Dr. Lola Leontin Szladits was a renowned figure of the New York library world in the mid- to late-twentieth century. As curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library (NYPL) from 1969 to 1990, she greatly expanded the Berg Collection, adding works of W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, May Sarton, and Virginia Wolf, among others, and curated no less than 35 exhibitions.
Before her time at the NYPL, Lola, as she preferred to be called, survived the terrors of World War II. Born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 11, 1923, she reported in her unpublished autobiography A Journey of a Heart that it was her early years in Budapest that sparked and nurtured her passion for art and literature. Amidst the occupation of her home country, Lola pursued a B.A. in English and French Literature with a minor in Art History, graduating in 1945. The following year, she received her doctorate in English Literature. During this time, she also volunteered with the Allied Control Commission, delivering the new lifesaving antibiotic penicillin across her war-torn country. However, with the siege of Budapest and the pressures of occupation, she resolved to leave Hungary. From 1946 to 1948, she pursued post graduate work, first and Columbia University, then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1950, she received her librarianship diploma from the University College London.
Lola permanently immigrated to the United States in 1950 and quickly worked her way up to the Berg Collection. In New York, she followed two passions: publicly collecting manuscripts for the Berg, and privately collecting art, mainly European drawings and paintings. At her death in 1990, her estate made a gift of approximately 130 works from her private collection to Columbia University. On this 100th anniversary of her birth, both Columbia and the NYPL mounted exhibitions with Lola as a common thread, each highlighting small portions of her life, career, and legacy.
In this interview, Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator of the Berg Collection, is sharing her approach to the exhibition she curated on Lola, entitled Lola L. Szladits: Devoted Guardian of Literary Delights. This interview took place on August 14, 2023, in the Berg Reading Room in the Steven A. Schwarzman Building.
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Ava Mira Robles: Thank you for speaking with me today about Lola Szladits and her work at the Berg Collection. Let's begin with why you decided to curate an exhibition about Lola?
Julie Carlsen: Lola Szladits was the Berg's second curator and she had an incredibly powerful personality. She was the first librarian to be profiled by The New Yorker. She did an incredible amount of work with organizing and describing our collection. She mounted a truly impressive number of exhibitions during her 21-year curatorship. The Berg Collection opened in 1940, which means that she was curator for almost half of the first fifty years of the collection's existence. I recognize how formative she was to the collection. She would have been 100 this year. Further, I am particularly interested in women at that time as collectors and curators, librarians, and booksellers. It seemed like a great opportunity to shine some of the light the Lola shown on the people she worked with and the collections in her care. I wanted to put some of that light back on her. Through this exhibition, I hopefully bring a small peek into the window of the book world at that time and the many women who were a part of it.
AMR: Let's dive into her collecting. According to A Journey of a Heart, Lola began collecting art, mainly European, in 1955. By 1969, she began collecting for the Berg Collection. What drove her to collect?
JC: I think that Lola was a life-long collector. You can see in her autobiography that from an early age she is fascinated both by the art and architecture of her home in Hungary. I believe she had a fairly intellectual family so she learned an appreciation from them—her grandfather particularly. As she left Hungary—I'll say traveling, although she was in part traveling due to necessity—and moved around London and France, I think she had that natural eye. She couldn't help herself in that way.
AMR: You mentioned Lola's powerful personality. Her determination, charm, and wit come through in all her writings, from her correspondence to her exhibition catalogues. How did you choose to show this aspect of her in your exhibition?
JC: Right, her personality is definitely powerful. I think it was one of the first things that really made me take notice of her. I tried to show as many facets of her personality as possible. The Lola who writes on her personal stationary versus the Library stationary; the fan she kept in her office1
versus the text she put out for publication on an exhibition. I wanted to use her words as much as possible, in part because I wanted to be as honest to her as I could. Also, I know that some people today still remember her or have their own stories about her. So, I tried to draw on her autobiography, her letters, and her exhibitions. I tried to take as much of what she was saying and put it back out, instead of trying to draw my own conclusions.
Click to see images of selected pages from A Journey of a Heart: page 1 and page 2.
AMR: How has working on this exhibition changed your perception about Lola?
JC: I admire her more. I also feel more humbled. When I first started learning about her, she seemed like such a force, and she was, but she was a bit intimidating. In her autobiography you can see some of her vulnerabilities. It was also a very self-reflexive process for me to be working on this theme [of women as librarians and collectors] and about what it meant to be a curator of the collection that I work with. I am inspired by how much Lola was able to work through. A lot of the doubts she shared [in her autobiography] are doubts that I felt or that I think are natural to feel. That was inspiring. It was a very exciting process for me and I just admire a lot of the work she was able to do.
AMR: In your exhibition, you quote Lola: "I am a Foreign Student for Life—a Refugee, an Exile."2
Before her time at the Berg, Lola lived through the occupation and siege of her home country of Hungary. How do you believe this experience affected her role at the Berg? How does this aspect of her identity come through in your exhibition?
JC: I think it definitely affected her role at the Berg and her mindset in general. Before she came to immigrate to the United States permanently, she was at Columbia University from 1946 to 1947. In her autobiography, she talks about what it was like to be in a city that hadn't just been broiled by World War II in the same way that Europe had. I think [those experiences] really strengthened her fortitude, her determination, and her natural traits. In Hungary she volunteered with the Allies after World War II. She immediately had a plan for how she wanted to leave Hungary; she did not doubt her convictions; she was determined to make things work as a librarian. I think that the experience only made these qualities stronger.
AMR: Lola ardently believed that exhibitions were incredibly important to bring the collections to the wider public. How does your exhibitions share Lola's legacy with today's public?
JC: In some ways, I think it's sharing her legacy just by putting her in front of the public. She did a lot of the documentation for our collections. She was so dedicated to documenting this history and making sure that the people she admired got the attention she thought they deserved. I felt like someone should do that for her. I think that having the exhibition out there, even if people have never heard of her, just seeing Lola and the exhibition keeps her legacy alive. In the online part of the exhibition, I decided to do an exploration of a couple of her exhibitions and acquisitions. I tried again to draw on her words as much as possible. She's quite funny. I think we get a sense of both how smart and playful she was at the same time.
AMR: I agree! Let's wrap up with this last question: Upon her death in 1990, Lola gifted portions of her estate to both Columbia University and the NYPL. At Columbia, her personal art collection is used as a study collection for students and researchers. How does her gift continue to benefit the NYPL and the greater public?
JC: I think we benefit from Lola's work every day here and not just in a poetic sense. She literally created the card catalogue which we still use regularly, she created the accession records, she physically arranged most of the collection in the vaults. I constantly look at her catalogues for inspiration or to learn more about the collection in a different way. The work that we do today would just not be possible without her. We wouldn't be able to share our collections and out passions for them without the description and care she put into preserving, describing, and making the works available. I am just very thankful to her.
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The NYPL's exhibition Lola L. Szladits: Devoted Guardian of Literary Delights was on view through September 24, 2023. To explore the online exhibition, click here.