Joseph Cornell travelled far beyond New York in his imagination but preferred to stay put at home with his mother in Queens. There he made the collages that go on show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in the exhibition Wanderlust, which opens this weekend (4 July until 27 September). Among the many collages he made in the late 1960s are ones dedicated to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. They formed an unlikely May-to-December relationship that was as passionate as it was platonic. Cornell, who was 26-years older than Kusama when they met, would call her several times a day and send her charming collages with messages such as, “Have some tea and think of me,” revealed the Tate curator Rachel Taylor in her blog during Tate Modern’s Kusama retrospective in 2012. The young Japanese artist spent days at Cornell’s Queens home where the two artists sketched each other. Kusama still owns a number of drawings Cornell made of her, Taylor wrote.
