I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a different Cornell, one that counters the photograph of the elderly artist, such as the iconic image used as frontispiece for the catalogue of the last Cornell retrospective twenty-six years ago in which an elderly Cornell sits in a lawn chair in the backyard of his house on Utopia Parkway. SFMOMA opens its show with a photograph that captures Cornell the maker, and it is a fitting emblem for Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. The vita contempletiva has been revisioned by Lynda Hartigan in her retrospective as the vita activa. As viewers and readers of this exhibit and its major catalogue,...