The Muralist: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY B. A. SHAPIRO

  The Art Forger

  The Safe Room

  Blind Spot

  See No Evil

  Blameless

  Shattered Echoes

  NONFICTION

  The Big Squeeze

  THE

  MURALIST

  a novel by

  B. A. SHAPIRO

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2015

  For Emma and Charlotte,

  the wonders of my world

  Eleanor’s failure to force her husband to admit more refugees

  remained her deepest regret at the end of her life.

  —Doris Kearns Goodwin,

  No Ordinary Time

  The Muralist is a novel in which fictional characters mingle with historical figures. All incidents and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Minor alterations in the timing and placement of persons and events were made as the story dictated, the details of which can be found in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

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  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

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  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Recommended Reading: The Art Forger

  About Algonquin

  1

  DANIELLE, 2015

  It was there when I arrived that morning, sitting to the right of my desk, ostensibly no different from the other half-dozen cartons on the floor, flaps bent back, paintings haphazardly poking out. As soon as I saw it, I ripped off my gloves, dropped to my knees, and pawed through the contents. I didn’t realize I wasn’t breathing until my chest began to ache and little black dots jumped around the edges of my vision.

  I stood, hung up my coat and scarf, reminded myself that this needed time, thoughtful research, judgments deduced from fact not desire. But I did know my Abstract Expressionists. Their early paintings as well as their more famous later ones. Jackson Pollock before his drips, Mark Rothko before color block, when Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning worked representationally. And there was a stirring of recognition, a sense of knowing this was no ordinary cardboard box, no ordinary find.

  There were over a dozen paintings, not particularly large, three by four feet was the biggest, small for the Abstract Expressionists, even the early works. One by one, I propped them against the walls and across my desk, put a couple on top of a pile of art books. I inhaled the musty aroma of dust and aged paint, wondered where they had been all these years, who had touched them, loved them, forgotten them.

  Rumor had it that this carton was the proverbial box in the attic, uncovered by a bereaved family and full of priceless masterpieces. These rumors are all too common around here and rarely pan out, but the odds were actually better than usual that this was the real deal. In the early 1940s, the WPA/FAP, the art division of the Works Progress Administration, one of Roosevelt’s New Deal employment programs, was canceled without notice; the artists were unceremoniously dismissed, all the work they’d previously submitted disposed of.

  Hundreds of these pieces were sold at four cents a pound to junkmen while the rest ended up on the sidewalk, some grabbed by art lovers and dealers, most left for trash. This was the possible origin story for these paintings, with the added prospect that some might be early works by the Abstract Expressionists, many of whom were employed by the WPA way before they became who they became.

  Even an auction house like ours, with one of the most illustrious names in the business, routinely accepts art brought in by laypersons, in this case the Farrell family of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Our fear of missing the Big One is almost as great as our fear of authenticating one that isn’t big at all. We try to get people to email photographs, but this request is often ignored, and these mostly valueless pieces are shunted off to cataloguers (i.e., me and my wary band of late-twenty-somethings with undergraduate art degrees from classy colleges and no real marketable skills). Researching these wayward children and logging them into the database is how we make our so-called livings.

  Most of the paintings in front of me weren’t signed, which wasn’t surprising, as the WPA’s main concern was with the art and not the artist. I didn’t recognize the signatures on the few that had them but some of the unsigned . . . Was it possible? Could that be one of Rothko’s geometric cityscapes? A Krasner still life? Another looked similar to de Kooning’s early figurative drawings. And two reeked of Pollock’s over-the-top symbolism.

  My interest in art, and in the Abstract Expressionists, stems from my grandfather’s stories about my mysterious great-aunt Alizée—although when I enrolled in art school I’d pictured myself in a studio, not a cubicle. According to family legend, Alizée worked for the WPA and hung out in New York City with all the up-and-coming artists of the day. Grand-père claimed they were her friends, lovers even, and that she had a significant influence on their work. A point my mother declares is unverified speculation. Aunt Alizée disappeared under shadowy circumstances in 1940, so she isn’t telling.

  I visualized her two paintings, the only ones in existence as far as anyone knew: the colors, the brushstrokes, the brash energy. Grand-mère had given them to me because I was the artist in the family, and they overwhelmed the scant wall space of my tiny studio apartment, dwarfed the furniture. One was a beguiling and slightly disturbing abstraction, a shape-shifting ode to lily pads or clouds or fish, which I called Lily Pads because it sounded better than Clouds or Fish. The other, Turned, was in-your-face unavoidable, neither abstract nor realistic, something else completely, a smash to the solar plexus.

  Unfortunately, in opposition to the gut reaction I’d felt for Pollock, Rothko, and Krasner, I saw nothing in any of the paintings that bore a resemblance to my aunt’s work. Over its lifetime, the WPA/FAP had employed hundreds, if not thousands, of artists who created hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures, so the chance that any of these were made by my aunt was more than slim. As was the chance the carton contained any WPA paintings at all. Still.

  “Hey,” my friend Nguyen interrupted my thoughts. His first name was Tony, but no one ever called him that. “Can I see what you’ve got here? Seems like the least you can do after I finagled it for you.” He was an aspiring lifer at Christie’s, an associate specialist, two-going-on-three pay grades above me, and had always wanted to work for an auction house. He played the kowtowing lifer’s game with a wry self-awareness that amused us both. I was in it mostly for the inadequate benefits and piddling semi-monthly check.

  I stepped into the hallway so he could slide into the cubic
le. He was, after all, the one who’d alerted me to the box’s possibilities and then sent it my way.

  He pointed to the maybe-Rothko. “His New York City series? Has his sense of alienation.”

  “So does a lot of art from that period,” I argued for argument’s sake.

  “True.” His eyes scanned the rest. “Anything that might be your aunt’s?” We had lunch together at least once a week, and there were few secrets between us.

  I shook my head. “My mother claims there aren’t any more.”

  “How does she know?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “If your aunt could disappear, why couldn’t her paintings?”

  “The assumption’s that she was too crazy to paint any more. Remember? That whole mental institution thing.”

  He waved me off. “You sound like your mother.”

  “Ouch,” I cried. “Anything but that.”

  He turned toward the space where a door would be if I had one. “If any of these turn out to be real,” he said as he walked down the hallway, “you’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do, girl.”

  Nguyen was right. It’s much easier to research a painting that proves to be worthless than one that might be valuable. The actual decision wouldn’t be mine, that was for someone with a PhD and reams of experience authenticating art. I was only responsible for the preliminary forensics, but months of hard labor lay in front of me before I passed on the canvases. Everything from dating the age of each one to determining the chemical composition of the paint and the degree of rust on the nails holding the frames together. All of which would be redone after me, and then redone again. There are a lot of unscrupulous people around and too many galleries and auction houses had recently been caught with their pants down.

  I flipped over the maybe-Rothko to check the backside of the canvas. To my semi-trained eye, it looked to be anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old, which would be about right. As I was returning the painting to my desk, an odd ridge on the back caught my eye. I wiped away what was probably seventy-five years of dust with a cloth I kept around for just this purpose.

  It wasn’t a ridge. It was a vellum envelope. I grabbed my tweezers and carefully pulled it off. Inside the envelope was another painting, roughly a two-foot-square canvas. I checked the backs of all the other paintings. Under heavy layers of dust, I found two more vellum envelopes, each enclosing another two-foot-square canvas. When I turned over the paintings to which the envelopes were attached, facing me were the maybe-Rothko, the maybe-Krasner, and one of the maybe-Pollocks.

  I took the three square canvases into the hallway where the light was better. I knelt, ignoring the sharp blast of pain as my knees hit the thinly carpeted concrete. The three appeared to be the work of a single artist; all had a deep red undertone and contained images of abstracted flora and fauna, two had pieces of newsprint pasted to parts of the canvas. But the styles were quite different: one was more surrealistic, one more cubist, and the third an unusual combination of techniques. All were stunning.

  As I stared at them, I was rocked by a wave of vertigo. I pressed my hand to the wall to steady myself. Then my brain caught up with my physical reaction, and I understood where the dizziness and trepidation came from. I told myself I was mistaken, that it couldn’t be true. But the colors, the brushstrokes, the energy, the mix of styles . . . The paintings looked like my aunt’s work. Could these squares be the creation of the enigmatic heroine of my childhood? Not possible and yet possible still.

  Alizée, so charismatic, headstrong, and talented. Disappeared into pre–World War II New York City at almost the same time the rest of her family disappeared into Europe. Just as lost, just as gone, but with no bombs, no concentration camps, no lists of the dead, no explanation. The stoic silence of my Holocaust-surviving grandparents shrouded what little might have been known until the carton showed up in my office, lifted the veil, and let me inside.

  2

  ALIZÉE, 1939

  Alizée painted at a makeshift desk, an overturned shipping crate with one side sawed off to accommodate her legs. According to the label, it once held uniforms for butchers; she hadn’t known butchers wore uniforms. She worked in a warehouse that jutted into the Hudson River where eight different mural projects were being created side by side, and armies of artists clutching charcoal or brushes or marble pestles bustled through the yawning space.

  Two years ago, she’d returned to the States after seven years in France. Seven more than she would have chosen, but she’d learned early on that the vagaries of fate had far more power than she did. She was nineteen at the time and had been living for that moment, had done battle with her family, her friends, even her art teachers, to realize it.

  Nevertheless, at the first sight of Lady Liberty, she was swamped by a wrenching sadness and that odd sense of floating above her own head. From afar, she watched the shadows darken the space around her as she stood on the ship’s deck, searching for people bustling with energy and opportunity, the ones she remembered and the ones she knew weren’t there anymore.

  Obviously, the country was in the midst of a depression, and she’d thought she was prepared for this. But the mute shipyards bounded by weathered warehouses, their wide doors swung open to reveal their lack of wares, unsettled her. It was well into the morning of a working day, yet grimy men, newsboy hats cocked, sat on posts along empty piers, smoking cigarettes and watching the boat’s arrival with no interest whatsoever.

  This was where the memories lived, and that would be difficult, but it was, she somehow knew, the only place her real life could begin. And she was right. Now, although the empty warehouses and grimy men were still perched on the New York City docks, she’d beaten back most of the sadness and moved on.

  “Looks swell.” Lee leaned over her shoulder and squinted at the tiny four-by-six-inch canvas she was painting. “If you like wooden patriotism.”

  “My favorite,” Alizée said dryly. Although she got a kick out of making fun of the stiff, overly enthusiastic style imposed by the WPA, she wasn’t about to complain about receiving a paycheck to produce art. Even if other artists actually designed the works she was painting, it was a hell of a good gig.

  Lee squatted, looked more closely at the small panels. She’d taken over directing the mural from a boy who’d gone to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War, receiving the unacknowledged and unpaid promotion because she’d worked for the WPA longer than any of the other assistants. She was ostensibly Alizée’s boss, although neither of them thought of it that way; they’d been friends long before this particular project. Lee frowned at the six four-by-six-foot pastel studies Alizée was miniaturizing, the original WPA-approved drawings for the mural.

  Alizée didn’t like the frown. “What?” she demanded in mock dismay, then lit a cigarette. “Now you want to change it after I’ve worked my butt off for a week?”

  It would take time to redo her efforts, but that was all it was: An effort. A job. Her own paintings were her real work. And those were very different from these: less tangible, more multidimensional, more in the process of becoming something else. When she worked on the mural, she was outside it; it was separate from her. With her own canvases, there was no space in between.

  “Something queer about it.” Lee cocked her head to the side. She was far from beautiful, but there was a voluptuousness about her, both in body and temperament, that made men forget all about her plain face. Lee claimed she didn’t like going to parties with Alizée because, as she put it, “Alizée captures the room,” which was ridiculous. Lee garnered attention, particularly male attention, everywhere she went.

  Alizée walked up to the original drawings, thought for a moment, then rubbed her palm vigorously along the left legs of three shipbuilders shouldering a large slab of wood until the original lines of the sketch were indistinct. Then she started refashioning their calves. “Better?”

  Lee nodded and pointed to the men’s shirts. “A little more blue mixed in w
ith the gray, I think.”

  “Jumble Shop?” Alizée asked.

  “Sure.” Lee sat back down at her desk, which was next to Alizée’s.

  After work, they often went up to the West Village for a beer dosed with arguments about the future of art, the meaning of art, the political in art, the abstract in art, just about anything in or of art. It reminded Alizée of the Dôme café in Paris, but without all the depressed faces and gloomy war talk.

  A Frenchman might complain that the artists who flowed in and out of the Shop in paint-splattered waves drank too much, debated too boorishly, laughed too loudly, and didn’t look beyond the streets of New York for either their art or politics, but he would also be forced to admit that they knew how to have fun. To Alizée, it was as if each person at the Shop was years younger than his or her European counterpart.

  She loved the levity, the lightness, but more than that, she reveled in the shared certainty that being able to make art was the most amazing gift anyone could receive. Granted, it was tough for everyone these days, particularly tough for artists, and particularly, particularly tough for female artists. But just last week, her usually critical teacher, Hans Hofmann, proclaimed that one of her paintings was so good he would never have believed it was painted by a girl. He’d meant it as the highest compliment, and she’d taken it as such.

  She had the mural job, which was no little thing, and she was happy, proud, of that, although it was difficult to get the galleries to show anything painted by a girl, especially if the paintings were abstract. But if she was going to spend her days working representationally, she damn well wasn’t going to do the same on her own time just to please some pigheaded gallery owner. So she went to the Shop to drink and gripe with her like-minded comrades.

  Lee leaned toward Alizée’s desk, her eyes shining wickedly. “Forgot to tell you Bill and Jack said they can’t make it to the Shop until a bit later, but Mark said he’d be there around five, so let’s leave here on the early side.”

  Alizée shrugged.

  Lee grinned. “He’s such a wonderful, sweet bear of a man.”