Joseph Cornell, the odd man out in the Abstract Expressionist generation, had a mystical feeling for spaces and places. A Crusoe marooned in his basement in Flushing, Queens, Cornell lived in an ordinary frame house on an ordinary street with the incredible name of Utopia Parkway. His imagination, however, sailed everywhere like this clipper ship—his first surviving collage—bursting into a great rose blossom spanned by a spider web. For four decades, Cornell built his handmade boxes and collages—"cages for infinity," as Mexican poet Octavio Paz called them—filled with birds, ballerinas, and bric-a-brac. De Kooning praised the "architecture" of Cornell's boxes, and Cornell loved mysterious old buildings with unexpected nooks and crannies. He would have been delighted to learn that a generous exhibition of his work titled "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," the first major retrospective in 25 years, is nestled in the old Patent Office Building a few blocks from the Washington Mall. Two museums now share this Greek Revival colossus—the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum—along with distinguished ghosts from previous years. The building served as a temporary hospital and morgue during the Civil War, when Walt Whitman worked as a nurse to the wounded soldiers lining the halls. In March of 1865, Lincoln held his second inaugural ball on the third floor, where Cornell's miniature ballerinas now curtsy and pirouette.