Germaine's Daughter

Germaine’s Daughter is a graphic novel that uses both prose and what Kann calls 'story paintings' — 100 images which sequentially tell a tale. They include color oil paintings and black and white acrylics, and some pastels. The images range in size from 30 X 42 inches to 84 X 84 inches. They stand alone as narrative works for exhibition, in addition to forming the graphic novel. The book explores the legacy of the war outside — the Holocaust, and the war inside — mental illness, over three generations of transformation. The viewer follows the story arc from imagery of suffering to eventual transcendence over time, from darkness to the light.

“There are stories that live in our bones before we learn their words. In Germaine’s Daughter, Lydia Kann gives powerful form to the lingering, mutating aftershocks of historical trauma as it reverberates through three generations, rendered with both formal vigor and narrative compassion. Bridging the personal and the political with unapologetic intimacy, what we have witnessed is not illustration — it’s revelation (…) As the graphic novel moves through sorrow, perseverance, rage, grace, it reminds us that art does not heal by pretending things didn’t happen — it heals by showing how survival, too, can be artful.” -- Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic, Curator, Author

Lydia Kann is a visual artist and a writer. This summer she published a graphic novel, Germaine’s Daughter, containing 100 large scale paintings and text about the legacy of war and debilitating illness over three generations. She exhibits the paintings from the project at galleries in L.A., where she lives. Lydia returned to Paris for a two-month residency Summer 2025 at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where she had a yearlong residency 2017-2018 and conceived Germaine’s Daughter. Lydia writes fiction and nonfiction including short stories, essays, novels and memoir. Many are stories of women and men overcoming adversity — psychological and external challenges such as poverty, illness, immigrant life, war, and gender conflict.  She is interested in both the personal/domestic and the historical/sociological experience.

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