l'Afrique: A Tribute to Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel Johannesburg - Exhibition
25 May 09 - 31 July 10 Museum Africa, Newtown
An exhibition of Spiegel/Stein-Lessing's rich heritage of African Art and Artefacts couldn't come at a better time.
While world markets tumble, art works in auction houses attract increasing value; none more so than African heritage art.
Maria Stein-Lessing's story begins with immigration to South Africa from Germany in 1936 as a Jew fleeing the Holocaust. Rather than considering herself a victim, forced to live in a foreign country among an alien culture, she immediately integrated and found herself fascinated by African art and artefacts.
By the mid forties, she had immersed herself in study of South African artefacts assembling a collection of carvings, beadwork, and unusual paintings by South African art pioneers. After Maria Stein-Lessing married Leopold Spiegel, they combined artistic forces. The influence of their previous cultural life in Germany alerted them to the fact that several 20th Century Masters, Picasso, Gauguin, and Matisse art were inspired by African masks. Ironically, most South Africans were unaware of (or dismissed as ethnography) the indigenous art and the invaluable enriching role it would play on the future world stage.
After her death in 1961, Stein-Lessing remained largely forgotten. Distressed by this fact, Spiegel made a bequest to enable the Spiegel/Stein-Lessing art and artefacts collection to be brought into the public eye by co-curators Natalie Knight and Nessa Leibhammer at Museum Africa.
But, it's Marie Stein-Lessing, the collector and teacher whose character evoked almost as much interest as her artefacts.
To this end, l'Afrique a hard-covered book describes her Bohemian lifestyle, highlights her foresight, describing her as seen through the different eyes of the Wits students and the friends whose lives she touched. Tributes to Stein-Lessing come from art luminaries, Esmé Berman, Cecil Skotnes, Judith Mason, Elizabeth Rankin, and Eric Fernie (former director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London) providing anecdotes and recounting Stein-Lessing's unorthodox teaching methods. The book edited by Natalie Knight is set to become a collector's item. Its launch takes place simultaneously with the l'Afrique exhibition.
ADSL & Web hosting proudly provided by Afrihost.