“No one in their right mind would have considered trying to open a Surrealist gallery in the California environment, which, of course, is what we decided to do late one whiskied evening,” wrote the artist and collector William Copley. “In the white haze of the morning after, we were both too proud to perish the thought.” It is fortunate for us that they didn’t. The Copley Galleries, founded by Copley and his brother-in-law, operated in Beverly Hills for just six months in 1948 and 1949. It may have been a spectacular failure, but it was also the inadvertent seed of one of the most important collections of Surrealist art in the United States.

In 1930, as the film East of Borneo was being made, a team of scientists descended on the remote volcanic island of Niuafo'ou to view an eclipse. Joseph Cornell, an avid stargazer who kept dossiers on constellations and heavenly bodies and subscribed to at least one journal of astronomy, was likely aware of this expedition.