After a voyeuristic look inside the notebooks and sketchbooks of great creators, here comes a peek inside an even more private facet of the creative self: the list. Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum offers a surprisingly intriguing glimpse of some of the 20th century’s most remarkable creators — including Pablo Picasso, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Andrew Wyeth and Janice Lowry, among dozens of others — revealing their personal habits, priorities and decision-making schemata through the lens of the seemingly mundane and, in the process, demystifying artmaking and the creative life.
From a list Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen made of his second wife’s positive attributes, to designer Harry Bertoia’s 1932 self-rating chart for a school assignment, rating 21 of his characteristics on a spectrum from Very Poor to Excellent, to Picasso’s recommendations of artists he liked for Walt Kuhn’s 1913 Armory Show, these wonderful and fascinating seventy-or-so artifacts reveal as much about their creators as they do about the values, fixations and points of interest of their respective eras.
![, upload 2696](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-2696.jpg)
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
![, upload 2697](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-2697.jpg)
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
![, upload 2698](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-2698.jpg)
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
![, upload 1869](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-1869.png)
Image courtesy of the Archive of American Art.
![, upload 2699](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-2699.jpg)
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
![, upload 2700](https://www.sinatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/upload-2700.jpg)
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
Complement Lists with pioneering journalist Nellie Bly’s illustrated packing list and Barthes’s likes and dislikes, illustrated.