Maria Lani (Maria Jeleniewicz; 24 June 1895 – 1954) was an aspiring film actress and artists' model. In the late 1920s she was portrayed in paintings and sculpture by over fifty artists, including Bonnard, Chagall, Cocteau, Derain, Matisse, Rouault,[1] and Suzanne Valadon.
Maria Lani was born in Kolno, Poland, and grew up in Częstochowa also in Poland.[1] She went to Paris in the spring of 1928 and proclaimed herself to be a silent film star who had worked in Berlin. Together with her husband, Maximilian Abramowicz, and her brother, Alexander, the trio claimed to be working on a film which required multiple portraits as part of the plot. She befriended Jean Cocteau who enthusiastically endorsed the project and with his encouragement, fifty-nine artists made portraits of her.[1]
A limited edition book about Lani and the portraits was published in 1929 by Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris with essays by Cocteau, Mac Ramo, and Waldemar George. It included fifty-one plates of reproductions.
The film never materialized, but the portraits were exhibited as a group in Europe and the United States, and Lani and Abramowicz kept them in their possession.[1] In 1941 they moved to New York City, where she worked at the Stage Door Canteen, a recreational center for servicemen. They returned to Paris after the war, where she died in 1954 and was buried in a pauper's grave.[1]
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