Joseph Cornell was one of the most original and extraordinary American artists of the twentieth century. Born in 1903, he lived almost all his life with his mother and badly handicapped brother in a house on Utopia Parkway, Queens, New York. A recluse, with no formal artistic training, Cornell had an obsessive fear of female sexuality (he died a virgin) but fantasized about ballerinas and film stars, preferably long dead. These fantasies were expressed in his remarkable 'shadow boxes', the constructions on which his artistic reputation rests. Admired by the Surrealists, then the Abstract Expressionists and finally by the pop artists, Cornell remained a unique figure, both as an artist and a human being.