Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust review – exquisite curiosities

Royal Academy, London
Joseph Cornell’s ‘poetical theatres’ conjure up intense worlds of mystery, devotion and longingJoseph Cornell (1903-72) had the mind of a visionary and the methods of an archivist. He accumulated odds and ends from the real world – a bird’s egg, a marble, a foreign stamp, a thimble – and assembled them into enigmatic dreams. The little boxes for which he’s famous, when filled with arrangements of tiny fragments and fronted with glass, convey an intense but mys