Venus, Vanishing

The Safekeep meets Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a gripping debut following a young Jewish painter in 1930s Berlin whose work is tampered with and exhibited under a man's name, reckoning with art forgery, desire, suspicion, and resistance In the raucous world of 1928 Berlin, Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman’s life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to explore the city and revel in its clubs and galleries, finding friends and lovers along the way. Her true passion, though, is art. Working as a tailor while studying painting with every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint. Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when one of her clients, a wealthy female art collector, commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name. While lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah finds herself caught up in a devastating game of survival. Laced with queer desire and life-threatening secrets, Venus, Vanishing pulses with hedonism and danger as history comes to Hannah’s door, offering a textured and sweeping counter-narrative of creativity, resistance, and survival.