By the time Robert Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, at the age of 35, he had amassed over 1,000 periodicals and books. Soon after his death, a graduate student catalogued each and every one—save for a few loaned to friends and never returned—and grouped the artist’s titles by genre before arranging them alphabetically.
Smithson, who was also a skilled and articulate writer, is perhaps best known for artworks that dabble in anthropology, archaeology, and Earth sciences. But he read widely: fiction and philosophy dominate his holdings. Smithson especially enjoyed modernist literature—Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé, and so on—as well as the writings of fellow travelers, like Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Duras.
The list below provides a sense of the breadth of his holdings, but its depth continues to inspire. Between 2014 and 2019, the artist Conrad Bakker recreated each volume, painting their covers in oil on blocks of carved wood. For the full list, you can consult his project or the exhibition catalogue for his 2004 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, edited by Connie Butler and Eugenie Tsai.
