DC Museumgoer

Lists can be a window into someone’s soul.

My grandfather, for example, was an expert listmaker, forever jotting down instructions and to-do items in distinctive block print on graph paper, a nod to his days as an engineer. When we’d visit him in his later years, I’d find penciled lists of things he wanted to tell my mom tucked away in a desk drawer.

These notes were bittersweet– “getting old is hell,” said one– and I always felt as if I’d stumbled on a personal diary.

Turns out great artists keep lists equally as revelatory. You’ll find a few on display this month at the National Portrait Gallery (via the Archives of American Art) in what might be Washington’s quirkiest exhibit of the year.

Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Archives of American Art includes a handmade address book by Alexander Calder; a list of “29 personal facts” by H.L. Mencken; and a lengthy list of home improvements planned by architect Eero Saarinen shortly before his death.

Willem de Kooning’s “notes for a tax return” reveals the artist earned $6664 in 1953, and a liquor store receipt issued to Franz Kline shows he bought $275 worth of booze for a New Year’s Eve blowout in 1960.

Traveler that I am, I most enjoyed painter Adolf Konrad’s illustrated list of items he planned to pack for a 1962-63 trip to Egypt and Rome. His tiny watercolors could’ve been a model for the J. Peterman catalog: three pairs of socks, a camera, a toothbrush, a couple overcoats, and tubes of oil paints.

All that’s missing is the overwrought copy: “Her eyes glowed violet as we set off down the Nile…”

Lists runs through September 19, 2010, at the National Portrait Gallery.