Book Review: Helen Harrison's 'A Willful Corpse'

Helen Harrison, art scholar and former director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, East Hampton, has just completed her fourth Jackson Pollock-related murder mystery. Each book in the series turns on the meaning of an adjective in the title with the same noun. And so there is “An Accidental Corpse,” “An Exquisite Corpse,” “An Artful Corpse” and now, “A Willful Corpse.”

This fourth book is arguably the most complicated of the series because, among other details, some having to do with buying, forging and authenticating art, there are four wills, each with the same date, though a different year. Each is the last will and testament of the snappish art expert Francis O’ Connor, Ph.D., whose body falls onto the subway tracks on the opening page. Was it suicide, an accident, murder? The reader doesn’t know for sure until the last paragraph of the novel, another will and testament — no date.

The novel is set in May 1986, 30 years after Pollock’s death, but much of the content describes the heady days of the New York art scene in the 1940s and 1950s — major players, museums, galleries, schools, collectors, archivists, agents, hangouts and hangers-on. It’s a period Harrison knows well. Once again, she crafts a plot that allows her to revisit venues where artists and wannabes lived, studied and cavorted, including, of course, Springs, where the newly married Pollock and Lee Krasner put down roots in the mid-1940s to paint and play.

The house remained their home and studio until August 11, 1956, when, at age 44, Pollock died in a car crash, drunk at the wheel, also killing Edith Metzger, a friend of his lover, Ruth Kligman, who was badly injured.

In this book, the center of the action, though, is Manhattan, particularly the board room of The Pollock Foundation and a committee dedicated to authenticating works destined for a new catalogue raisonné. An earlier one left blank, suggesting works still out there, missing or waiting for validation. O’Connor, rarely, if ever, wrong, is sure that recent candidates for the new catalogue are fakes — likely painted by the same person. Tracking down provenance isn’t easy. For a while, Pollock stopped giving titles to his paintings — a decision the Filipino-American Abstract Expressionist artist Alfonso Ossorio said reflected Pollock’s wanting people “to look at the work as pure painting, not pictures of something else.” So there are numbers, sometimes with letters, a bit confusing for folks keeping records.

O’Connor winds up hiring a young detective, T.J. Fitzgerald, the husband of a former assistant to Lee Krasner. T.J., a private investigator, is urged to look into the provenance of each of the disputed works — and to do so quietly. O’Connor says he has his reasons. T.J., a likable and thorough guy, has been in other Harrison murder mysteries and is passionate about his job and his wife, a fashion designer, now involved with The Pollock Foundation. And so the inquiry is on, but it’s regularly paused for sections on real-life principals and art history. Essentially, a Helen Harrison “art of murder mystery book” is a mini course on art history in New York — the days of WPA (the Roosevelt era Works Progress Administration), The Art Students League, Abstract Expressionism and favorite watering holes.

More than the earlier books, however, “A Willful Corpse” seems to invite follow-up reading about some of the real characters who intermingle here with the fictional ones, especially who was sleeping with whom. Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s lover for the last year of his life, and an aspiring abstract artist who was said to resemble Elizabeth Taylor, went to bed with just about every VIP artist, including Willem de Kooning, a year after Pollock died. If it’s inevitable to take sides, let it be said that Harrison has Krasner’s back … and future. A major part of the novel has to do with Ruth’s disputed claim that Pollock’s last work was painted for, and given to her, by Jackson.

“A Willful Corpse” may be Harrison’s juiciest book, involving even the innocent T.J. Still, the main attraction is what the author knows about the authentication process, a timely subject given how much art forgery is constantly in the news. As O’Connor says, authentication, though dependent on judgment and discernment, is “a three-legged stool: connoisseurship, provenance, and technical analysis.”

Given Pollock’s unique but widely imitated “action painting” technique (O’Connor prefers the term poured” to “drip” paintings), correctly identifying a Pollock can confound even the experts. In “A Willful Corpse,” the forger may well be the murderer, T.J. speculates, but not necessarily. Money is not always a main motive for murder. O’Connor talks vaguely of “revenge,” but he dies before clarifying. Though some readers may balk at Harrison’s late introduction of new suspects and information, as well as T.J.’s uncanny intuition, the book will surely enlighten as well as entertain.