Wes Anderson Recreates Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway Studio in Paris

In his lifetime, Joseph Cornell’s studio was a top destination for many in the art world. But not all were invited to the basement of his modest Dutch Colonial home on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. The painfully shy recluse extended the offer to very few—mainly women, who might furnish their male counterparts with a book and a seat at the kitchen table to wile away the time. But now, anyone can visit. Not the actual studio, of course, but a painstaking replica titled “The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson,” which is the brainchild of curator Jasper Sharp and the filmmaker and will occupy the storefront windows at Gagosian in Paris through March 14.

“He said let’s recreate the workshop and all of his tools and his table and his furniture,” Sharp recalls Anderson suggesting. “So, that’s what we’ve done. We loved the idea of doing it on street level, a storefront, and creating an exhibition that we never open the door to. It’s entirely consumed on the street.”

A famous hoarder, Cornell spent his days scouring secondhand stores, flea markets and other venues, choosing objects that caught his eye and storing them away for future use. The basement was more like a workshop than your average artist studio, packed to the rafters with items that might look like junk to anyone else, but to Cornell were sweet morsels which, when paired properly in one of his glass-fronted shadowboxes, conjured magic. Much like the artist’s own assemblages, the Gagosian installation paints a portrait of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures.

While recreating the studio might not sound like an overwhelming challenge, the project required arduous research, drawing on accounts from curators, friends, family members, assistants, and collectors. Sharp and his team relied on the few photos that existed, taken by people like Hans Namuth, Duane Michals, and most of all, Harry Roseman, who worked with the artist from 1969 until his death in 1972.

Famous from the photos is a shelving unit containing whitewashed boxes on which Cornell labeled the contents—owls, Caravaggio, watch parts, seashells—each reproduced in the artist’s hand by a pair of sign painters who work on Anderson’s movies. Another of Anderson’s crew, Catherine Little, was called upon to age items and recreate the walls, damp and damaged by the years.

“We have several hundred bits of printed material, a little box of Dutch clay pipes,” says Sharp, noting the inclusion of the artist’s typewriter and 16mm projector used to view titles from his oversized film collection from which he sometimes spliced disparate images and sequences, creating his own movies. “We have the most beautiful things from his studio and from his home, which are original. We’ve collected the records that Cornell had in his record collection. We’ve collected the exact editions of books on the moon, on the stars, that he had. These are not Cornell’s objects, but they’re exact equivalents.”

Originals came courtesy of the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., including archival materials and four unfinished boxes, as well as 14 shadowboxes, one object and four collages. These are interspersed among historical items discovered by Sharp in secondhand shops and flea markets on several continents, as well as eBay, antiquarian booksellers and record dealers.

Also included is Pharmacy, modeled after an antique apothecary cabinet, owned by Teeny and Marcel Duchamp. Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy) is from the artist’s celebrated Medici series, framing reproductions of Bernardino Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy behind amber-tinted glass, presented alongside wooden toys and maps of Italian streets. A Dressing Room for Gilles pays homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot, the original of which hangs just a few blocks away at Musée du Louvre. And Blériot II honors Louis Blériot, the first to make an engine-powered flight across the English Channel.

“There’s stuff everywhere, piles of National Geographic, aisles of film, he’s an absolute hoarder,” says Sharp, who mounted the 2015-2016 show, “Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust,” at Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum as well as London’s Royal Academy of Arts. “Everyone who went to the studio described it as beautifully organized chaos. He kept dossiers on dozens of individuals, some of whom he knew, some of whom he was friends with, and some of whom had died three hundred years prior. He kept dossiers on Dürer, he kept a dossier on Lauren Bacall for 30 years. And he was making these exquisitely poetic boxes which were aligning him more with European Surrealists, a label he rejected.”

Perhaps the most eccentric in a milieu full of eccentrics, Cornell lived his whole life in the same house and rarely ventured outside of New York City. One exception was attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. As a graduation gift, he was promised by his father a trip to Paris. But his father died soon thereafter, and Cornell, despite having reached his senior year, never graduated. Instead, he returned home to care for his mother and his younger brother Robert, who had cerebral palsy.

A voracious reader, Cornell was an armchair traveler, once describing specific sights in Paris to his friend Marcel Duchamp, who was surprised to later learn that Cornell had never visited the city. An autodidact, in his late 20s he began making collages and assemblages—boxes with items strategically placed within. Some of the items commented on or rhymed with others, some did not. But they were regarded as treasures by those who collected them, including figures like a young Yayoi Kusama, with whom he shared a platonic relationship. Once, when his mother caught them kissing, she is said to have thrown water on the couple.

In 1931, Cornell visited Julien Levy Gallery while Levy was unpacking new works by Surrealists like Max Ernst. Captivated, Cornell later brought his own collages to show Levy and was invited to join the gallery’s 1932 Surrealist exhibition. In addition to Levy, he later showed with gallerists like Richard Feigen and Leo Castelli.

Those who made the journey to Utopia Parkway include filmmaker and collector Billy Wilder, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of assemblage Cornell found kinship with, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Mark Rothko and Stan Brakhage. His artwork impacted that of people like Dorothea Tanning, Betye Saar, Octavio Paz and Louise Nevelson, among many others.

A transplant from Houston to Paris, Wes Anderson might have visited the house on Utopia Parkway had he not been born a mere three years before Cornell’s passing. Their work overlaps in movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel, the poster of which appears to be a tribute to Cornell’s castles and hotel pieces like Untitled (Pink Palace).

“It goes beyond the aesthetic, the narrative and storytelling, it’s a deeply layered relationship. And Wes, someone who’s grown up in the States and made a decision to live his life in Europe, when you look at his films, there’s certainly a kindred spirit,” notes Sharp, who refrained from referencing “pink palace” in the show, lest it shorthand their artistic kinship.

“He treasured as perhaps the last of his almost Edwardian youth, the right to be quietly eccentric,” wrote art critic Jed Perl, “to take a subtly ironic attitude toward a world that he observed with the friendly caution of a man who was glad to be here but also suspected that he was meant for another time and place.”

A devotee to opera and ballet, Cornell struck up friendships with dancers like Tamara Toumanova, Allegra Kent and Balanchine’s tragic muse, Tanaquil LeClercq, but never married and, by his own admission, died a virgin. His final sentiment, expressed to his sister, was one of a heart-wrenching regret: “I wish I had not been so reserved.”

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