The Missing ‘Muralist’

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When Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a way for people to escape poverty in Depression-era America, he commissioned artists of all types to create beautiful and unique works of art, including huge murals that still span cities across the country. A new novel by award-winning author B.A. Shapiro tells the riveting story of one WPA artist whose mysterious disappearance on the eve of World War II remains unsolved decades later.

Set in New York City and moving fluidly in time between the America of 1939 and the present day, The Muralist tells a dynamic and passionate tale of art, history, love and politics. The past comes alive through Alizée, a talented WPA painter whose benefactress is Eleanor Roosevelt and whose friends include famous real-life artists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. When Alizée disappears in1940, no one—including her family, desperate to flee war-torn France for the safety of the United States—knows what happened to her. More than seven decades later, her great-niece, an artist herself working at the famous Christie’s auction house, stumbles on an old WPA-commissioned painting that just might reveal the secrets of the past. B.A. Shapiro’s entertaining thriller brings to life the early days of Abstract Expressionism and today’s New York art world with brilliant authenticity and originality.

The author of seven novels, including the best-selling The Art Forger, Shapiro is also the author of four screenplays and one nonfiction book. Her newest release, The Muralist, is the #1 Indie Next Pick for November. She will speak at Boswell Book Co. at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1.