Dr Marian Wenzel FSA was an art historian, artist and charity director. She and her husband John Cornish were jointly curators of Abingdon’s Abbey Buildings through the 1980s and early 1990s, living in Thames Street. They were deeply involved with the Unicorn Theatre, personally repairing and painting the stage decorations and almost certainly (although there is no actual record) also designing and making stage sets and costumes.  Marian’s professional training enabled her to identify some fragments of glass found in Lombard Street as being of medieval Islamic origin and of great historical significance. She described it in a paper published in 1984 in The Oxford Journal of Archaeology, and the glass remains on permanent exhibition in the Abingdon County Hall Museum.

The Islamic glass fragments at the Abingdon County Hall Museum.
Photo by the Abingdon County Hall Museum

But Marian’s activities while she lived in Abingdon represent only a small part of her varied career. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1932, she was the daughter of a respected chemist – Robert Wenzel PhD. It was another relative, however, who spurred Marian’s passion for the Bosnia-Herzegovina region that wove itself throughout her extensive cultural research and creativity across history, archaeology and art. Her step-grandfather, Charles Benjamin Wing, gave the young Marian a book featuring the beautiful old bridge at Mostar in Bosnia. Wing had been a civil engineer, designing bridges and dams; he had helped to build railways across Bosnia after World War 1. Very much like Marian, her step-grandfather was a dynamic and inspirational man with a wide range of interests and a passion for people and travel.

Marian came to Britain in 1959 to study philosophy under A J Ayer having achieved a BA in philosophy from Columbia University, New York. But she found her real interests lay elsewhere and enrolled in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where she studied under its director Anthony Blunt. As Marian’s love for Bosnia-Herzegovina was encouraged to blossom, it was Anthony Blunt who approved her budget for field work which included an amount for the purchasing of donkeys – the only sensible form of transport across the area’s rough and rocky landscape which was the home of the Stecci Marian became fascinated by.

Stecci at Radimlja, Bosnia. Photo by Kit36a at Hungarian  Wikipedia, from Wikipedia commons.     

Dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the Stecci are casket-shaped monumental medieval tombstones scattered across Bosnia and were thought to have been created by an elusive heretical sect: the Balkan Bogomils. They are decorated in ­a curious mixture of central European Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Mamluk Egyptian and Ottoman Islamic Styles.  

Marian’s research began in 1960 and proved to be ground-breaking as she was able to prove that the structures were of Bosnian origin and not Serbian as had long been assumed. With only a donkey or two for company, Marian painstakingly documented that the Stecci designs which she discovered were linked to the Bosnian silversmithing tradition. Her interest in this metalwork later led Marian to study the Islamic rings in the Khalili collection.

Prior to the publication of her thesis, Marian had travelled to Wadhi Halfa in Sudan, where in 1964, she began investigating the unique decoration of the Nubian houses just months before they were cleared for the building of the Aswan High Dam. The area has since been described as the heart of Nubian culture and, once flooded, this decorative art of sculpted and painted mud is almost lost forever to the wider world… ‘almost’ because thanks to Marian, the armchair traveller can still experience the beauty of this work through the delicately observed  drawings and watercolours held in store at The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and published in her 1972 book entitled House Decoration in Nubia.

Marian’s interest in human archaeology ranged widely, her research thorough and running deep – from Gothic and Islamic art to ethnological studies of nurses in the First World War, via Greek miniatures from the fourth and fifth centuries. She was keenly aware of the importance of the connection between decorative artefacts and the development and understanding of society, its needs and its hopes.

Despite Marian’s tireless campaigning on behalf of the people, archaeology and art of Bosnia and Sudan, she found time to be an artist herself. In fact, the quality of her draftsmanship had been noted by art historian Ernst Gombrich who commissioned Marian to illustrate several of his publications after meeting her during her fellowship at the Warburg Institute from 1960 to 1964 where he was then director. One can only imagine the joy their shared belief in the importance of the decorative arts gave them both and which they successfully shared with the wider world.

A small private collection of Marian’s sculptures was exhibited at Abingdon County Hall Museum as part of its “Celebrating Abingdon Women in the Arts and Sciences” exhibition running across International Women’s Day 2024.

Amphritite – a sculpture by Marian Wenzel. Photo by Abingdon County Hall Museum.

Marian was a physically impressive woman, described in a Daily Telegraph review of one of her one-woman exhibitions as “tall, statuesque, raven-haired … who looks as if she might have been a high temple priestess in another age”.

Marian Wenzel setting up an exhibition of her work in London, January 1972.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Daily Telegraph

Consistently fascinating in her breadth of knowledge, Marian dressed accordingly as she was also not only a collector of historic dress but a designer of stage and costume attire, and she delighted in her own wonderfully theatrical wardrobe.

Sadly irreplaceable, Marian Barbara Wenzel died of cancer at the age of 69 in 2002.

Gabrielle Venus

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