Please note that this is a pre-order and is estimated to arrive on May 27th 2025. When purchasing multiple items at once, please note that we will ship the order in full when all items are in stock.
A revelatory biographical graphic novel chronicling the elusive life and tumultuous times of Maria Lani.
On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into in Paris—a city unknowingly between wars and hurtling toward even greater disaster— claiming to be a German actress who starred in all of all of Max Reinhardt’s films, 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 Women With Fifty Faces is about uncovering as much of the truth about Maria Lani as possible. Pinson’s graphic approach to depicting Lani’s life is a combination of German Expressionist influences and the lurid tradition of such American satirical cartoonists as R. Crumb and Joe Sacco. The resulting images that cascade through the book are stunningly beautiful, deeply compassionate, and farcically grotesque, capturing the essence of Lani’s life from Poland’s anti-semitic 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 the life of Maria Lani and Zachary James Pinson spent 5,000 hours putting pen to paper to create a masterful collaboration about identity and the power and limits of reinvention.