Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to parents descended from Dutch ancestry. His father’s death in 1917 left the family financially burdened and forced Cornell, along with his mother, two sisters, and an invalid brother, to leave Nyack and move to Flushing, Queens, where he lived until his death in 1972.

Joseph was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and upon graduating worked at a variety of jobs such as selling refrigerators door-to-door, designing textiles, and working in the garment industry to help support his family.

In the 1930’s, Cornell, though he had no formal training in art, began creating simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged collections of photographs or various bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine Constructivism with the fantasy of Surrealism. He had not originally conceived them for such a wide audience. Rather, they were made as "gifts" for individuals, often people the artist had never met, but who in some way had touched his life.

From his home in Queens he would travel almost daily on small voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets and return to the studio to sort his finds into their appropriate categories of eccentricity.

Cornell was particularly influenced by the surrealist artist Max Ernst and befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War. This led to his inclusion into several Surrealist exhibitions in New York during the 1940’s and 50’s.

Cornell never travelled from his home on Utopia Parkway in Queens and never married. He merely created his boxes in his studio, which was the former family garage. Some pieces he created would take years. His Object (Roses des Vents) construction, for example, was begun in 1942 and not finished until 1953.

Cornell continued hunting for various trinkets that he felt captured a moment in human emotion and created his box constructions in his studio in Flushing New York until his death in 1972.