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<\/p>\nWes Anderson\u2019s films have frequently been compared to Joseph Cornell\u2019s art\u2014 the meticulous attention to detail, the miniature nature of the tableaux they both create and the abundant art historical references. But Anderson has never publicly acknowledged Cornell\u2019s influence on his film-making, until now.<\/p>\n
Next month, to coincide with Christmas and Cornell\u2019s birthday on 24 December, Anderson is recreating the artist\u2019s New York studio in Gagosian Gallery\u2019s storefront space on Rue de Castiglione in Paris. Around 12 of Cornell\u2019s most recognisable works, so-called shadow boxes he hand-built from wood and filled with assemblages, will be exhibited alongside hundreds, if not thousands, of found objects\u2014though visitors will not be able to enter the gallery.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s essentially a window display,\u201d says the exhibition’s curator Jasper Sharp, who has worked with Anderson for several years, most recently sourcing original works of art for the director\u2019s latest film The Phoenician Scheme. \u201cAnd we\u2019re doing it at Christmas, which was Cornell\u2019s favourite time of year. His birthday was on Christmas Eve. Leo Castelli, Peggy Guggenheim, all his dealers gave him shows at Christmas time because they thought that his boxes made small, inexpensive Christmas presents.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joseph Cornell, Pharmacy (1943)<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2025 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation\/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of Gagosian<\/p>\n
Among the main bodies of work on show are Pharmacy\u00a0(1943), which was once owned by Teeny and Marcel Duchamp and is modelled after an antique apothecary cabinet. Other key pieces include Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy)\u00a0(around 1950), a work from Cornell\u2019s celebrated Medici\u00a0series, and A Dressing Room for Gille\u00a0(1939), which pays homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau\u2019s Gilles (1721), in the collection of Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, a short walk from the gallery. Bl\u00e9riot II\u00a0(around 1956), meanwhile, honours Louis Bl\u00e9riot, the French inventor who was the first person to make an engine-powered flight across the English Channel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rest of it,\u201d Sharp says, \u201cwe\u2019re reverse engineering.\u201d He and Anderson have spent weeks studying first-hand accounts of the atmosphere at the studio, as well as poring over photographs. \u201cWe\u2019re basically doing what Cornell did, going to flea markets and buying what he bought,\u201d Sharp says. \u201cFor example, there\u2019s this wonderful wall of whitewashed shoe boxes where Cornell kept all his seashells and driftwood and different things. We are recreating these boxes ourselves.\u201d <\/p>\n
The sign painters who work on Anderson\u2019s films have studied Cornell’s handwriting and will write on the ends of all the boxes. Another movie expert is helping to age some of the materials. \u201cIt\u2019s not an archaeological excavation or one-to-one model of Cornell\u2019s studio, we\u2019re primarily recreating the spirit and atmosphere. But Wes also didn\u2019t want it to look like a Wes Anderson show. He hasn\u2019t done his version of Cornell\u2019s studio,\u201d Sharp says. The exhibition coincides with a show of Anderson\u2019s archives, which opens at the Design Museum in London on 20 November.<\/p>\n
With no formal artistic training and having worked a string of blue-collar jobs to support his family after his father died young, Cornell was 37 when he decided to become a full-time artist. It was then he built a studio in the basement of the home he shared with his mother and brother in the Queens neighbourhood of Flushing, setting up a workbench, several tables, cabinets and a series of shelves on which he stored the objects he collected. Cornell also continued to work in the house\u2014in the garage or at the kitchen table. \u201cHe\u2019d bake things in the oven to age them and give them a craquelure,\u201d Sharp says. \u201cBut very few people were actually allowed down into the studio.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Joseph Cornell\u2019s studio in the basement of his family home in Queens, New York,\u00a01971<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Harry Roseman, Wes Anderson<\/p>\n
The few who visited were of a certain calibre: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Yayoi Kusama, who Sharp says was Cornell\u2019s girlfriend for a time. Andy Warhol, who bought a piece, and Robert Rauschenberg as a young art handler, who went to collect Cornell\u2019s work for an exhibition. Other visitors included Susan Sontag, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Billy Wilder and Tony Curtis.<\/p>\n
Precisely because Cornell\u2019s studio was largely invisible to the world, and preserved only in black and white photographs, Sharp says he and Anderson \u201cthought it would just be beautiful to bring it to life\u2014and in a city that he dreamt of his whole life but was never able to see\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cornell, a recluse who was also a Christian Scientist, experimental filmmaker\u00a0and self-declared magician, rarely travelled further than a subway ride into Manhattan. \u201cI think he was very shy. One of the very last things he said before he died was, \u2018I wish I had not been so reserved\u2019,\u201d Sharp says. <\/p>\n
Nonetheless, having read guidebooks and collected postcards, \u201cCornell knew Paris like the back of his hand\u201d, Sharp adds, pointing to an account of one of his first conversations with Marcel Duchamp, with whom Cornell had a longstanding friendship. \u201cDuring this conversation, they wandered around Paris for about 30 or 40 minutes and at the end of the conversation, Cornell said, \u2018I\u2019d love to go to Paris one day\u2019. Duchamp was just astonished that this person had a photographic memory for a city that he’d never seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is exactly this precision that drew Anderson to Cornell\u2019s work. Sharp notes how the same approach to detail was how he came to work on The Phoenician Scheme, sourcing works including a Renoir from the art collecting Nahmad dynasty and several masterpieces from the Hamburger Kunsthalle. \u201cThere was nothing gratuitous about [securing the loans], it was completely consistent with Wes\u2019s approach to detail and an approach to just extract everything he can from a particular situation,\u201d Sharp says.<\/p>\n
He points to the scene where Mia Threapleton, who plays Liesl, is woken in bed by Benicio del Toro shining a torch in her face. Del Toro plays arms dealer and art collector Zsa-Zsa Korda. \u201cMia is wearing a vintage nightgown, she\u2019s sleeping on a mattress that\u2019s been stuffed with horsehair, then there’s an original Renoir painting behind her. The whole scene is set up so intricately with beautiful materials, textures and original things that it’s going to elicit a different performance from her than if everything is made of balsa wood,\u201d Sharp says.<\/p>\n
As for staging the Gagosian show, with so many objects to bring together, Sharp says he and Anderson are now doing a test build of Cornell\u2019s studio in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. But, despite the rigorous preparation, there is still an element of chance with the installation. As Sharp puts it: \u201cLot of things will be in flux until about an hour before the door opens, that\u2019s just the nature of the beast.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wes Anderson\u2019s films have frequently been compared to Joseph Cornell\u2019s art\u2014 the meticulous attention to detail, the miniature…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,10993,2332,47760,103573,71908,56,54,55,70888],"class_list":["post-247742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-film","tag-gagosian","tag-joseph-cornell","tag-studios","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wes-anderson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}