The Woman With Fifty Faces is a revelatory biographical graphic novel chronicling the elusive
life and tumultuous times of Maria Lani, an enigmatic young woman who in 1928 blew into
Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with
her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing 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 Woman With Fifty Faces is about uncovering as much of the truth about Maria Lani
as possible. Jonathan Lackman spent two decades researching Lani’s life and Zachary J. Pinson
spent 5,000 hours putting pen to paper. The result is a masterful collaboration about identity
and the power and limits of reinvention.
Fantagraphics president and publisher, Gary Groth, spoke with Lackman and Pinson about their
new book.
GARY GROTH: Jon, what initially got you interested in Maria Lani? You devoted a
considerable amount of time researching her life. What was it about her story that fascinated
you?
JON LACKMAN: When I was studying for my art history PhD oral exams, I had to commit to
memory some 300 books, down to the smallest footnotes. In one such footnote, I read the
curious story of an artist’s model who had been portrayed by some 55 artists in a single year,
nearly every major artist of the time. I tried to think of a comparable moment in art history. At
best, I could think of kings and queens who had portrayed by perhaps a dozen artists across
several years.
I had studied physics in college and my scientist brain lit up in this moment — what a
laboratory! If the subject stays the same, all the better could we glimpse each artist’s individual
temperament and weltanschauung. How had I never heard of her? Why was she a mere
footnote? I memorized her name and vowed to one day return to her grand experiment.
I ended up spending more time researching Maria than I did researching my dissertation. Her
story is a fascinating unknown passage in art history. But, if it were just that, I might have just
written article about it. Not an entire book. I think I wrote the book, above all, to obtain justice for Maria. Once I learned that her extraordinary accomplishments had after her death been
unfairly maligned and forgotten, I couldn’t let her story go. She stuck to me. I knew from
studying feminist art history under my PhD dissertation adviser, the pioneering Linda Nochlin,
that artist’s models often met this fate, their contributions minimized and misunderstood, and
Maria illustrated this perfectly.
Uncovering and reflecting on what she pulled off left me with a sense of wonder and expanded
possibility that enriched my life. To quote Judith Butler, “We lose ourselves in what we read,
only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.” I recognized that,
sure, Maria had changed her name, shaved a decade off her age, exaggerated her resume, and
presented her film project as fait accompli rather than as a wisp of a dream. But half of history’s
greats deserve worse if those are truly sins rather than the forgivable peccadilloes of an
ambitious nobody with no other credible path to success. Maria was a beautiful hustler. To my
mind, a hero.
I think the other major factor in Maria being memory-holed was that few in the art world,
artists least of all, wanted to admit how easily and thoroughly they’d fallen for her deceptions.
These were people, after all, who prided themselves on their ability to see past appearances, to
use their models rather than be used by them. They groused that she was no actress, as she
claimed, “just a stenographer from Warsaw,” completely missing the irony that, in conning half
of Paris, she’d proved herself one of the greatest actresses of all time.
GG: How did the two of you find each other and agree to embark upon such a serious, long-
term creative project?
JL: I had never been much interested in comics and graphic novels, due to my own ignorance of
their possibilities, but a new one caught my eye—Logicomix. The product of two authors and
two illustrators from Greece, it told the story of Bertrand Russell. After I devoured it, I had the
thought, well, if a graphic novel can bring alive the history of the philosophy of logic, it can
really do anything, and wouldn’t the biography of Maria Lani, an eminently visual story, be a
particularly strong fit? Moreover, an artist could do what I couldn’t, stretch her story to book
length while enhancing rather than diluting it.
I went looking for an illustrator, but found that most of my favorites, even if they were
interested, were booked out for two to three years. At the time, that seemed like an
interminable wait to me—little did I know how long the book would ultimately take! By 2013, I
had essentially given up on the book. Again. But meanwhile, I couldn’t help continuing to dig
through archives for more information, and to tell her story at every party I went to. There are
certain stories I can never stop telling, and these are the ones I know are worth sticking with no
matter what.
At a friend’s art opening in Easthampton, Mass., I saw my wife, the writer and artist Alex Hart,
beckon me from across the room into a conversation she was having with a long-bearded,
shaggy-maned man a decade younger than me who looked like he had just emerged from the backwoods after a long day felling trees, the artist Zachary Pinson. “Jon, Jon, you gotta see his
comics!” my wife exclaimed as she jammed Zack’s phone in front of my eyes.
GG: How did you two collaborate? In most comics that employ a writer and an artist, the
division of labor is obvious to the reader — the artist illustrates the writer’s words — but in
Fifty Faces, the art and the writing are seamless. The storytelling is so organic that it feels like
the work of a single creative mind. How did you do that?
JL: Frankly, we’re not sure how it happened. It wasn’t something we consciously worried about.
Nor did we have a long friendship to draw on when we started collaborating. But still, as you
say, lots of collaborators with similar backgrounds nonetheless fail to mesh.
We got to work shortly after we met. I knew, from studying art history, that artists need a
certain amount of freedom, that if I had told Zack exactly what to do, the result would have
been “illustration” instead of “art.” That isn’t to knock illustration, it’s just not what I wanted.
So, while I mostly devised the basic structure of the narrative – what scenes to include, in what
order, etc. – I tried to step back after that. For each individual scene, I gave Zack all the facts I
had and then let him devise how to translate them into panels and spreads.
I encouraged him to convey the story visually as much as possible, and to resort to words only
as a last resort, when necessary to explain certain things to the reader. For each spread, Zack
first did a sketch, after which we’d debate a few details, usually minor issues of clarity, and then
he’d begin the long process of inking the pages, with his thousands of little crosshatches.
This process led the book in some surprising directions that I never could have predicted. For
example, Zack was able to perceive and express some of the ridiculousness and grotesquerie in
Maria’s story and times that I might never have been able to infuse it with. How she approached her ambitions with single-minded devotion, while remaining light and agile. That idea probably couldn’t even be expressed in words as well as Zack did it in pictures. At so many junctures, Zack leveraged the graphic-novel medium to do things, sketch moods, evoke feelings, that I couldn’t have achieved within the covers of a regular words-only book. And these elements only evolved loosely, trustingly, over years, because I fought my urges to plot every panel before Zack got to work. That other book, the pre-planned one, would have felt stale. Safe.
GG: Zack, how did you research the visual elements of the various periods and locals — from
Lani’s early proletarian life in rural Poland to the high stepping Paris of the 1920s?
ZACHARY J. PINSON: Internet, photography books, newspaper clippings, paintings/drawings,
and movie-stills— any visual material that would give me a visceral reaction and could serve
Jon’s story. When I met Jon he already had a large stack of books and vintage articles collected.
I did my own findings as well, anything that could help! I grew up in landlocked Arkansas in the
80’s and 90’s so anything from early 1900’s abroad was not something I could recall intuitively. I
did my best to immerse myself in the specific times and places. Looking at old photos of a Kolno farm village and imagining myself walking down the dirt roads and asking myself “what would I
see?” was how I approached every page. I would spend days and nights looking at historical
photos of furniture, lamps, cars, buildings, clothing, interiors/exteriors, and whatever else a
scene needed.
Finding visual material for 1920’s Paris was the easiest because of how well it was documented-
you can find hundreds of photographs of alleyways, beaches, and interiors. But certain scenes
required more than just set pieces, Jon and I wanted to feel like we were in certain characters
heads. I remember watching John Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet and seeing the lead of the film
falling into water that looked like a door. I’d walk up to the tv, holding my phone- taking
pictures of these kinds of things and finding ways to use them. In our Cocteau “psychedelic
pages”, a man falls into water the same direction as in Cocteau’s film. In those pages, I wanted
it to feel as if John Cocteau had directed it himself or at least give me a nudge.
GG: Zack, I think your work is in the stylistic of German Expressionists like Otto Dix and
cartoonists like R. Crumb and Joe Sacco. Is this simply how you naturally draw, or did you
choose this stylistic approach because it is so exquisitely appropriate to the story?
ZP: Love those guys! Drawing haunted and grotesque imagery is always natural for me- I’ve
been doing it since I was a child. I love to play with light and shadow, texture, and drama. As far
back as the 3rd grade, I remember being sent to the school counselor for drawing “scary
pictures”. Growing-up there were a lot of bruises and holes in the walls because of three
brothers, no sisters, and a single mom who had to work and go to school most of the time out
of necessity- God bless her. Perhaps that explains things? But I think Jon’s writing, and choosing
Maria as a subject, brought out a more poetic and tender quality to my work— and for the
better. I wanted Jon and Maria to take me to new terrain! Show some love. Also- it was Jon’s
idea to hide Maria’s face from the viewer- which I thought to be such an interesting approach
and creative handicap that would serve the story well. With Jon’s writing— I drew how I saw
things playing out in head or my “mind’s eye”.
I always had a love for classic Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, Ren & Stimpy, and directors like
David Fincher- they all did interesting things with “the close-up”. I always wanted to see more
of this in cartoons and movies. I think anyone can see these artists really enjoying themselves
when the close-ups happen. The face is the most interesting place to be- and you can see it in
Otto Dix’s work. Every time I drew a German soldier with empty eyes for the book I was
thinking of Otto.
As for R. Crumb and Joe Sacco— is it the shading? I don’t think I necessarily crosshatch or
model like they do. My shading is more like washes of chicken-scratch that don’t crisscross
most of the time. I really got into this technique when I did intaglio printmaking- etching a
copper plate with a teeny needle or nail. Crumb and Sacco are in a much higher league of
crosshatching than I’ll ever be. I do wish more artists would attempt these old craftsman ways
of depicting light and shadow- but I can see how it can feel long and strenuous, and at times
painful to get satisfaction- but it feels like home to me.
GG: Jon, Lani has been falsely mythologized over the years a con artist and a grifter, and part
of what you do in Fifty Faces is debunk this calumny. But what is it that you think resonates
with a readership in 2025?
JL: To me, there are three few aspects that feel particularly relevant to today:
1) The art of self-presentation: Today everyone from A-list celebrities to people with ten social-
media followers carefully curate their public image, whether it’s a question of using AI to spruce
up their faces or Photoshopping screenshots to inflate the value of their Bitcoin wallets.
Similarly, in business, “vaporware” is as prevalent as ever— companies claiming to have
products and then making them only after enough people have bought them.
Maria was a master of such techniques, despite having more limited means at her disposal. She
reduced her age, changed her name, and passed herself off as a film star. Most strikingly, she
and her husband claimed to have a film in the works that would make artists Hollywood-
famous if they contributed portraits to it. Which worked! And came very close to making that
hypothetical film a reality. Thomas Mann, Jean Renoir, and Greta Garbo all signed on, but the
second world war made scarce the necessary financing, and not long after Maria declined and
died.
2) The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, forced many Jews who had disconnected
from politics to re-engage, to “choose sides.” Similarly, Maria seems to have tried to leave her
Jewishness behind, only to have the rise of European anti-Semitism in the 1930s drag her back
into it. Her film project might well have proceeded more quickly and succeeded if she and her
husband hadn’t sacrificed several years to get fellow Jews out of the east.
3) A forgotten feminist heroine: Ever since the 1970s, historians have endeavored to rescue and
rehabilitate unfairly maligned and ignored women, and the work is far from done. When I was
in graduate school, we did Wikipedia hackathons to add forgotten artists to that encyclopedia,
and it seemed we could never do enough of them. This felt like a similar project. Maria got the
best of dozens of men who thought they were cleverer than a mere artist’s model.