Cornell's shadow boxes presented the artist with an escape from the realities of his domestic life into an distant worlds of his imagination.
When Cornell created Sandsifter in 1952, he had garnered considerable acclaim as a pioneer of assemblage art. As early as 1936, his unique shadowboxes were included in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and he had been the subject of several high-profile exhibitions at the Julien Levy and Charles Egan galleries. Cornell’s was on friendly terms with artists Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko, and his work was being acquired by prominent collectors — and yet he remained a profoundly solitary figure.

Duane Michals, Joseph Cornell, 1972 © 2020 Duane Michals.
In Context
Cornell initiated his work in assemblage as an escape into an imagined world from the realities of his domestic life; for the majority of his adulthood, Cornell lived with his mother and brother on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, acting as the primary caretaker for his brother, who had cerebral palsy. He embraced the process of creation as an act of imaginary travel, using his art as a passport into the infinite realm of his imagination.
Incredibly, Cornell created worlds of extraordinary vividness having rarely left his immediate surroundings of New York. Instead, he directly derived inspiration from his experience of the city itself, as well as from his readings of poetry and passions for ballet and the arts. Cornell’s appreciation for sundry materials first began during his midday escapes into the junk shops of Lower Manhattan during his time as a cloth salesman. He was mystified by the “poetry of things,” the notion that all objects intrinsically contain the memory of lived experience. Cornell saw the taciturn beauty of these items and used his Duchampian assemblages to translate their hidden exquisiteness into a universal language of visibility.

A Fabric Sale in the Lower East Side, Mahattan, 1946.
Joseph Cornell and Travel
wanderlust noun
/ˈwɑːn.dɚ.lʌst/
the wish to travel far away and to many different places
On the occasion of the major retrospective Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2015, curator Sarah Lea describes how the theme of wanderlust is closely linked to Cornell’s artistic practice, and his travels of the imagination.