This is a group of people that includes her own family, which makes for tense, sharp, dramatic scenes, with an uncomfortably close relevance to our present political moment. My favorite parts of Shapiro’s novel are the ones where Alizée takes on Breckenridge Long, a powerful Roosevelt official doing everything he can to prevent the entry of European refugees.

Could they be the work of this lost genius? And where did she disappear to? As The Muralist begins, Danielle discovers some mysterious paintings. Her forebear’s fate has always been a mystery within her own family, and she’s dropped out of the history of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The first, in 1940, is Alizée Benoit, a young French painter who has immigrated to America and found a cohort of fellow artists in Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner, all of whom are inclined to fall in and out of each other’s beds the second, in our own time, is Danielle Abrams.ĭanielle is Alizée’s great-niece. The Muralist is the story of two (fictional) women. That makes me exactly the wrong reader for Shapiro’s affable but superficial dramatization of this particular artistic movement, but readers who like to dip into history through fiction, not very deeply, will find a feel-good appeal in its tale. I loved those field trips, and I still love those rainy days. I happen to care a lot – a lot a lot a lot – about modern painting. Shapiro’s new novel The Muralist tells us, “when we began to export our artistic ideas to Europe instead of vice versa.” And most of us, on some school field trip or grown-up rainy day, have probably stood in the hushed shadows of a museum and gazed with confusion or awe or some mix of the two at one of its products: the slashing drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the deeply saturated colors of Mark Rothko, the forceful abstractions of Joan Mitchell. Abstract Expressionism was “the first true American school of art,” B.A.

The muralist a novel