Best known as an American original who constructed miniature or poetic theaters in glass-fronted boxes, Cornell was fascinated by the theater, opera and ballet, fantasies providing a dream door to escape the realities of life.

The power of his art and films can best be described as dreamlike, innocent playfulness and humor grounded in profound melancholy and loneliness.

But as this exhibition suggests, he was a brilliant, strange and relentlessly serious artist whose stature has reached monumental proportions, thanks in part to a number of books celebrating the centennial of his birth and the publication of his voluminous diaries and letters.

The exhibition consists of 12 collages and three assemblages from the 1950s and '60s, including a drawing by his younger brother Robert and five works on loan from the Shidler family collection.

A quote from John Updike found in his diaries suggests what game is afoot: "The willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions is what distinguishes artists from entertainers and what makes some artists adventurous on behalf of us all."

Born in 1903 in Nyack, N.Y., about 30 miles from Manhattan, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the self-taught Cornell was haunted by extraordinary dreams and visions, yet — perhaps like that of the visionary William Blake — the environment for his imaginings could not have been more ordinary.

In the cluttered basement of his Flushing, Long Island, home, he spent early mornings and nights, arranging photographs, cutouts and other humble detritus into some of the oddest and most haunting three-dimensional works of the past century.

Contemporary and sophisticated, his most famous and distinctive works were boxes of wood, glass and innumerable natural objects, memorabilia, and antique and contemporary images he collected in New York City's junk stores, flea markets, and souvenir shops on 42nd Street, found objects to be arranged into his collages and constructions.

In 1931, holding his first job as a woolen-goods salesman, he saw an exhibition of surrealist art in a New York gallery and later met surrealist writers and artists at the Julien Levy Gallery, eventually showing his work there in solo exhibitions in 1932 and 1939.

He continued to work in the textile industry as a designer until 1940.

Worshiping women from afar, especially young ones, he lived an ascetic life, never married, and apparently never even consummated a relationship.

Cornell was no recluse, however. Admired by several generations of avant-garde artists, he formed friendships and corresponded with such diverse talents as Duchamp, de Kooning and Warhol, and had romantically charged encounters with Susan Sontag and Yoko Ono —not to mention unrequited crushes on countless young shop girls and waitresses.

He was especially interested in the past, and his work may have evolved from the Victorian hobby of preserving souvenirs and mementos in boxes, as well as from Victorian parlor games.

He used a variety of materials: cutouts from various publications, marbles, butterfly wings, scraps of wallpaper, souvenirs and memorabilia, sky charts, old advertisements, broken glassware, music boxes, feathers, metal springs, maps, seashells, mirrors, plastic ice cubes.

He also was influenced by his lifelong Christian Science faith, with its emphasis on harmony and the spirit.

Cornell's works are marked by what might be called a "cinematic imagination," techniques of accumulation, collection, montage and juxtaposition adapted to the art of creating visual epiphanies, affective memories of things lost or never realized.

His small wooden boxes (from 10 to 12 inches to 20 or more inches in size) are filled with various carefully chosen objects, evidence of Cornell's quest for seeing in his words "what a certain object will tell another."

Birds are a common image, as are constellations and other heavenly bodies, either as two-dimensional images or economically evoked by a sphere.

His visual juxtapositions resonate with mystery, fantasy, the subconscious and dreams, the poetic connections of meaning between disparate objects.

Cornell never enjoyed his growing status as a seminal figure, and his last years were his most isolated, watching neighborhood children from his window, leaving out on his porch boxes with which they could play.

In addition to the excellent exhibition of his boxes and collages, Cornell's films are presented on DVD in a small video gallery, courtesy of the Voyager Foundation, Washington, D.C.

The five films from the '30s and four from the '50s mirror his interior world and illuminate the connections between film, collage and assemblage that can be seen in his work. They also extend his obsessive visual themes: children at play, Central Park statues and fountains, flights of pigeons, star charts, tree branches and leaves in the wind, weathered houses.

For his first film "Rose Hobart," created in 1936, he spliced together existing film stock he found in New Jersey warehouses, mostly derived from the 1931 jungle "B" film "East of Borneo."

Juxtaposing the gestures and expressions made in the original film by Rose Hobart (the original film's starlet), this dreamscape of Cornell's seems to exist in a kind of suspension until the film's most arresting sequence toward the end, when a solar eclipse is juxtaposed with a white ball falling in slow motion into a pool of water.

During its rare screenings, Cornell projected the film through a deep blue (his favorite color) glass filter while playing Nestor Amaral's recording of "Holiday in Brazil," adding to the film's already dreamlike effect.

The exhibition and films are well worth an extended visit to absorb the spirit of one of America's authentic wizards who truly grappled with the stuff on which dreams are made.

More to see

The Contemporary Museum's other two exhibitions provide not only inspired juxtapositions to the Cornell exhibition but bear close inspection as well.

Highlights include Swenson's eerie sculpture "Ebie," Ahearn's equally surreal acrylic on plaster wall sculpture "Jay," and silver gelatin prints "Man and Woman No. 24" by Hosoe and Morimura's "Self Portrait After Marilyn Monroe." The exhibition truly reverberates with Cornell's spirit, and the challenging lower gallery in the museum has rarely been utilized better.

Similarly, "A Collector's Journey and Legacy" presents an eclectic juxtaposition reflecting Cornell's aesthetic by presenting a wide range of art, from Ming-dynasty Chinese furniture to 19th-century folk art portraits to Native American textiles and objects to works by American postwar and contemporary masters, emerging artists, and artists of Hawai'i.

These represent some of the diverse interests of Betty Sterling, a collector and former art dealer with significant connections to New York City and Ho-nolulu.

Highlights include two works by Robert Motherwell — also a Cornell admirer and acquaintance; a drawing/collage by Christo, late of "The Gates" fame in Central Park; and works by such giants as Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, de Kooning, David Smith, Frank Stella, Nancy Graves, Donald Sultan and Pat Steir.

The Contemporary Museum's staff is to be applauded for these extremely creative and risk-taking exhibitions that work together in a unique and illuminating fashion, approaching a world-class level of curatorial artistry rare in any community.