Coming July 22 from Fantagraphics, The Woman With Fifty Faces: Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was, by Jonathan Lackman and Zachary J. Pinson, is a nonfiction graphic novel chronicling the elusive life and tumultuous times of Maria Lani.
On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists —Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Georges-Henri Rouault, and Suzanne Valadon among them— to immortalize her in paintings and sculptures, which would appear as an important plot device in a forthcoming film. Unveiled as an exhibition in New York, the art works traveled to Chicago, London, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Paris. But, in 1931, as legend eventually had it, she and her husband Max Abramowicz vanished without a trace, and so did the art. The film was never made.
The Woman With Fifty Faces is about uncovering as much of the truth about Maria Lani as possible. Where there are solid facts to rest on, the book follows them scrupulously. Where there are lacunae, we attempted to imagine the most likely scenario. This website’s blog will in time provide all the source material and allow readers to reach their own conclusions about Maria’s many remaining mysteries.
The images that cascade through the book are stunningly beautiful, deeply compassionate, and farcically grotesque, like Lani’s own life. From Poland’s antisemitic pogroms to the vulgar glamour and decadence of 1920s Paris to the Nazi occupation of France in the ’40s, the tumultuous Europe Lani traverses practically becomes a character itself. Jonathan Lackman spent two decades researching Lani’s life and Zachary J. Pinson spent 5,000 hours putting pen to paper.
Jon’s grandmother Lola Lackman, who (barely) survived the Holocaust interned at Bergen-Belsen, grew up in Czestochowa, like Maria Lani; to Lola’s knowledge, the two women never met. This book was partially funded by restitution payments made to Lola by the German nation.
About the Authors
Growing up in Arkansas, Zack Pinson idolized the creations of DC and Image Comics and of course Robert Crumb. He’s spent the last two decades in and out of comics, painting, and underground music. His paintings have filled walls from New England to New York City and Paris. He is an identical twin formed of a zygotic split somewhere in Arkansas in 1982.
Jon Lackman published an article on Maria Lani in the June/July 2014 issue of Art in America. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Wired, been a MacDowell fellow, and completed a PhD in art history from NYU under the late, great feminist historian Linda Nochlin. Find his five favorite nonfiction books here.
Photo by Ernst Schneider, in Der Querschnitt, March 1928.
Website by Ben Di Maggio. (Thanks, Ben!)