Helen A. Harrison

"A first-rate whodunnit set in the 1960s New York art world, a time and place Helen Harrison has recreated with a page-turning mix of history, gossip, and fun!"—Bob Colacello, author of Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up One artist. One student. One deadly mystery. When Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton's corpse is discovered behind the easels of Manhattan's famed art school, whispers in the art community say he had it coming. As Benton's list of enemies lengthens to include the school's instructors, Vietnam War protesters, and members of Andy Warhol's entourage, one art student is ultimately painted as the murderer. The only problem: the suspect has vanished. Why would an art student murder Benton? And if he were innocent, why would he run? When TJ Fitzgerald, son of Detective Juanita Diaz and Captain Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, discovers his classmate is the prime suspect, he uses his own investigative skills to try and clear his name. But as TJ and his girlfriend work to unravel the clues to the art mystery, he begins to wonder if the police got it wrong and one secret may be the key to it all... Helen Harrison's An Artful Corpse is a clever mystery sure to please art enthusiasts and armchair detectives alike.

An Artful Corpse

Accidents happen. But so does murder... On the night of August 11, 1956, in a quiet East Hampton hamlet, Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree. The accident killed Pollock, the world-renowned abstract painter and notorious alcoholic, and his 25-year old passenger, Edith Metzger...or did it? Metzger's autopsy reveals that she was already dead before the crash. Was it murder? This shocking question draws vacationing Detective Juanita Diaz and her husband, Captain Brian Fitzgerald, of the NYPD into a homicide investigation that implicates famous members of East Hampton's art community—including Pollock himself. "Edifying and juicy."—Newsday

An Accidental Corpse

When the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam turns up dead in his Greenwich Village studio, the investigation takes Detective Sergeant John J. O'Connell and his team from Chinatown's underworld to Spanish Harlem's gangland in search of a killer who left a grotesque calling card. 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 worid 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. That turbulent era's creative ferment is the backdrop for a desperate crime and its lethal consequences.

Death in Surrealist New York

An Exquisite Corpse

Larry Rivers

A study of the life and work of the avant-garde artist supplemented by reproductions of many of his works

Helen A. Harrison

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