Sur les terres oubliées des Petites Iles de la Sonde
Sur les terres oubliées des Petites Iles de la Sonde
THE MARIA LANI CASE
The Maria Lani case
She made the event this spring 1929.
All the newspapers talk about it, Paris-Midi to the night owls who have just got out of bed, Paris-Soir to its two million readers, Comoedia and the specialized press, Vu and Vogue the luxurious photo weeklies.
Yet we do not know anything about her. She has just landed in Paris, flanked by two men wearing handsome, her husband and her agent. She is sold to the press as a famous German actress. It works like a Garbo or a Dietrich. Dresses, furs, social dinners, shows, she would do the news today and the cover of Paris-Match.
Actress of which films? no one has the boldness to ask the question. The adage is still valid "no matter how far you lie".
Undoubtedly to give credibility to the tale, she leaves again for months as if she were claimed on film sets. She will do two seasons in Paris. Becomes the new queen of Montparnasse that the triumph of the Coupole (inaugurated on 12.20.1927) makes even more spectacular: Montparnasse is the center of the world.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
These were the craziest of the Roaring Twenties until the 1929 crisis (black September!) Which took two years to cross the Atlantic. Paris celebrates every night. Not a night without the splendid Maria Lani. It is sponsored on its only beautiful appearance and the effectiveness of its two protectors. Nobody investigates, we swallow the story of his agent.
The painters spotted therefore know it well before being approached. This is the effect of teasing.
Positions at the hotel? at the artist? Which is more likely especially for sculptors like Bourdelle, Chana Orloff, Despiau.
As soon as the painting is finished the photographer takes it away for a few hours to photograph it and brings it back. 51 times. Waldemar George and Jean Cocteau control the operation. They make it a "collector" and a book.
On the Quai Malaquais, in the summer of 2004, looking for documents to write a biography of the poet and painter Max Jacob, François Pédron discovers a surprising portfolio. An unknown woman ... Celebrated by the greatest painters. Portraits never seen in museums or in catalogs.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
Henri, the bookseller that François interviews, is delighted that the book, which has been lying around in his box for years, is finally of interest to a reader. “Origin unknown. The name of Cocteau, of which I am an expert, attracted me. That's all."
Chance quickly becomes an obsession. François studies the portraits, searches in the biographies of the artists the trace of this model. After verifications, not a word about this young woman, while all the models, like Kiki de Montparnasse, are very present in the columns and press articles.
The books are silent and the story bounces back with the reading of number 262 of Paris Match dated April 3, 1954, which devotes a page to the disappearance of a certain Maria Lani.
The investigation begins
And here are the 51 portraits of Maria Lani
This sumptuous living gallery becomes an art book published by Les quatre chemin editions, rue Godot de Mauroy, prefaced by Cocteau, argued by Waldemar George the authoritative critic and a certain Marc Ramo. Completely unknown to readers since he does not exist, it is Abramovicz the husband of Maria, who will also sign reviews under the name of Maximilian Ilyin.
To publish is to prove. Maria is necessarily a star since we devote a portfolio to her.
Event which takes note of "For you cinema", cantor of art, the seventh.
Ramo will distribute some information to American journalists to make it more true and to increase the media surface.
For example, this session in a bistro with Matisse who is sketching a few sketches on the pedestal table, between two glasses of wine, before making the canvas in his studio.
The waiter will wipe off the preparatory drawings with a cloth.
Problem, Matisse never painted the portrait on canvas. And was satisfied with two drawings ...
The investigation begins at the Bourdelle museum
Paris, Rue Antoine Bourdelle.
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle was born in Montauban on October 30, 1861.
Received second in the entrance examination of the École des beaux-arts de Paris in 1884, Bourdelle entered the studio of Alexandre Falguière, which he left two years later.
In 1885, he took up residence in the studio at 16 Impasse du Maine - the museum of today.
At the end of a courtyard undergoing repair of the museum, almost covered with vegetation, a head appears. That of Maria Lani who wanted to be a star
This woman who hypnotized Cocteau calls herself Maria Lani and she arrived from Berlin, a young actress with a bright future, escorted by two men presented as her brother and her manager. She will shoot a film in Paris before taking the boat to New York and settling in Hollywood. The kingdom of cinema awaits its new queen.
It all started with an article by Jean Cocteau which appeared in number 25 of "Pour Vous Cinéma", dated May 9, 1929. This is the first appearance of the "star" in the press, when she has arrived for several years. weeks in Montparnasse. Indeed, page 3, Cocteau publishes twelve signed portraits of great names and a sculpture by Chana Orloff falsely attributed to Zadkine! She has therefore already met Matisse, Van Dongen, Krogh, Chagall, in total, we will know later 45 painters and 6 sculptors. Cocteau does his job as a publicist and tells us what emotion he feels when he draws this great movie star with a face so mobile that it will take 51 artists to try to identify it. She is installed on a chair, in Cocteau's hotel room, which faces him on another chair, pen in hand because he refuses to be considered a painter: he draws. A writer and his model. He will make 14 portraits with a light and sharp line.
The scenario of the film which required the 51 portraits of painters and sculptors
Maria lani
his painters
and the cinema
Maria Lani who inspired fifty famous artists by their genius, their talent or some delicious originality was born in Germany, of a purely Polish family.
She first worked at the Reinhardt Theater then played the main role of a film called Destins which we have unfortunately not yet seen in France.
And here is today Maria Lani of whom Jean Cocteau spoke with so much emotion and poetry arrived among us. Under the direction of Max Renco and Maurice Sachs, she will start shooting the great film which required the collaboration of fifty-one famous artists.
It will begin ... We express ourselves imperfectly ... Maria Lani and her fifty-one images will undertake, in Paris itself, the interpretation of this film. Its partners are not yet definitively chosen but in a few days we will be able to reveal their names.
The scenario, fantastic, a little in the manner of Hoffmann, is of a seductive originality.
A wealthy collector of paintings is possessed of the following mania: he would like to animate the paintings of the Masters using optical instruments. He has never yet been able to succeed.
One evening, in a music hall, he sees playing a sketch where a young actress strangles a doll. At night, the collector experiences a crisis of suffocation - his old asthma aggravated - and in a nightmare he thinks he sees the actress suffocating him. The next day, he meets her, falls in love with her and soon he has her painted by his favorite painters. The young woman, Maria Lani in this case,
cheats on him with his secretary. The crises of the old man are increasing. One night, he dreams that his optical process is successful, but all these creatures that represent the same woman come out of their frame and start chasing him. He flees, still in a dream, arrives at the actress and
finds her with her secretary. Furious, he arms himself with a knife, strikes her with redoubled blows. In his delirium, he lacerates all the famous canvases but engaging his head in the tear of one of them dies of strangulation.
La Meilleraye.
"FOR YOU CINEMA"
May 9, 1929
No one will ever see the film and for good reason.
Maria is only an extra in Max Reinhardt's troupe who has only ever played utilities and in a film that no one has seen in Paris.
A beautiful lie that comes from afar.
The sulphurous Maurice Sachs has thought of putting dollars there that his uncle stockbroker cultivates in New York.
He says it, without insisting, in his book "Au temps du Boeuf sur le toit" And without citing a title that no one will know.
This is very likely since he was Cocteau's “secretary” that he will dupe and swindle like all those who allow themselves to be approached.
He spends his life in salons, theaters, newsrooms, cafes and bars. What he does not learn, he makes up.
Spring 1929
“In the middle of Paris, two astonishing characters appeared, called the Abramovicz brothers. They are the imprésarii of an extraordinary actress, incredible, that nobody saw play, Miss Maria Lani and they decided to have her portrait done by all the famous painters of her time.
What they will do then, precisely, with these portraits, no one knows. They don't tell us that very explicitly.
I would have thought that these very famous, rich painters, a little suspicious as glorious people are, would refuse outright. Well, not at all.
Derain made two portraits, Matisse three, Segonzac, Rouault, Dufy, Dufresne, Waroquier, Vlaminck, Favory, Foujita, etc., everyone worked, except the prudent Picasso.
Marie Laurencin said quite rightly:
“Take one of my paintings and call it: portrait of Maria Lani”.
The Abramovicz gallantly refused.
(but I think Marie Laurencin wanted us to pay for this painting).
In short, we have Maria Lani by everyone, except Picasso and Laurencin, but on the other hand quartoze portraits by Cocteau.
I saw Maria Lani who is, indeed, irresistible.
It is not that she is regularly beautiful, but she is seductive. We will make her, say the Abramovicz, the greatest star of the time.
One of the Abramovicz brothers appeared one day in great mourning; I asked his brother the cause of so many drowners: "He lost his father," replied the brother who was himself very gleefully put on.
We expect the greatest results from the Abramovicz company.
Maurice Sachs "In the days of the Ox on the Roof"
Maria Lani photographed by Boris Lipnitzky
The only certainty after this operation, totally unprecedented in the history of art and artists, is that Maria with 51 faces reappears on the picture rails in the absence of cinema screens. Five times.
Five exhibitions in one year is a record. That it was necessary to finance, how? Maria and her accomplices do not hide above all, they show off as if they were "advertising" to find producers.
They therefore did not leave with the cash register as one might think, storing canvases whose value would increase a hundredfold.
Only two finals did not work in the combination, Picasso who then lived rue Schoelcher, so in Montparnasse, and Marie Laurencin whose prices were increasing every month and who had contemptuously proposed "take any portrait - charcoal or drawings - and call her 'Maria Lani'. "
She wanted money to make an original… A Maria Lani by Picasso would be worth $ 30 or 40 million today if we follow the latest sales at Sotheby's.
1. Brummer, a friend of Max Jacob's, exhibited the 51 portraits from November 1 to 28, 1929, in his New York gallery.
2 . A few days later the paintings and the sculptures are in Chicago at the Arts Club gallery, from December 3 to 17, 1929. Even though America is ruined after the crisis of Oct. 24.
3 . Maria crossed the Atlantic a second time to exhibit at the Leicester Galleries in London , August and September 1929.
4 . Then the 51 portraits cross the Channel for the picture rails of George Bernheim in Paris , from November 15 to 30, 1930.
5 . Then to those of Alfred Fleichtheim in Berlin , an esthete who knows how to count and who often comes to Paris
The exhibition "... of this most beautiful swindle in the history of art" (Crespelle), was the last major Parisian artistic event before the dark years. Pierre Lazareff devotes a page to the "hundred faces of Maria Lani" (he doubles the stake! It is the style of the house to make a round count) in Paris-Midi of November 15, 1930, the favorite daily newspaper of the intelligentsia. He interviews at length
“M.Abramowitch” who is delighted with the success of the Ecole de Paris throughout the world. The charming whim of a young woman who is endlessly doubled has won over audiences and critics alike. We are not talking about commercial success and even less about film. Jean Cocteau speaks again of the woman "whom everyone makes the portrait" and makes the preface of the catalog by evoking once again the session of pose where he was hypnotized. As if he was a reference ... Then, the queen of Paris, for three seasons, disappears after this final demonstration, with her brother and her husband. The star was just a little shorthand typist from Prague. A hairpiece star. The trio takes their paintings on board. But Maria had to come back to Paris, a little less hypnotic.