Pen & Brush: The Author as Artist

October 2, 1969–May 15, 1970

Attendees: 19,699 

Pen & Brush was Lola’s first conceptual exhibition, following a display of her predecessor John D. Gordan’s final acquisitions before his death in 1968. Exemplary of the whimsy her exhibitions would come to be known for, Pen & Brush presented a range of professional and amateur art by a selection of authors represented in the Berg Collection. Half of the exhibition and its accompanying catalog was devoted to the professional artist most prominently represented in the collection: William Makepeace Thackeray. The rest of the exhibition surveyed authors from William Blake through Denton Welch.

From the catalog: 

“In margins, in letters, in notebooks, authors have drawn, doodled, and dreamt of themselves as artists . . . . One could engage in pedestrian psychology, speculating on the hidden meanings, frustrated drives, and sublimated desires expressed in some of the incidental art exhibited. The subconscious undoubtedly emerges in doodles or elaborate drawings which reflect the author reflecting upon his face, his work, his thoughts. We feel no special competence in that field, and prefer to offer this catalogue to our visitors in the spirit in which it was compiled: each new discovery, with its suggestion of the complicated interaction of the mind and the hand, was a particular delight.”