The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “It’s so fine, it’s so fine, it’s so fine!” Lee sang. “You’re so fine, you’re so fine, you’re so fine!”

  Alizée laughed. “I’m fine?”

  Lee thrust a letter into her hands. “Look what you’ve done.”

  Her heart pounded as she read. Commissions from the WPA for two abstract murals. Hers to be hung in the New York Public Library and Lee’s in the US Custom House. They were to submit the preliminary drawings in early September. It was signed by Burgoyne Diller, a supervisor on the mural project, but it was clearly the work of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  There was no one else who could have achieved this. Despite the fact that most people, even most artists, ridiculed abstraction and thought even less of female artists, Mrs. Roosevelt had gone to bat for them and managed to find these projects. It had been two months since their conversation, and Alizée had almost forgotten about her request. Clearly the First Lady had not.

  “Can you believe it?” Lee crowed. “The rotunda of the library? The ceiling of the Custom House?”

  She reread the letter. It was difficult to believe. These murals weren’t to be hung in some obscure high-school dining room or fifth-floor stairwell.

  “You’ve got a lot of guts.” Lee gave her a hug. “And you’re one hell of a pal.”

  Alizée pulled her mother’s ring from under her smock and curled her fingers around it, the familiar punch of loss taking her breath away. They would have been so proud. She didn’t believe in heaven, but somehow she trusted her parents were looking down on her with pride. I love you. She sent the thought skyward. Stay with me.

  She dropped the ring back between her breasts and looked at Lee’s beaming face, heard Tante’s voice in her ear: Man tracht un got lacht. Man plans and God laughs. “Let’s go out and celebrate!” she cried.

  There’s nothing like a spring evening in New York, when the sun remains high and the lilacs perfume the air. Well, there’s Paris on such a night, but Alizée wasn’t going to think about France or the dangers that lurked there; she was going to revel in their success, how grand it was to be an artist in this city at this moment in time. She would stay in the present. She and Lee figured it was too fine a night to be inside and that “anybody who was anybody,” as Lee put it, would be up at Union Square Park, including the Jumble Shop crowd.

  Arm in arm, the girls walked north toward the square, discussing their murals. According to the specifications outlined in the letter, the paintings were “allowed” to contain “nonrepresentational elements,” but the murals were officially labeled as “decorative” to avoid that much maligned word: abstract. They found this distinction amusing and laughed gaily as Tenth took a forty-five-degree turn due east.

  “I’ve got absolutely no idea what’s exported from the port of New York,” Lee said.

  “And I know just about nothing about education in the United States.” All WPA murals were based on a specific theme, usually related to the use of the building in which they were hung. Although why their current shipbuilding mural was going to a high-school cafeteria was a complete mystery.

  Two blocks below Union Square, she could smell the frankfurters and hear the buzz of the crowd. She’d been to the park many times. It was a hotbed of socialist and communist political activity, where she and Lee had gone to countless meetings and rallies. It was a gritty, wild place, roughly four square blocks between Fourteenth and Sixteenth, its bottom cut into a triangle by the slanting intersection of Broadway and Park. Few trees, lots of concrete, even more people.

  When they stepped into the throng, it felt different from the other times she’d been here. Instead of the usual overcrowded, argumentative spirit, there was a festive air, as if they were all guests at the wedding of two people madly in love. Spring will do that. Lee treated them both to a frankfurter, saying it was the least she could do, and they ate as they wandered through the crowd. It didn’t take long to find Jack, Bill, Gorky, and Mark sitting on a low wall, drinking beer with Phil and Grant, Mark’s roommates.

  Mark grinned when he saw her, and all she could do was grin back.

  “We’ve got something grand to tell you,” Lee said, waving the letter. “Alizée’s scored a home run!”

  The boys’ happiness at the news was touching. When she’d studied in Paris, there was a group of students she saw outside of class, drank with at the Dôme café, but it was never like this. Her modest successes there—winning a few awards, selling the most at a student show, two paintings purchased by actual collectors—had generated polite congratulations, but no real emotion aside from some barely disguised jealousy. Here, the boys whooped their approval, predicted their great success, toasted many times to Mrs. Roosevelt, and hailed Alizée and Lee as the “first ladies of abstraction.” More beer was procured and pushed into their hands.

  They all headed out of the park about an hour later to go work in their studios; Alizée and Mark fell behind. When a full block separated them from the others, he dropped his arm causally around her shoulder. “I’m very proud of you,” he said softly, bending down to bring their faces closer together. “You’re remarkable in so many ways.”

  His breath in her ear put her into a full body shiver, and when she looked up into his eyes, she was stunned by the burst of desire that filled her. Man tracht un got lacht. She raised her mouth, and his lips were even softer and more giving than she’d imagined. They slipped into the recessed doorway of a closed jewelry shop, and the inevitability of it, the rightness of it, obliterated everything else.

  She didn’t remember the walk to her flat. They were suddenly there, dropping clothes, reaching for each other, falling to the mattress, laughing like happy children. But they were far from children, and all those months of longing initiated an abandon she’d never experienced before. She pressed herself into his caresses, rose to his tongue. The feeling was so intoxicating she didn’t ever want it to stop. And neither did he. It was dawn before they finally fell into exhausted sleep.

  12

  DANIELLE, 2015

  It’s called the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a museum of sorts, and it took even longer to get there than the map suggested. It’s in the Hamptons, way out on Long Island, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s home, now a National Historic Landmark. Grand-mère hadn’t exactly said she and Grand-père visited Lee and Jackson there, but I was hoping to find something that confirmed her implication. Plus I’d always wanted to see it.

  It was the house where they lived and the barn where they painted, bought in the mid-1940s. Apparently, Lee convinced Pollock to move out there because she wanted to keep him away from his drinking buddies in the city. He was an alcoholic of the highest sort, putting to shame all the other alcoholic artists of the time, of whom there were many. He was killed at the age of forty-four in a drunken rage just a mile down the road by driving into a tree. Killed someone else, too. People quietly speculated it might have been suicide. I don’t get the speculation part.

  As I wandered through the house, a tiny thing, homely and uninspiring, surprisingly little light—apparently even after Pollock started making money, they had no interest in an upgrade—I wondered if Grand-mère’s ramblings held any truth. Could my grandparents have sat in this very living room, on this lumpy couch, leaned against this kitchen counter? Hung out with people whose house had been turned into a museum?

  I climbed the narrow steps that led to the master bedroom, which wasn’t very master, and a cramped extra room where Lee painted while Jackson worked in his huge studio in the barn. A single bed would barely fit into her space while a Mack truck would be quite comfortable in his. No wonder her paintings from this period were small, in more ways than one, and his were gigantic, also in more ways than one.

  I was surprised by how unfocused I was. Not connecting the way I usually do with artists’ homes and studios. Typically, I’m so awestruck that I go into a state of intense mania, roller-coastering between stomach-rolling swoons and mad bouts of glee, jumping around lik
e an eight-year-old at Disney World. But that day, I was more akin to a bored teenager being dragged on an educational excursion.

  Until I went into the barn. The structure where Jackson created his drip paintings, the studio Lee took over after he died. When I was sheathed in the required slippers and climbed the steps to the studio, my heart began to race and my apathy disappeared. I was in the space of genius, and every part of my being knew it. A rush of excited heat filled me as I slowly turned 360 degrees.

  On the floor were splatters and drips and streams of every possible hue, remnants from when Pollock laid his canvases flat and worked from above, circling, pouring house paints, throwing in bits of sand and shell, more paint. The floor lacked the intentionality of his creations, and yet it was art in its own right. Or at least the tracings of art, the makings of art, the remains of art.

  And so, too, on the walls, empty squares and rectangles outlined by sunburst splashes of color, marking the outside edges of Krasner’s masterpieces. It was difficult to take it all in. The frenetic energy. The command of the castoffs. Fabulous unintended consequences.

  I took a deep breath, hoping to inhale the odor of paint and turpentine, what used to be my life’s blood; but of course, there was none. It was a museum, after all. There were shelves loaded with jugs of turpentine, tubes of paint, hundreds of brushes, all of which, the guide assured us, belonged to Pollock and Krasner.

  I saw my own apartment filled with the same and closed my eyes against the longing the image evoked. Who was I kidding? I missed it: the slipping of time, the pain–pleasure of a long day at work, the gratification of doing something difficult. Why had I been so sure giving up painting was the right thing to do? Why had I been so quick to fuel my insecurities with Sam’s bitter judgments?

  I pushed these questions aside and cruised the circumference of the barn with its huge window streaming north light, taking in the juxtapositions of the splotches, the colors pushing and pulling each other into three dimensions, picturing the paintings in my office at Christie’s. Were they Jack’s? Were they Lee’s? I’d been working on this question for weeks now, ever since the carton first appeared, trying to create the beginnings of what’s called the three-legged stool of authentication: provenance, forensics, and connoisseurship.

  One problem was that there was no provenance: no papers detailing the lineage of owners, no sales receipts, nothing signed by the artist, not even a name on the paintings themselves. The second was that forensics are only marginally useful with a modern painting; it’s a lot easier for a forger to get his hands on canvases, stretchers, and paints used in the twentieth century than it is for those used in the sixteenth. I was checking what I could, but so far there had been nothing definitive either way.

  So it was probably going to come down to connoisseurship, the least verifiable of the three legs, as it’s based on a gut feeling, coupled with experience, knowledge, judgment, and all kinds of other things that can’t be quantified. I was in no way qualified to make this kind of determination. Which is why I was only tasked with the preliminary forensics piece.

  There was little in the barn to help me with either this or my Alizée quest, so I wandered back to the house, where there was even less. I was hoping there might be some personal papers on site, maybe letters or journals Lee or Jackson wrote, maybe detailing their visitors or, even better, discussions about Alizée. But the director told me all the original papers were at the Study Center at SUNY’s Stony Brook campus, which was closed to the public until the end of the semester, two months away. I asked her if she was familiar with the name Alizée Benoit. She thought for a couple of seconds, shook her head, and moved on to answer the next person’s question.

  I tried talking up the girl taking tickets at the back door, clearly an art student, but of course she’d never heard of Alizée either and appeared to have as little interest in her as she had in me. I looked around the small kitchen and remembered Grand-mère’s mention of eating pie. “How about Jackson Pollock and apple pies?” I asked her, then laughed with false heartiness. “Someone told me he was into making them, but I can’t imagine him doing such a thing. Seems completely out of character.”

  She gave me a withering look. “It’s a well-known fact,” she informed me, “that baking apple pie was one of his passions.”

  My jaw literally dropped. “Are you kidding me?” I cried, far too loudly for a recipient of such mundane information.

  The art student took a step back. “No,” she said, without a trace of humor. “Why on earth would I make up something like that?”

  13

  ALIZÉE, 1939

  She was helpless against the passion, the power of being with Mark, a hunger, a raging thirst. He had a wife he might return to at any time, and while the thought of this terrified her, threw her back to the loss of her parents, she willed herself to live in the present. This was sometimes successful, sometimes not. They never talked about Edith, the estranged wife, who was unrelated to them or to the art they were so committed to making. Myopic, of course, and perhaps self-serving, but new love is selfish and so were they.

  They hadn’t ventured out much in the past month, preferring to hide out in her flat feasting on sex and conversation, but the Valentine Dudensing Gallery was showing Picasso’s Guernica, his controversial antiwar mural. Although neither she nor Mark were keen on political paintings, she’d left France just weeks before Guernica’s first display at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1937 and didn’t want to miss it again. Picasso, after all, was Picasso.

  They stood in front of the massive painting, eleven feet tall and over twenty-five feet wide, mesmerized. A wild-eyed bull loomed above a woman clutching her dead child. A horse fell to its knees, gored by a spear. The severed hand of a dead soldier still held a saber. An evil eye shone down on it all, a lightbulb as its pupil. Daggers rather than tongues. The bull’s tail in flames. A shattered sword. The room’s ceiling pressing down, crushing the people, the animals, and the objects below. Crushing her heart.

  The painting was based on Hitler’s bombing of Guernica, a small Spanish town of no strategic importance in a civil war that did not directly involve Germany. At the time of the attack, most of the men were off fighting, and the village was primarily inhabited by women and children. Hitler’s intention was to impress Franco, to terrorize the populace, and to test his latest weaponry; he succeeded in all his ambitions and also destroyed the town, killing hundreds of people, but leaving standing, with cunning hubris, the only potential military target, a single factory.

  In black, whites, and grays, Picasso had created a heart-wrenching portrayal of this particular horror and the tragedies of all wars. Truncated animals and dismembered humans distorted in palpable agony filled the canvas in a nightmare miasma. It attracted and repulsed her at the same time, too horrific and too real to look at, but she couldn’t turn away.

  Mindless war. Mindless killing. The lust for power. Hatred of the other. The destruction of innocents. It hit her like a sucker punch. Babette was right: If Hitler had done this in Spain, he could do it in France. Do it anywhere. Everywhere. She sat down hard on a bench.

  Mark sat next to her, still staring at the mural. “It’s good,” he said. “I’ll give him that. But propaganda has no place in art.”

  “This isn’t propaganda,” she said, her voice rough with unshed tears. She had to get the visas.

  “Even if it’s true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t sending a political message.”

  She sat up. “Why can’t it be both? A great painting and a provocative one?”

  Mark turned and looked at her. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You don’t like political art any more than I do.”

  She crossed her arms. “I like this painting.”

  He shrugged. “It shouldn’t be about an artist’s ideology. Real art needs to explore the soul, not politics.”

  “But Picasso’s using politics to express w
hat’s in his soul,” she said more vehemently than she expected and lowered her voice. “What he cares about. And to warn people.”

  “It’s the warning part I disagree with.”

  “His warning is about the evil of war. It’s a call to save lives. What’s not to agree with about that?”

  “Art isn’t a weapon.”

  “Then why is Hitler chasing all the abstract painters out of Europe?” she demanded. “What about his horrid Degenerate Art show? If he didn’t believe art could change minds, why would he care?”

  “Come on, do you really believe a painting’s going to stop Hitler?”

  “No one knows what might or might not stop Hitler!”

  Mark frowned, then his face softened. “I’m sorry, Zée. I forgot about your family.”

  She slumped on the bench. He’d forgotten about her family. About the thousands running for safe haven. So easy to forget what wasn’t important to you, what wasn’t affecting you. So easy to forget what you didn’t want to remember.

  Mark turned her shoulders so they faced each other, his eyes latching onto hers. “I’m a dolt, and I wouldn’t blame you if you never spoke to me again.” He lightly kissed her lips. “But it would break my heart.”

  There was nothing to say, so she took him back to her flat where she hoped their lovemaking would drive away any thoughts of what was or wasn’t happening in Europe.

  As soon as Mark left, she went down to Telzonski’s Hardwares and bought a used Philco radio for eighty-seven cents. She couldn’t afford it, but she needed to keep better tabs on what was happening in the larger world. She unplugged the hot plate, hooked up the radio, and found a news station. Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London. In some magical way, the Philco played live broadcasts from across the ocean. Mr. Telzonski said it had to do with shortwave transmissions. Whatever those were.

  As she listened to the dreary reports and somber prognostications, she tried to cheer herself by thinking about the letter she just received from a man named Hiram Bingham, whom Long had fired after Bingham objected to the number of visa applications the department was rejecting. She’d tracked him down with help from one of Gideon’s contacts, and Bingham finally responded saying he was coming to New York next month and wanted to meet. Reading between the lines, she and Gideon got the impression he might have something specific to give them on Long. It wasn’t much, but it was something.