Hundreds of artists create paintings and sculpture and other works of art all across the country. The real history didn’t quite work out that way, but the Shapiro’s protagonist Alizée Benoit is a fictional point of connection between Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning and the refugee crisis in the late 1930s and early 40s.Īlizée Benoit, like many artists in the late 1930s, works for the Works Progress Administration. In Shapiro’s version of art history, the artists of early Abstract Expressionism made a quantum leap in their style at the beginning of World War II. Shapiro’s The Muralist is just that kind of book. The author finds a gap in the historical record and writes a story that connects previously unconnected events and people. There’s a certain kind of historical fiction premise that I particularly love.
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