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An Artful Corpse by Helen A. Harrison

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Once upon a time, Thomas Hart Benton was a household name, known widely as America’s foremost Regionalist painter. A prolific chronicler of the nation during the good and bad times of the 1920s through World War II, the Kansas City native studied art in Paris and New York City and spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard, yet never strayed far from his Midwestern roots and influences.

But now, in Helen A. Harrison’s latest mystery, An Artful Corpse (Poisoned Pen Press), it is 1967 and the name of the 78-year-old painter means nothing to most of the students at New York’s venerable Art Students League, where Benton has landed for a few unfortunate weeks. While awaiting two of the greatest moments of his life — the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum and induction to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — he hangs around drinking too much whiskey, insulting the work of the aspiring artists, and attacking both the antiwar and incipient gay rights movements.

Eventually, Benton turns up dead in the studio on the top floor of the League’s 19th-century building on West 57th Street. Since the painter had managed, during a short period of time, to alienate various professors, models and students, the detectives assigned to the case cast a wide net for suspects. These include a member of Andy Warhol’s retinue and the brilliant scholar Lewis Mumford, along with other men affiliated in some way with the school.

EVOCATIVE OF TIME AND PLACE

Harrison, who once studied at the Art Students League, is a former New York Times art critic and commentator with NPR. This is the third book in her art-themed murder mystery series. She effortlessly conjures Manhattan during the 1960s, leading the reader from the West Village to Stuyvesant Town, the sprawling postwar apartment complex just north of the Lower East Side, where one of the heroes lives with his police detective parents. We stand at the lobby desk of the Chelsea Hotel and sit in rickety chairs in the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, listening to folk music. We pass by antiwar demonstrations in Union Square and crowd into a booth in the Carnegie Deli. We eat lobster and steak in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, a nightclub frequented by painters, sculptors, writers and musicians and, inevitably, plenty of celebrities.

While Benton’s widow harangues the police commander in charge, the detectives and — unbeknownst to them — a few art students who have banded together out of concern for a friend who is a suspect, search for the murderer. Along the way, a romance blossoms.

A BLENDING OF FACT AND FICTION

Harrison moves back and forth in time, largely between the 30s and the 60s. She demonstrates the importance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided jobs to out-of-work photographers, writers and painters. Benton, a muralist, benefited particularly from the program. Harrison also suggests that Benton’s most important relationship may have been with his student, Jackson Pollock. Harrison writes what she knows; she researched New Deal federal art patronage programs for her M.A. in art history from Case Western Reserve University, and is now the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, where Pollock lived and worked during the last decade of his life.

One aspect of the book is chilling: Harrison’s portrayal of homophobia in the midst of such transformative social change. Slurs show up in casual conversation and angry prejudice causes confrontations, and they haunt this intricate story. While the murder plot is pure fiction — Benton died in 1975 of natural causes while at work in his studio — unfortunately, his viewpoints are not. In 1941, Benton was dismissed from the Kansas City Art Institute after he made repeated homophobic comments about what he perceived as the excessive influence of homosexuals in the art world.

By the end of An Artful Corpse, one feels relief when the murderer is caught — but perhaps, most of all, that time has marched on.

An Artful Corpse by Helen A. Harrison
Publish Date: 2021
Genre: Biography, Fiction, Historical, Mystery, Thrillers
Author: Helen A. Harrison
Publisher: Art of Murder Mysteries
ISBN: 9781728214030
Claudia Keenan

Claudia Keenan is a historian of education and independent scholar who writes about American culture. She blogs at throughthehourglass.com.

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