Scope and arrangement
The Lola Menzeli and Senia Solomonoff papers (1873-1954, bulk 1910s-1940) contain scrapbooks, photographs, and other papers documenting Menzeli and Solomonoff's dancing and teaching careers.
Scrapbooks make up the bulk of the collection, and date from 1873 to 1939. The scrapbooks contain clippings, programs, posters, correspondence, contracts, and photographs. Subjects of the scrapbooks include Menzeli's career in vaudeville in the 1910s; Menzeli and Solomonoff's world tour in the 1920s; and the Festival of States Pageants of 1933, 1934, and 1935. There is a large scrapbook about Elizabetta Menzeli's dancing and teaching career, which dates from 1873 to the 1920s. There is one small scrapbook dedicated to Solomonoff's work with the Federal Theatre Project in Florida, and one small scrapbook about the play Lindbergh, performed in Paris in 1929, in which Menzeli appeared as the principal dancer. There are also loose clippings, fliers, programs, correspondence, and contracts, dating from 1913 to 1954.
The collection contains materials concerning Menzeli's invention of high-heeled toe shoes, which were sold by the E. Landi dance shoe company as the Menzeli Heeled Toe Slipper. The materials include designs, advertisements for the shoe, copies of Menzeli's contract with E. Landi, and documentation of her patents from the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.
The collection contains a small amount of material related to Menzeli's ballet textbook, From Teacher to Student, published in 1946. Materials include mock-ups, galleys, and correspondence.
Photographs in the collection are primarily promotional images of Menzeli and Solomonoff, both together and individually. There are also photographs of Menzeli and Solomonoff meeting dancer La Argentina in 1932, signed photographs of Yvonne Printemps and Lew Fields, and a photograph of Solomonoff meeting Babe Ruth.