‘The Woman With Fifty Faces' Review: Painted Like a French Girl

Wall Street Journal

18-07-2025

The French author and artist Jean Cocteau was enthralled by a mysterious woman named Maria Lani, but his attempts to capture her likeness during a 1928 sitting were agonizing. 'Every time you take your eyes off her she changes,' he wrote. 'How do you expect me to draw her?'
Cocteau was far from the only one to try. 'The Woman With Fifty Faces,' a graphic novel by Jonathan Lackman and Zachary J. Pinson, is based on the riveting true story of Lani, who, with her husband, Max Ilyin, persuaded some 50 artists in Parisian society to paint, draw or sculpt her. The remarkable roster included Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and Chaim Soutine. Only Pablo Picasso, it seems, turned them down.
The couple claimed that Lani was a silent-film actress from Berlin and that the artwork would be featured in a Hollywood film. But there was no such film, and Lani was not, in fact, a movie star. She was born Maria Geleniewicz in 1895 in Poland, where her Jewish family escaped violent pogroms. At age 24 she met Ilyin and the two hatched a plan to reinvent themselves in France. They succeeded wildly: Lani achieved fame as an artists' muse, and by the end of 1930 she and Ilyin had mounted exhibitions, in Europe and the United States, of the various portraits of her.
Afterward, Lani and Ilyin disappeared from high society. In the run-up to World War II, they helped Jewish refugees in Paris obtain immigration papers before fleeing the Nazis themselves. The pair settled in America, where they nearly willed their fake movie into spectacular existence—Greta Garbo was to play the lead—before the project collapsed due to lack of financing.