“They have imposed their so-called anti-Jewish regulations,including yellow stars, curfews, and the unimpeded looting of shops. “Things grow more difficult by the day,” her cousin writes from Belgium.

Her European relatives are struggling to find refuge. All over the country.”Īlizée has another agenda. There are lots of us doing nonrepresentational work right here in New York. Shapiro describes her as “charismatic, headstrong and talented,” and she captures the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt during the First Lady’s visit to the artists at the WPA when Alizée says: “I noticed that all of the WPA. They, like Alizée, are working for the Works Progress Administration, the government’s project to put artists to work during the Depression.Īlizée lives in a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village. Her modern-day grandniece, Danielle Abrams, a lapsed artist working as a researcher at Christie’s auction house, decides to find out what happened to Alizée.Īlong the way, we meet some of the creative giants of the art world: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and others. Shapiro has overlaid her story with the slightly implausible tale of the fictional Alizée Benoit, a promising French-born Jewish artist working in New York who mysteriously disappears.

Shapiro, author of The Art Forger, has combined the exploits of real artists and real government figures with made-up characters against the lead-up to World War II. The Muralist, a novel set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, explores a new, distinctly American art movement: Abstract Expressionism. Shapiro (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 352 pp.

The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro