From small boxes big things come

In "Toward the Blue Pen insula (for Emily Dickinson )," one of Joseph Cornell's most mysteriously poignant works, an antique wooden box encloses a white interior resembling an empty birdcage. A wire grid encloses an area toward the rear where a small window built into the back wall of the box frames a view of blue sky. In the place where the grid overlays the window, the wire has been cut and folded back, creating an opening through which, it would seem, the bird that once lived here has escaped into the wild blue yonder.

That poetic play between containment and escape runs throughout "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," a beguilingly beautiful exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum. Organized by Cornell expert and chief Peabody Essex curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan , the exhibition presents some 180 works by Cornell, including many of the box sculptures for which he is best known, as well as collages and films. The first Cornell retrospective in 26 years, it is a deeply absorbing and touching show.

The attractions of Cornell's art are immediate. Though self-taught, he had a keen, often playful sense of design, a wonderfully sensuous way with materials, and a poet's feel for the metaphorical possibilities of ordinary objects. His intimate, antique wooden boxes neatly stocked with little mementos and flea-market oddities are dreamily evocative even if it's hard to say what they mean.

But Cornell was doing more than just creating amusing little curiosity cabinets. He was grappling with certain fundamental tensions in his own psyche, and that is what gives his art its compelling expressive urgency.

Many works are clearly driven by longing for romantic connection. "Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall )," one of many pieces dedicated to beautiful female entertainers, is a kind of shrine to unattainable desire. Framed behind glass at the center of a box built to resemble an antique arcade game, a closely cropped publicity photograph of the sultry young actress seems like an image of a goddess whom no earthly mortal could ever touch.

Often the tension is metaphysical. In the box construction "Untitled (Cockatoo With Watch Faces)," the cut out of a white bird surrounded by a grid of white watch faces suggests the soul hemmed in by the empirical facts of time and space. The box itself, which Cornell gave an old and weathered appearance, enhances the sense of time and agedness -- a melancholy feeling of earthbound existence -- while the bird suggests the possibility of imaginative flight into that realm of ecstatic eternity about which Dickinson wrote with such cryptic eloquence.

Cornell in fact led an unusually confined life. He supported and lived with his mother and his brother, who had cerebral palsy, in a small, working-class house in Flushing, N.Y. He was a devout Christian Scientist, and he rarely traveled beyond Manhattan, where he regularly browsed second-hand stores and thrift shops to find materials for his art. It is assumed that when he died in 1972 he was a virgin.

Cornell was not a complete re- cluse. He corresponded widely and forged a successful career in the New York avant-garde art world. Only a year after producing his first collages in 1931, he was included in a historic exhibition called "Surré alism" at the legendary Julien Levy Gallery . He went on to exhibit at the Egan Gallery, which also showed art by Willem de Kooning , Mark Rothko , and other Abstract Expressionists, and later, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg . He lived to see his works included in "New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970," the landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Henry Geldzahler curated.

Nevertheless, the feeling one gets with Cornell is that being boxed in -- whether by familial circumstances or by neurotic shyness -- is what led to the cultivation of an extraordinarily lively and adventurous inner life. He didn't think outside the box; rather, he thought deeper into the box by transforming its interior into a space of infinitely elastic possibility. Every box sculpture he made represents the triumph of a wide-ranging imaginative vision over the deadening captivity of external, terrestrial existence.

Hartigan's organization of the exhibition according to recurring themes in Cornell's work helps to show just how remarkably various were the artist's interests. Renaissance painting, modern art, ornithology, astronomy, architecture, the history of ballet: Cornell's boxes contain an almost encyclopedi c range of subjects. Yet one never gets the sense of pedantic scholarship in Cornell. Every image and object -- from nude starlets to antique star charts -- takes on a mystical animation.

What is also impressive is how inventively he played with style and form. Some boxes resemble Catholic Church icons. Another, dedicated to the 1930s Hollywood actress Tilly Losch, depicts a girl held aloft by the strings of a hot-air balloon or parachute floating above an alpine landscape; it looks like a decorative confection produced by an ingenious, Victorian-era amateur. A set of early collages made by gluing together scraps of old engravings dedicated to the Surrealist Max Ernst could easily be mistaken for the work of Ernst himself. And a box in which each little compartment of a white gridded structure is occupied by a white wooden cube anticipates the gridded sculptures of Sol LeWitt and other minimalist artists of the '60s.

Cornell's raw materials are fascinating to study. The boxes themselves are wonderfully diverse. They range from lovingly finished small cabinets with multiple drawers to little cardboard containers for children's toys. Cornell did not build his own boxes -- they're all found or purchased objects -- but each gives the impression it was crafted with exacting care.

The objects he put into the boxes are equally remarkable: wooden and rubber balls, marbles, white clay soap-bubble pipes, feathers, costume jewelry, miniature bottles and wine glasses, seashells, dolls, watch springs, children's blocks, images of birds and butterflies clipped from books and magazines, and much more. Each object has its own vividly physical presence, and yet at the same time each is transformed into a numinous image within Cornell's long-running psychic theater. The recurring thrill in Cornell is that leap from the material immediacy of the box and its contents to the immaterial plane of visionary fantasy.

One aspect of Cornell's work that is not often mentioned is its sly sense of humor. See, for example, "Pantry Ballet ( for Jacques Offenbach )," a horizontal box occupied by a lineup of little plastic lobsters, each with a gauze tutu wrapped around its tail. Often it is humor that saves works that would otherwise be viewed as absurdly sentimental. In a collage dedicated to the ballerina Tamara Toumanova , the dancer appears swimming in a luminously colorful, submarine wonderland amongst goldfish and exotic underwater plants. Cornell's worshipful homage seems genuinely felt, yet the kitschy, over-the-top luxuriance of the picture suggests that he might be having a bit of fun with his own extreme romanticism.

Still, the mood that mostly prevails in Cornell's work is ultimately one of unrequited yearning for something beyond the limits of the box. One of the most abstract and most powerful of his box sculptures is "Untitled (Window Facade)" from 1951, which presents a grid of window mullions heavily coated by white paint with a mirror covering the box's rear wall. It is a strangely desolate tableau, in which an inner image of infinite depth is only the sterile, illusory reflection of a cheap mirror. For all he was able to create imaginatively, there is an underlying feeling of loneliness and wishing for more contact with real life.

People who know Cornell only for his boxes and collages may be surprised and intrigued to discover that he also produced short experimental movies. He didn't actually shoot films himself, but he cut up and re-spliced old commercial films into disjunctive montages. In later years, he worked with professional filmmakers who would shoot footage that he would edit into his own works.

The films are mesmerizing. For "Rose Hobart ," a blue-tinted silent film accompanied by music, Cornell edited out every scene from a 1931 jungle movie called "East of Borneo" that does not feature its starring actress Rose Hobart. The result is comical yet strangely voyeuristic, as though Cornell were an obsessed stalker.

Something similar happens in "A Legend for Fountains," (1957-1965) in which the camera (operated by filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt ) silently follows a pretty young woman carrying a cat as she wanders around the city, pausing for long, close-up studies of her face. As in many of Cornell's boxes, one senses an unquenchable longing not just for this particular earthly woman but for something she seems to represent: the possibility of escape from the spiritual flatness of the mundane modern world into a semi-divine realm of erotic transfiguration.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a review of "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" at the Peabody Essex Museum in Sunday's Arts & Entertainment section incorrectly stated the artist did not build his own boxes to house his artworks. Though Cornell initially used containers that he found, he later acquired carpentry skills and began making the boxes himself.)