THE WOMAN WITH FIFTY FACES

A fraud among the famous.

Maria Lani (1895-1954) was an enigmatic bit player on the stage of modern art. She appeared out of nowhere in the 1920s, claiming to be a great silent film star. She befriended such artists as Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse. Everybody painted her portrait. With her husband, Max Abramowicz, they scammed the art world, keeping the valuable portraits and breezing through Paris until they disappeared in the 1930s. They were, of course, not who they said they were. Maria was born Maria Geleniewicz in the Jewish quarter of Czestochowa, Poland. She never was the film star that she claimed to be. She and her husband remained in Europe until 1940, when they managed to make it to Lisbon and sail for America. There was supposed to be a film based on her life, but it never materialized. She made it back to Paris, where she died. Writer Lackman and artist Pinson have transformed Lani’s life into a graphic biography. Vivid black-and-white images illustrate the hardships of the Polish Jewry of her birth. They boldly limn the world of 1920s Paris. They give us nightmarish and unforgettable faces. The whole book has the feel of the musical Cabaret, as if illustrated by R. Crumb, or as if Art Spiegelman’s Maus were told by Mr. Natural. There is a trippy terror to the book: Mouths distort, noses grow, eyes bulge out. Its bizarre genius is to take a woman known for her face on Modernist canvases and transform her into a visage fit for 21st-century comics. Lani was an artist of impersonations, a true charlatan worthy of this book’s outré imagination.

The life of an exhibitionistic, modernist fraud, told through graphic art that will keep the reader up at night.