He was Primarily an archivist, but an archivist of a world that didn't exist. He was a compulsive collector, a browser, cross-indexer. When he died the basement where he worked was full of cardboard boxes marked with labels like 'stamps', 'maps', 'Dürer', 'plastic shells', 'glasses', 'cording'. He left a diary, which he called a 'repository laboratory, picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key'. And he left his art, wooden cabinets filled with what he considered to be the most felicitous combinations of those objects and images: photos of Lauren Bacall arranged to look as if they could be in a penny arcade, a Renaissance prince framed in a vending machine, a baby doll in a forest of twigs, a painted lady in a French hotel, marbles among the stars and ballerinas in the sky - each box a dreamed universe or fantasised cohabitation.

LRB 31 July 1997 | PDF Download