I've long had a fascination with the work of Joseph Cornell, especially the wooden boxes that incorporated his assemblages created from found objects.

The Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Object Boxes indicate that Cornell is the acknowledged master of assemblage art. The assemblages have came to be considered among the most seminal works of 20th-century art. They combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism.

I'm discovering that Cornell was much more versatile as an artist than being a sculptor. This "sculpture" is almost a still life:

I didn't know that Cornell was a film maker. While his earlier films were often collages of found short films, his later ones montaged together footage he expressly commissioned from the professional filmmakers with whom he collaborated.

Yet I still come back to the assemblages--eg., the Aviary series:

In the late 1930s, inspired by the bird cages hanging in the window display of a local pet store, Cornell began his aviary series, one he would work on until his death. The boxes, which at first featured only parakeets (cutouts from natural history books and children's shooting gallery sets, mounted on conforming pieces of jigsawed wood), would soon include owls, cockatoos, canaries, and finally, about a decade later, an absent bird: an empty perch in a barren cage. Cornell's birds were often world travellers who pasted collage remnants of their exploits on the walls of their cages: hotel paraphernalia, foreign newspaper clippings, European advertisements, theatre and dance programmes.

Many of Cornell's boxes were not intended for the museums in which they now reside. They were gifts, tokens of affection.