The Woman with Fifty Faces by Jonathan Lackman and Zachary J. Pinson; Fantagraphics; © 2025; ISBN 9798875-001116; 232 pages; $29.99; Publication Date: July 22, 2025.
SAN DIEGO – Art historian Jonathan Lackman and graphic artist Zachary J. Pinson have subtitled their collaboration “Maria Lani & the Greatest Art Heist That Never Was” and that formulation requires a bit of explanation.
First, who was Maria Lani? She modeled under false pretenses for 59 artists, some of whom were world renowned such as Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Chaim Soutine. Her husband sent press releases to Paris announcing the arrival of a famous German actress named Maria Lani, who, he claimed, had been featured in several movies directed by Max Reinhardt.
Without checking, the Paris media printed the story and were on hand to record her arrival in 1928. Had they checked with Reinhardt, he would have said he never had heard of Maria Lani and that she certainly had not appeared in any of his films.
In fact, Maria Lani wasn’t German, she was a Polish Jew named Maria Gelenwiecz. Her husband, the self-styled “producer,” Max Ilyin, was in reality Maximilian Abramowicz, another Polish Jew. Together, they pulled off one of the most daring cons in the history of art.
Their first victim was writer-poet-artist Jean Cocteau who agreed not only to paint Maria’s portrait but to spread the word that her portraits by different artists would appear in a forthcoming movie.
Maria sat for portraits by 59 artists in all, culminating in exhibitions in cities all over the world. The art works ended up where they started, in Paris, and negotiations for a movie starring Greta Garbo progressed. However, afflicted with a brain tumor, Maria returned to a Paris preoccupied with rebuilding after World War II. The movie deal fell through and when Maria died, she was buried in a pauper’s grave.
That story is graphically related by Zachary J. Pinson, whose drawings in panel after panel highlight not only the main points of Lackman’s narrative but also essay the surrounding milieu, successively depicting life in Poland, in the Weimar Republic after Germany’s defeat in World War I; in Paris, in the years before World War II; France under occupation; New York during World War II; and post-war Europe.
Truly a novelty; it just goes to prove our publication’s motto, there’s a Jewish story everywhere.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.
How Lackman pruned the story to leave enough room for the enormity of Zacks drawing is way beyond me. Masterful work and you will re-read it for all of its subtlety, depth, spiced with magnetic mystery..
It sounds as though this book would be an excellent companion to “Con Artist,” a memoir by Tony Tetro, an extraordinary art forger.