Jonathan Lackman
Jonathan Lackman is the author and Zachary J. Pinson is the illustrator of the new graphic novel The Woman with Fifty Faces. It focuses on the life of Maria Lani (1895-1954), an actress and model.
Q: How did you first learn about Maria Lani, and at what point did you decide to write this book about her?
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| Zachary J. Pinson |
Jon: Starting in the spring of 2006, I spent five months doing nothing but cram for the dreaded oral examination of my art-history Ph.D. program. Most of graduate school felt collegial, like your professors were your peers. But in orals, three giants of the field show how much smarter they are, as they grill you for three hours non-stop. You abase yourself at their feet and beg for admission to the next level. Failure is a very real possibility.
At 31, I was older than most, married with a toddler at home. I’d had full-time jobs, managed a team of 10 editors and 100 writers. So I bristled a bit at playing the supplicant.
I knew I’d be shown obscure artworks from all over Western art history from 1789 to 1969, and I’d be expected to name the artist, date, medium, and approximate dimensions. There’s no hope of memorizing every piece by every artist, so you have to figure out what separates one artist from another.
The problem is artists are more similar than you think. Museums and monographs mostly show you their iconic styles, the moments when they were at their most distinct. But much work, even by groundbreaking artists, looks like it could have been done by any number of contemporaries.
So you have to try to boil down each artist’s “essence,” to develop a kind of scientific taxonomy of style, insofar as one exists. What always remains true about them, even when they are imitating their peers?
Deep in the footnotes of one book, I stumbled upon mention of the 1929 exhibition of Maria Lani, 50-odd portraits of the same woman by as many artists, including most of her era’s famous names—Matisse, Chagall, Soutine, Braque, Léger, de Chirico, Valadon, Bonnard, Delaunay, Man Ray, Rouault, and many more.
What better laboratory to discover artists’ individual differences, I thought: The year and the model are identical, and so through each work, each artist’s idiosyncrasies come to light. I was sorry to discover that this exhibition was a mere art-historical footnote; there was no easily obtained book devoted to it, and in those early days of the Internet, few images were available online.
Why wasn’t she more famous, I wondered? How many people have managed to pull off such an experiment, to get their portrait done by that many great artists at once? Possibly none! A king or two, at most. The reason seemed clear: She was “just” a woman. An artist’s model.
Not unlike an orals student, an artist’s model is a nobody, a bit player, literally a footnote, a servant to "genius." It’s no accident they’ve mostly been women. My adviser, the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, and I had long conversations about how unjustly overlooked models’ contributions had been, and here was perhaps the most underappreciated of them all. No one even knew her name!
I had no time to linger on my discovery of this oversight, girding myself for my high-stakes day before the slide projector. Still, Maria remained stubbornly by my side, finally refusing to be silenced. I found myself perpetually bringing her up at parties. Like she was sitting on my shoulder, nudging me.
A year later, working on my dissertation, waiting for dusty books to be delivered to my carrel at France’s national library in Paris, I thought, “While I wait, why don’t I see what I can find out about Maria?”
Q: Why did you choose the graphic novel format, and what do you think Zachary J. Pinson’s art adds to the book?
Jon: My impression is that most graphic novelists start with a childhood love of comics. But I actually hated them. I much preferred to spend my allowance on candy – ring pops, red hots, twizzlers, tootsie rolls, and long ticker tapes with neon sugar dots glued to them that forced you to ingest a certain amount of paper to get at the sweet stuff.
I remember resenting how clearly rendered the comic characters were, leaving no room for the imagination, and they never looked the way I wanted them to. Also, it didn’t help that comics were over way too fast. I read A LOT. And I was ... impatient. No way could I wait a whole week or month to get more of that serialized story.
When I came down with strep throat as a kindergartner, the doctor told me I’d be out of school all week. My father offered to pick me up some comics from the newsstand he frequented. I remembered that that stand also carried math workbooks, so I asked for those instead.
My father laughed and said sure. He even paid me for each one I completed – he’d inherited his immigrant parents’ obsession with education. Understandable, but never pay or even encourage a kid to do something they already naturally love – you’re taking it away from them.
Anyway, I don’t think I was aware of the existence of graphic novels until Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize the year I graduated high school. As the grandson of survivors still deeply haunted by the Holocaust, I had a lot of unprocessed feelings about that event and my own identity. So, Maus scared me and I’ve avoided reading it to this day, even though I’ve taken in plenty of other harrowing books on the subject, such as Primo Levi’s. I can’t explain it.
Not long after Maus caught my attention, a childhood best friend gave me the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, an attempt to elevate the genre to full literary respect. I wouldn’t say I found myself entirely convinced, but beaches were softened.
The first graphic novel to blow my mind was the 2008 tome from Greece Logicomix, a collaboration between a mathematician, a computer scientist, and a handful of artists about an “epic story” from the history of the philosophy of mathematics.
It might be an exaggeration to call this book literature, but it completely eroded my prejudices about the genre’s supposedly narrow limits by drawing me headlong into an obscure topic that I would never have sunk my teeth into otherwise.
My only complaint? It was over too soon!
By this point, I had essentially given up on the Maria Lani project. I’d researched her life in every city, every library, every archive I could think of, but still didn’t have enough material to fill a full-length nonfiction book. I didn’t want to “just” publish an article. Or pad out her story with historical detail or my own musings on the meaning of her project, which I thought would dilute the story’s power.
But now I had a new thought: Why not a graphic novel? Hers is an inherently visual story. And this is a medium that could allow me to give her story the heft it deserved, to explore it with more than one of our senses.
To succeed, I wanted – needed – to find an artist with a truly original style and vision. Her story deserved nothing less. Also, I thought that if we could make every page a work of art unto itself, this would solve my perpetual problem with graphic novels, that they ended “too soon.” The pages I envisioned would allow the reader to stare and stare and never get bored.
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!
At my daughter’s high school, I met an extremely talented graduating senior who warmed to the project, and had loads of free time, but who begged off shortly after starting, following her lover to Vermont to work at a café and study yoga, much as I would have done at her age (minus the yoga).
By 2013, I had essentially given up again. Still, my habit of digging through archives for more information wouldn’t die. And I couldn't stop recounting Maria’s life at every party I attended. There are certain stories I return to again and again, and these are the ones worth finishing no matter how much discouragement is thrown my way.
At a friend’s art opening in Easthampton, Massachusetts, I saw my wife, the writer and artist Alex Hart, wave me over from across the room to join a conversation she was having with a bearded, shaggy-maned man a decade younger than me who looked like he had just emerged from the backwoods after a long day of 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.
At the time Zack considered himself a painter, despite having made personal comics all his life. He had never done a graphic novel. But he fell in love with Maria’s story as quickly as I had and got right to work. I fed him all my research but also tried to step back as much as possible.
The period of time when Maria burst onto the Paris scene is sometimes called Les Années Folles – the crazy years. And practically everything about Maria’s story is crazy.
The idea that a penniless orphan from a Polish backwater could within a few years become one of the most celebrated people in the red-hot center of Western civilization, armed with her wits alone. And then fall all the way back down the ladder and die alone in poverty and obscurity. If I’d read that in a novel, I’d say Bullshit, I don’t buy it, that doesn’t happen.
By the time I met Zack, I’d grown used to her story, had told it so many times that perhaps I no longer saw it as shocking. But Zack was able to bring his unique sense of wonder and bewilderment to the project, transmuting my files into art.
He gave rich and varied visual forms to all the many excesses in Maria’s personality and in her adventure, whether it’s her stumbling into Cocteau’s opium-laced hallucinations, or her becoming a player in the Götterdämmerung that was Suzanne Valadon’s life – Valadon, whose adult son was upstaging her as a painter even as she was making his best friend her lover, all while the three of them shared the same roof.
I would have been hard pressed to make this book feel crazy enough and kaleidoscopic enough with just words. Zack’s work is essential, surprising, and just exactly right. I’m so grateful to have found him.
Zack: Comics give me an opportunity to make hundreds of images that I wouldn’t normally make. I love to paint and make large drawings for a gallery show or something, but with that I will have to sit with one image for a day, a few days, a week, to an entire year sometimes … it can be “a task” in its own right. A comic page gives me new purpose per panel and gives me a wide variety of subject matter. But I’m not favoring one format over the other – I want to do everything!
I love the integration of art and words and how they look on a successful page. It’s a balancing act that I’m still learning. I just love to sit with a comic book page, as long as I want, and with little and big information hitting me all at once.
I care so much about cartooning and the power of expression it has. The sincerity of a line, the way characters look in those little boxes, the language, and the story beats working together like no other format. Maria’s story should be depicted in as many formats as possible! (Hello, Hollywood?)
Q: How did you research Maria Lani’s life, and what did you learn that particularly surprised you?
Jon: My research started old-school, in the French national library in Paris. To get full access to its riches, I presented letters of reference from established scholars. And I was required to demonstrate my seriousness in an interrogation, er, interview – simply being a Ph.D. student didn’t suffice.
Once I passed this gauntlet, the experience gave me a satisfying insider-y feeling not easy to obtain as an American in Paris. I went to the library café and ordered myself an espresso and a cookie with all the authentic French pronunciation I could muster, only to elicit a snicker from the barista. I later learned with embarrassment that real Parisians pronounce cookie just the same as we do.
Over time, I visited, or enlisted others to visit, libraries and archives in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, New York, and a dozen other cities around the world, in search of material. And while my research progressed, institutions continued to grow their online offerings through digitization, so I was able to do more and more from my laptop wherever I happened to be. Still, even today, plenty of material can only be viewed in person.
There were so many revelations along the way – that she wasn’t German; that she hadn’t been a star (contradicting her own story), but had acted (contradicted others’ people’s stories); that her husband had barely escaped Polish authorities who wanted to prosecute for various dubious schemes; that they hadn’t stolen artwork, as many claimed; that they saved countless Jews from persecution back East; that they very nearly got a movie made with Thomas Mann, Jean Renoir, and Greta Garbo.
But I suppose what surprised me most of all was learning that such an extraordinary woman could be forgotten. There’s a simple explanation for this – sexism – but the full story of her absence from history is tremendously complex.
Zack: The first time Jon and I met up to start work, at a coffee shop, he brought this gigantic stack of research, and plopped it down next to our mugs. He had photos, artist journals, maps, obituaries, etc. He had me hooked. I think reading Jean Cocteau’s journal entries about Maria was the most surprising and exciting discovery for me.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
Jon: The title of the movie that Maria and her husband wanted to make was “The Woman with a Hundred Faces.” But the total number of artists who depicted her was closer to 50, plus in English there’s an alliterative ring to “The Woman with Fifty Faces.”
This left the question of a subtitle, which seemed de rigueur, given that this is an unusual book about a near-unknown. We batted around dozens of possibilities, including a few suggested by AI, but in the end a human won out – our agent Mary Krienke hit on “Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was.”
Q: What are you working on now?
Jon: Promoting this book, lol. Given how much work I put into this book, over 20 years (on and off), not to mention all the work Zack put in, some half-million strokes of his pen, it seems right to drop everything and do everything we can to make readers aware of it.
But it’s more than the effort and time we put in. It’s the best thing I’ve ever made, and I know it’s possible I might never make something this good again, and the experience has given me so much, so I owe the book my all.
After the book tour, I’m looking at pursuing a new book project. I have two very different ideas.
The first is about a brand of homeschooling called unschooling. Raising our two daughters, my wife and I had no interest in teaching the kids ourselves, but we were so monumentally disappointed by the public and private schools we encountered, academically and socially. And we were lucky enough to have the flexibility and resources to leave them behind.
We quickly discovered that the less we taught, the more we stepped back (or entirely out of the room), the more our kids actually learned. They start projects they want to do, and you support their work. That’s a quick way of describing self-directed learning or unschooling.
Unschooling sounds kinda crazy but it works for a lot of kids and tends to produce independent and financially stable happy adults – while inflicting a whole lot less trauma along the way.
It’s tragically under-appreciated, in my opinion, while schoolkids’ real (and avoidable) suffering is underestimated and too readily accepted as inevitable, or even necessary. (In my opinion, “grit” is actually best developed pursuing something you believe in.)
There’s a growing body of scholarship supporting unschooling, particularly by the eminent psychologist Peter Gray. I think the time is ripe for a book that would expose the wounds caused by even the best American schools, on the many kids for whom any kind of forced schooling is painful. (I was once one myself.) While at the same time presenting a relatively simple alternative that is less expensive, and more feasible than most parents believe.
My dream is that my book could revolutionize the way we think about education the way that, say, Silent Spring shaped our understanding of chemicals, Unsafe at Any Speed changed the way we thought about cars, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma upended our conversation around eating.
My second idea is wildly different. In my middle age, I’ve discovered a love of sport, rock climbing in particular, after a lifetime thinking that it wasn’t – couldn’t be – for me.
All kinds of misguided notions keep people away from sport. I thought I wasn’t good enough, that it only brought pain and humiliation. I thought sport was anethema to the life of the mind. I thought it was a chore, like swallowing your fish-oil pills or something. My physical and mental health paid the consequences.
I love to think I could write a book that would get us to think differently about sport. Everyone deserves to enjoy its benefits. I also think that sport is underexplored as a literary topic. We’ve had great moments in sports writing, sure, but compared with say, topics such as adultery or vampires, it’s woefully short-shrifted.
If I’m going to encourage more people into sport, I think it’s also important to promote the many reforms that it desperately needs. I’ve nearly completed a Master’s degree in sport coaching from Denver University, and I’ve seen in detail the many harms that sport inflicts even today, despite all its supposed advances.
Athletes in most sports are way more likely to get injured than 50 years ago. A full third of professional female soccer players quit because of knee-ligament tears alone, injuries that are largely preventable. There is also so much burnout, disordered eating, and bullying in sport deserving a closer look.
Finally, sport’s record with equity is deeply disappointing. For every victory you can point to, say Title IX’s improvement of female participation in college sport, there’s another stat like this one: before Title IX, nine in 10 women’s teams were coached by a woman, and now it’s just four in 10.
Zack: I’m drawing and writing a new book. Too early to tell you what it’s about but it’ll have a struggling teenage boy in the South set in the early ‘90s, and it’s mostly fictional. But I also might take a break from comics and do some large drawings and paintings. I try to follow my heart with projects.
Q: Anything else we should know?
Jon: Maria Lani was writing a memoir when she died, and I have no idea where it is. Her effects were inherited by her husband, and then by a Parisian cousin named Isabel Levy. Unfortunately, there were at least three dozen women with that name living in Paris at the time. So I exhort anyone with an ancestor named Isabel Levy to root around in their grandparents’ attic and see if it’s there – then call me!
Zack: It was a real joy and task to put this book together. Hopefully our book gives Maria a new light, grace, and audience that she deserves.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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