Venus, Vanishing

A Novel

De: Rebecca Birrell

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 join the city’s underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Her true passion, though, is painting. Working as a tailor while studying art 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 a wealthy female art collector, commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed 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 transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding 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.