Zamzar

Gloria Swanson and Anna Moffo.

Other ongoing explorations, which sometimes ran for decades, were meticulously catalogued by way of topic: Advertisements, Butterflies, Clouds, Fairies, Figureheads, Food, Insects, History, Planets.

Categorisation mattered to Cornell

though so too did intuitive leaps and flights of fancy. ‘A clearing house for dreams and visions,’ he called his files; part research project, part stalking, part devotional act.

By the mid-1930s, he’d discovered the two great mediums of his maturity: shadow boxes and films made by re-editing found footage. One of the most striking among the latter category was Rose Hobart, which he made by chopping up the B movie East of Borneo and splicing it back together as a series of lingering, blue-tinted glimpses of the actress Rose Hobart, wrapped in a trench coat, intercut with enigmatic footage of jungle foliage and swaying palms

According to Deborah Solomon’s biography, Utopia Parkway, at the first screening Salvador Dali was so overcome with jealousy that he knocked over the projector, an incident Cornell found abidingly distressing.

Because of his lack of a formal art education and the unusual nature of his domestic circumstances, Cornell is often depicted as an outsider

Because of his lack of a formal art education and the unusual nature of his domestic circumstances, Cornell is often depicted as an outsider artist, but in fact he was in the swim of things from the start. He took his early collages to the gallerist Julian Levy, who liked them so much they appeared in the ground-breaking Surréalisme show in 1932, alongside Dali and Duchamp. His first shadow box, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), was in Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Other artists were quick to see the value of his inventions (something that continued right through the successive waves of surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop art). Despite his shyness he developed sustaining friendships, though he was never wholly comfortable with the business aspect of the art world.

Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie.

If I tried to smile, people told me to stop smirking. If I was being sincere, people told me to stop being sarcastic. If I was being sarcastic, people took me literally.