fragile originals. Some objects have been baked in the oven to give them an artificially aged patina, a technique that Cornell also used.
Presented as a storefront tableau to curious passersby, the installation seeks to capture the softly lit atmosphere of a studio where Cornell mainly worked at night. “We’re not attempting to create a facsimile of the studio,” said Sharp. “We’re trying to get as close as we can in spirit.”
Joseph Cornell, Pharmacy (1943). Photo: Dominique Uldry, © 2025 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Gagosian.
Competed works like the antique apothecary (1943) or the art history-laden (ca. 1950) have been chosen to demonstrate Cornell’s considerable range. “He often gets accused of being whimsical, in a derogatory way,” said Sharp. “People see him as a bit light and poetic, which I’ve always found peculiar because he was so substantive in his thinking, and so influential on so many artists.”
The city of Paris held a special significance for Cornell, who had been promised a post-graduation trip that never materialized after the death of his father. “He traveled there in his head,” said Sharp. The artist, a recluse who rarely left New York, pored over guidebooks and postcards from Paris. One of the first times he met Duchamp, who would become a close friend, Cornell stunned the French artist with his “almost photographic memory of a city he’d never seen.”
This passion brings a certain poignancy to Sharp and Anderson’s mission. “There is something lovely about bringing him here in perhaps the most intimate form,” said Sharp. “Not just bringing his work here, but the place where the work was born.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
