The Woman With Fifty Faces
9798875001116
Uitgeverij Fantagraphics
Engels
On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into in 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, Henri Matisse, Georges-Henri Rouault, Fernand
Léger 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. The images that cascade through
the book are stunningly beautiful, deeply compassionate, and farcically
grotesque, capturing the essence of Lani’s life. From Poland’s
antisemitic pogrom in the early 19th century to the vulgar glamour and
decadence of 1920s Paris to the Nazi occupation of France in the ’40s,
the tumultuous Europe Lani traverses becomes nearly as much of a
character as Lani herself. Jon Lankman spent two decades researching
Lani’s life and Zachary James Pinson spent 5,000 hours putting pen
to paper. The result is a masterful collaboration about identity and the
power and limits of reinvention.
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