THERE HAS NEVER BEEN anyone in the art world like Maria Stein-Lessing. She positioned herself as a crusader of African artefacts in the 1940s, and was a character so formidable and of such vast eccentricities that her human portrait evoked as much interest as her arts.
She was at once loved, feared, and loathed. Love or hate her, nobody marginalised her influence on cultural aesthetics until her untimely death in 1961. The resurrection of her memory almost 50 years later came about through a bequest by her late husband, Leopold Spiegel, to Museum Africa in order to honour her contribution to African art and culture, and a viewing of her collection.
Additionally, he left instructions for a memoir and record of Stein-Lessing's collection be edited by collector and art historian, Natalie Knight.
With this celebratory revival, deep and enduring memories keep flooding in from her students, now art luminaries throughout the world. Esme Herman, Cecil Skotnes, Judith Mason, Elizabeth Rankin, and Professor Eric Fernie. The latter went on to become director of the famed Courtauld Art Institute, recalls: "It wasn't the idiosyncrasies, the chain smoking, the dog tethered during lectures. What I remember is her intensity. I knew nothing about medieval cathedrals, but when Dr Stein-Lessing had given us a lecture on them, it just seemed as if they were the most fascinating things in the world."