The Man Who Knew Paris

Joseph Cornell almost never left Queens. From 1929 until his death in 1972 he lived in a small wood-frame house at 3708 Utopia Parkway, and in the basement he built glass-fronted shadowboxes out of the world he had not seen.

He built boxes for European ballerinas. He built boxes for Hollywood stars. He built boxes for specific European hotels — the Grand Hotel de l'Observatoire, the Hotel de l'Etoile, the Hotel de la Duchesse-Anne — pieced together from turn-of-the-century French guidebook advertisements. He had not stayed in any of them. He had not been to France.

He kept paper dossiers on roughly a hundred subjects, labeled in his own midnight-blue handwriting and stacked in whitewashed shoeboxes. One box was marked Mouse Material. An archivist later found, inside, the contents of a vacuum cleaner.

From the same basement he began building boxes for Andromeda, for the constellation Custos Messium, for lunar maps and soap-bubble universes. There is, apparently, no upper limit to a place you have not been.

One evening he sat with Marcel Duchamp, a Frenchman, and discussed the city. Landmark by landmark. Street by street. At the end of the conversation he mentioned that he had never been there.

Duchamp said afterwards that no one could have a photographic memory of a place he had never been.

Cornell did.