notes.husk.org/likes images.

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

From The New Yorker, 2003:

The objects that cause this odd rhythm of stop and look and stop to think again are the shadow boxes that the American artist Joseph Cornell constructed for forty years in the basement of his mother’s house on Utopia Parkway, in Queens. This year is the centenary of Cornell’s birth, and his boxes continue to hold their own in the American imagination. Since his death, in 1972, it is not so much that Cornell’s fame has grown, which is what happens when critics water a reputation, as that his work has become part of the living body of art, which is what happens when artists eat it. It was strange to find how big a part Cornell played in the imaginations of young artists during the nineteen-eighties, when the Abstract Expressionist painters, for so long more central and cosmopolitan, seemed irrelevant, stagy, and stuffy, and when even the autistic genius of Warhol seemed to belong to a Beaux-Arts past, with its faith in painted things stuck on a wall.