1922: A Vintage Year

February 9, 1972–October 31, 1972

Attendees: 19,681

In her exhibition 1922: A Vintage Year, Lola presented a chronological study of the books published in 1922 fifty years after their publication because, she wrote, “[World War I] had changed the world and Freud the consciousness of man. The books of the year 1922 changed the world.” Lola produced a publication for all of her exhibitions, but this was her favorite. Paul Fasana, then the Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, recalled: “She felt so close to that exhibit that she would often change her birthdate so that she too could be born in 1922 rather than 1923.”  

From the catalog:

“1922 was a vintage year. As with the best crop of grapes, the wine was sound and perfectly balanced, and the sparkling kind had a fragrance to its bouquet the effects of which were felt throughout the century. The historians called that year a normal year . . . the first normal year after the war . . . . It could hardly be considered either average or even normal in the world of literature. A year that opened with the publication of Ulysses and closed with that of The Waste Land can by now, from the vantage point of fifty years, be regarded as an extraordinary one."