Zamzar

1962, he spent a painstaking day lettering a note to himself on a chest of drawers at the end of his bed. ‘Get up and work immediately,’ it said, and he’s been obeying ever since.

In 1962, he spent a painstaking day lettering a note to himself on a chest of drawers at the end of his bed. ‘Get up and work immediately,’ it said, and he’s been obeying ever since.

From the off, Hockney was canny if not outright Machiavellian at pursuing his ambitions.

THE BOX IS the central metaphor of Joseph Cornell’s life, just as it is the signature element of his exquisite and disturbing body of work, his factory of dreams. He made boxes to keep wonders in: small wooden boxes that he built himself in the basement beneath the small wooden house he shared with his mother and disabled younger brother, the two fixed stars of his existence.

As a boy, he saw Houdini perform in New York City, escaping from locked cabinets, wreathed in chains. In his own artwork, which he didn’t begin until he was almost thirty, he made obsessive, ingenious versions of the same story: a multitude of found objects representing expansiveness and flight, penned inside glass-fronted cases. Ballet dancers, birds, maps, aviators, stars of screen and sky, at once cherished, fetishised and imprisoned.

This tension between freedom and constriction ran right through Cornell’s own life.

pioneer of assemblage art, collector, autodidact, Christian Scientist, pastry-lover, experimental film-maker, balletomane and self-declared white-magician, he roved freely through the fields of the mind while inhabiting a personal life of extremely narrow limits. He never married or moved out of his mother’s house in Queens and rarely voyaged further than a subway ride into Manhattan, despite being besotted with the idea of foreign travel and particularly with France.

He was on friendly terms with almost every artist who passed through New York during the middle years of the twentieth century – among them Duchamp, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning and Warhol – and yet he was also solitary, stuck in himself, a hermit who said to his sister in the last conversation they ever had, ‘I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.’

Though he longed for larger horizons (the title of the Royal Academy’s 2015

retrospective is Wanderlust), he didn’t attempt to physically escape his circumstance, choosing instead to master the difficult knack of conjuring infinite space from a circumscribed realm.