Known for her paintings of erotic female nudes, Lene Schneider-Kainer divorced her husband in 1926 and set off on an artistic odyssey across Asia. Retracing Marco Polo’s journey, the intrepid artist travelled from opium dens in Isfahan to Buddhist temples in the Himalayas and from brothels in Agra to the Peking Opera.
When she died, Schneider-Kainer left her travel diary, photographs, scrapbooks, and over 100 watercolors and sketches to the Leo Baeck Institute. On September 19, 2019 at the Center for Jewish History, Archivist Michael Simonson took these rarely seen treasures Out of the Box and revealed the enchanting art and surprising story of a German-Jewish artist who defied the male art world and broke the boundaries set for women in her time.