Published in 2020
300 pages
Helen A. Harrison is an art historian, museum director and journalist who specializes in modern American art. From 1978-2006, she wrote art reviews and feature articles for the Long Island section of The New York Times. She is currently the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York. The museum, a National Historic Landmark, is the former home and studio of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Lee Krasner (1908-1984), two of the foremost Abstract Expressionist painters.
What is this book about?
When the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam turns up dead in his Greenwich Village studio, the investigation takes Detective Juanita Diaz and her new NYPD counterpart Brian Fitzgerald from Chinatown’s underworld to Spanish Harlem’s gangland in search of a killer who left a grotesque calling card: an exquisite corpse.
Suspicion soon falls on the tight-knit circle of Surrealist refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. Did one of their bizarre parlor games turn deadly? Set in the sexually liberated New York art world of the 1940s, populated by European artists in exile and the young Americans itching to take over the avant-garde, Harrison’s tale is an amalgam of truth and invention.
