In some cases, lists are less about itemizing facts and more about identifying emotions. Abstract Expressionist artist Lee Krasner responded to a list of questions from an art student by enumerating her reactions to finishing, selling, and exhibiting her work.
Before the age of computers and easily updated electronic lists, artists like Philip Evergood kept current by manually adding information to their lists. Evergood made a list of photographers and framers by gluing their business cards and other contact information together in one long strip. Each new attachment expanded his network.
Lists can be ordinary but telling, as in Franz Kline’s receipt from John Heller’s Liquor Store in Greenwich Village, dated December 31, 1960. Presumably purchasing booze for a blowout New Year’s Eve Party, Kline spent $274.51—an extravagant sum in 1960. He had the liquor — red wines, Scotch, whisky, cognac, vermouth, and champagne — delivered to his loft at 242 West Fourteenth Street in New York City.
It comes as no surprise that artists would illustrate their lists. In 1932 painter and color theorist Oscar Bluemner made an illustrated list of his recently completed landscape paintings, including thumbnail sketches with the dimension, date, media, and sometimes the subject of the work. His list was a graphic catalog, a snapshot of his current production.
It is often the casual record that reveals the rhythms of an age. Lists, whether dashed off as a quick reminder or carefully constructed as a comprehensive inventory, give insight into the list maker’s personal habits and enrich the understanding of individual biographies. In the hands of their creators, these artifacts sometimes become works of art in and of themselves.
A companion book to the exhibition, published by Princeton Architectural Press, includes an introduction by John W. Smith, director of the Archives, and an essay by Liza Kirwin, the Archives’ curator of manuscripts.
Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art is organized by Liza Kirwin, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art’s curator of manuscripts. The Archives of American Art is the world’s pre-eminent resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the Charles E. Pierce, Jr. Fund for Exhibitions.
Captions:
(1) Realist painter Adolf Konrad's "Packing List." Image courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
(2) Picasso list of possible artists for the 1913 Armory show
(3) Artist Janice Lowry regarded the notebooks as “126 chapters of a memoir.” Image courtesy of the Archives of American Art
(4) Illustrated list of works of art, 1932 May 18 . Oscar Bluemner papers. Image courtesy of the Archives of American Art
(5) Janice Lowry's Journal 102, Image courtesy of the Archives of American Art
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