Most striking is the fastidiously painted surface of the tabletop. It could almost pass for a plank of real wood. The wood grain seems to be of a higher order of reality than either the collaged-on snippets of newspaper or the human figure who is represented. The man lacks the sharpness, the physical thereness, of the objects around him.

Cornell, too, was a shadow of a man who read voraciously and disappeared into his books. As the writer Susan Sontag, a friend of his, once observed, “Cornell seemed to be a person who lived in his head rather than in his body.” He no doubt felt a temperamental affinity with Gris’s idiosyncratic version of Cubism, which was more cerebral than Picasso’s, more measured, less an evocation of omnivorous appetite than of calm and patient craftsmanship.

Much about Gris’s life appealed to the part of Cornell that valorized the marginal. A Spaniard who settled in Paris, Gris was the overshadowed, tag-along third in the Cubist triumvirate that featured Picasso and Braque. By the 1950s, Picasso was an international celebrity posing bare-chested for photographers at his villa in Cannes, but Gris didn’t live long enough to garner worldly perks. He died of uremia in 1927, at the age of 40.

Cornell always worked in series, and his Juan Gris boxes, of which there are more than a dozen, would consume him intermittently from 1953 into the ’60s. They’re easy to recognize. They stand about 18-inches tall and feature the same attractive bird — a paper cutout of a great white-crested cockatoo that the artist lifted from a 19th-century British book on ornithology. Gris’s influence at times asserted itself with remarkable specificity. For starters, Cornell adapted the telltale human shadow that appears in the upper right of the Gris painting. Cutting out silhouettes and reverse silhouettes from black paper, and pasting them to the back wall of his boxes, Cornell equipped each bird with an inseparable companion.