This Enigmatic Onetime Celebrity Stars in a New Graphic Novel
Chances are you’ve never heard of Maria Lani. The new evocative graphic novel The Woman With Fifty Faces: Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was focuses our attention on an enigmatic woman who at one time was a celebrity.
Somehow, this woman who was born a poor Jew in Poland managed to convince 50 artists in Paris to paint (or sculpt) her portrait.
As author Jon Lackman learned while earning his PhD in art history from his dissertation adviser, the feminist scholar Linda Nochlin, artist’s models are ignored by history, their accomplishments and contributions ignored or misunderstood.
Lackman found a mention of Lani in a footnote and resolved to solve the mystery of her identity and give her the attention she deserved. He spent two decades researching her life, and artist Zachary J. Pinson spent 5,000 hours creating the book’s magnificent drawings.
How did this woman from such impoverished origins persuade 50 prominent artists to paint her portrait? Lackman sets out to solve this mystery. But the book begs the question, to what extent is anyone truly knowable? And to what extent can one escape the circumstances of one’s birth and create a new identity?
We learn that Maria was a poor Jewish girl from Poland, recently orphaned, who changed her name from Maria Geleniewicz to hide her Jewish identity, and presented herself as a fabulous German actress, born not in 1895 but 1905. Her husband Maximilian Abramowicz changed his name to Max Ilyin, declared himself a producer, and helped promote Maria: before they moved to Paris, Max sent ahead press releases heralding the arrival of a German film star. In Paris Maria convinced 50 famous artists (all but one of them male)—including Bonnard, Chagall, De Chirico, Cocteau, Delaunay, Leger, Matisse, Soutine and Valadon to create her portrait, becoming the talk of the town in 1920s Paris. But then just as suddenly, she seemed to disappear.
It’s not often we see a main character who’s a charming female hustler figure. There are plenty of male picaresque rogues, transcending their circumstances with their wits and charisma—Odysseus, Jay Gatsby, Tom Ripley, Don Draper. This is the fascinating tale of a woman who uses her brains and beauty to escape the circumstances of her birth. “Every country offered a fresh chance at self-invention,” Lackman writes.
And Maria had a gift for re-inventing herself. Throughout the book, Maria and Max are constantly on the move for survival. They leave in the middle of the night for Warsaw; they leave Portugal as soon as they get their hands on a visa for New York.
Pinson’s evocative drawings, including his repeated use of the motif of masks that come on and off, underscore how antisemitism bristles under the surface of the Polish town of Czestochowa; when the facade shatters, hatred bursts out in violent pogroms. Pinson’s expressive grotesque drawings imbue each face with emotion. At the physical and emotional center of the book is the celebratory exhibit revealing the fifty portraits of Lani, featured in two striking centerfolds that fold out into a lush 4 page spread, creating a panoramic view of what that party might have looked like—with Paris’ elite drinking and carousing in front of portraits of Lani, drawn in different moods and artistic styles.
Try as they might, Maria and Max don’t completely escape their Jewish identity. On the eve of war they received appeals from friends and family trying to flee Europe, so they forged a war-veterans charity, creating fake store fronts to get immigration and work papers for fellow Jews, and channeling bribes to French officials in exchange for visas. When Nazis invaded France on May 10, 1940, “[o]vernight, it seemed, Maria’s beloved city fell to the kind of people she’d been fleeing all her life.”
Pinson’s drawings show the Nazis’ takeover of Paris: a tank rolling into the French countryside; Nazis’ eyeing the Eiffel Tower; a single Nazi eating a croissant at a café; troops march- ing through the Champs D’Elysees. Maria and Max request visas from the Portuguese government to sail to the U.S..
Artist Jean Cocteau became obsessed with Maria. His account of her flight, that she left Paris because she had stolen the paintings, became history’s accepted version. Lackman sets the record straight by telling Maria’s story. In a poignant and poetic part of the book, Lackman uses the only known excerpt from Maria’s memoir to have her narrate her experience posing for artist Jules Pascin. Pascin tells her to “let yourself go a bit, laugh, sing, dance, let your hair down.” And she does, “I laughed, I sang, and Pascin, eyes flashing, fully enchanted, made one sketch after another…He was happy. . .there was something like ecstasy in his sparkling voice.”
It’s a moment of true connection between artist and muse. I wished I could hear more of her intimate voice. While the rest of the book is not in Maria’s own words, Lackman’s empathy gives voice to her heretofore untold story.
In writing this book, Lackman honors not only Maria, but also his own grandmother, Lola Lackman, who was imprisoned
in Bergen Belsen. The last time he visited her, Lackman learned his grandmother was born in Czestochowa, the same Polish town as Maria. When he discovered this, he says, “I felt like working on Maria’s book was a way of honoring and keeping my grandmother alive.” A year after his grandmother died, Lackman’s father told him that she had left him a quarter of the Holocaust reparation money she and his grandfather had received from the German government. Lackman used that money to fund Pinson’s work on the drawings for the book.
In essence, the telling of Lani’s fantastic story, both figuratively and literally, came from the depths of the darkness and destruction of the Holocaust. Art, in and of itself, allows for re-birth.
—Laura Hodes is a writer and poet who writes about Jewish art on her Substack.
