Joseph Cornell, (December 24, 1903, - December 29, 1972). Born in Nyack, New York. American sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists. He was also an avant garde and experimental filmmaker who lived in New York City for most of his life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, with his mother and his crippled brother, Robert.

He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes'. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films.