The Muralist

September 21, 2015
After the success of The Art Forger, Shapiro returns to the art world, this time focusing on the budding Abstract Expressionist movement, whose major players, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollack, interact with the fictional Alizée Benoit until her mysterious disappearance in 1940. Danielle Abrams, a cataloguer at Christie’s in the present who is haunted by her great aunt Alizée, comes across some canvases that may have been painted by her enigmatic relative. The novel goes back and forth in time, and pre–World War II America comes to life in the flashbacks. Alizée and her colleagues are hired by the WPA to paint public works, but she is plagued by Hitler’s frightening actions against the Jews in Europe, where members of her family are trying to escape. Passionate about her work and finding new ways to express herself, she is caught up in the horrors overseas and the obstacles put up by America to keep out refugees—exemplified by the evil machinations of Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Though compelling, Shapiro’s latest is bogged down in relaying well-researched material about the pre-WWII politics and developments in the art world, ultimately undermining the power of the fictional story. Additionally, Alizée is a formidable character, but her modern-day counterpart, Danielle, lacks depth, diminishing the dénouement when she finally learns the truth about her great aunt.

November 1, 2015

Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Charles Lindbergh, and other remarkable personages of 20th-century history all make appearances in this novel about a fictional Works Progress Administration muralist, Alizee Benoit, who mysteriously disappears in New York City while trying to obtain visas for her Jewish family trapped in Europe during World War II. The narrative alternates between the 1930s and 1940s and the present as Alizee's great-niece tries to find out what happened to her aunt and her art. As with the The Art Forger, Shapiro weaves her research and art history expertise into an enjoyable and highly readable novel. [A November LibraryReads pick.--Ed.]

READ-ALIKE Lisa Barr's Fugitive Colors.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
A political artist disappears and, 70 years later, her great-niece determines to find out why. Shapiro takes a familiar ramp to launch her new mystery-a young woman goes missing. The author of The Art Forger (2012) returns to the canvas of art history to portray her titular figure, the muralist, one Alizee Benoit. She is, of course, "charismatic, headstrong, and talented." She is-must be?-a fragile beauty who "captures the room" and, quite briskly, the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt. Benoit paints for the Works Progress Administration, circa 1940, and lives with "no hot water, no heat on weekends" in Greenwich Village. Her contemporary great-niece, Danielle Abrams, toils in an auction house and pines to know why her aunt vanished. Shapiro toggles her very short chapters between Abrams in 2015, searching for clues in plucky first-person narration, and the lost Benoit era depicted through an omniscient voice. With her Jewish relatives imperiled in Europe, Benoit agitates politically, paints boldly, and pals around with her gang: "Jack, Bill, Gorky," "Lee and Mark": Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Mark Rothko. The immortals of abstract impressionism drink, argue, and flirt with the muralist. But don't expect the derivative deliciousness of The Paris Wife: the dialogue is wooden; the characterizations predictable. Mark's kisses are invariably "light," and he wants Benoit only one way: "desperately." Occasional sentences are howlers. Eleanor Roosevelt's deep, end-of-life regret that the United States barred thousands of Europe's Jewish refugees adds poignant color to this story, but Shapiro tries too hard to make her fiction into moral instruction.

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Starred review from October 15, 2015
Shapiro follows the enthusiastically received The Art Forger (2012) with an even more polished and resonant tale. In the present, Danielle, an artist working for an art auction house, discovers several abstract expressionist paintings that resemble canvases painted by her mysterious great-aunt, Alizee Benoit, who disappeared in 1940. Alizee steps in to tell her haunting story in chapters set in 1939 New York City, where she and real-life painter Lee Krasner are working on WPA murals in a harshly cold warehouse. When Eleanor Roosevelt tours the shabby facility, Alizee boldly asks the First Lady why none of the murals are abstract expressionist in style. Will their encounter be consequential? Alizee is passionate about art but far more concerned about her French Jewish family and their desperate struggle to secure visas to America to escape the Nazis. As dramatic, unexpected events transpire, Shapiro portrays the brilliant, unstable painter Mark Rothko and Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who covertly obstructed the issuing of visas to desperate Jewish refugees. Shapiro perceptively parallels the creative valor of abstract artists seeking essential truth with that of those who courageously protested the government's inhumanity. Shapiro's novel of epic moral failings is riveting, gracefully romantic, and sharply revelatory; it is also tragic in its timeliness as the world faces new refugee crises.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)