A Happy One-Trick Multi-Book Pony: On Writing Novels About Art History

Over the past fifteen years, my literary footsteps have followed a path through some of the most storied museums in the country, and the world, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Their history, their artists, their riches, their scandals.

My first historical art thriller, The Art Forger (2012), was inspired by the life of the iconic Isabella Stewart Gardner, who I came across while doing research for a novel I wrote twenty years earlier. When I dove into The Art Forger, I also dove into the world of art, artists, museums and galleries, not to mention the underbelly of this exclusive and often secretive realm.

I began experimenting with alternating time frames and alternating voices, setting the story in both the present and the past, told by different narrators. And I fell in love.

All I wanted to do was write more novels that dug into myriad aspects of this endlessly fascinating world. Different artists. Different schools of art. Different historical moments. Different crimes. Different bad guys and good guys. Different battles and intrigues.

So I wrote The Muralist (2015), which was inspired by the artist Lee Krasner and her compatriots Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning—the now respected Abstract Expressionists who had to fight their way to recognition.

This novel also alternates between characters in the present and those who live in pre-WWII New York City, and includes many subplots and points of view. Spending time with these artists, I began to understand how difficult it is for any new school of art to become accepted, how the reins of traditional power try—and often succeed—to strangle innovation.

The Collector’s Apprentice (2019) expanded on this leitmotif, also with alternating timelines and multiple points of view, full of intertwining plots and subplots. Now it’s the post-Impressionists struggling to be acknowledged, to move beyond the Impressionists and set their own style. Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Seurat get drunk together at Gerturde Stein’s salons and argue with Van Gogh and Picasso about who they are and where they fit in the lineage of art.

Side-by-side with these real folk are fictionalized versions of Albert Barnes and Violette de Mazia, who brought the post-Impressionists to America and facilitated their acceptance here, although not without tremendous effort—and a few shady maneuvers.

Three historical art thrillers in less than ten years. As much as I enjoyed writing them—as well as enjoyed their success—I began to worry I was getting myself into a rut. Fear of being known as a one-trick pony spurred me to write two contemporary novels in succession—though I couldn’t help slipping artistic elements—a photographer, an amateur painter with multiple personalities—into those, too.

And as much as I took pleasure in writing both of these novels, I couldn’t resist the tug of my long-dead artists and their creations. Along with the enchanted world of the past.

I have a folder labeled “Novel Ideas,” which is full of scribbled notes on scraps of paper, plot summaries, photographs, newspaper articles, and printouts on topics I’ve considered writing about over the last thirty years—and yes, it’s quite thick. While flipping through this file to find inspiration for my next novel, I saw a piece I’d saved about Berthe Morisot.

Morisot is one of the early Impressionists, the only woman in the group, well-respected by her peers, and toward the end of her life, finally heralded as the great talent she was. It was she, along with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, who fought the establishment to become recognized as legitimate artists—and for Impressionism to be accepted as a legitimate school of art.

But as much as I knew about Impressionism, I knew little about her. Everyone has heard of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro. Why not Morisot?

This question propelled me to write another historical art thriller, The Lost Masterpiece. For the past three years, I’ve immersed myself in late-nineteenth-century Paris, a magical moment when so many extraordinary talents were living and working together, producing an abundance of outstanding work. And it’s so wonderful to be back.

In many ways, contemporary novels are easier to write. There are no worries about whether this expression was used then or if this building looks as it does now. No deep dives into the norms and values of another era. No wondering if a particular character, now a well-known persona, would have actually spoken the words I’ve put in her mouth. No months scouring books to understand a bygone moment and represent it correctly.

For my last novel, Metropolis, all the action took place within a two-mile radius of my home, which made it simple to walk to where my characters were, look around and know just what they saw, heard and smelled.

But being easier does not make it better. At least not to me. The things that make a historical novel more difficult are the parts I like best. I’ve always loved history, but when I’m writing a novel about a pervious era I’m not just reading about it, I’m inhabiting that foreign land and time, amongst great talents now long gone.

And I love art, so there’s nothing quite like actually living with great artists, watching them paint, struggle, make love and make mistakes. I’m inside their heads, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, participating in their creations and conversations, and experiencing their hardships as well as the constraints of their historical moment.

This is magical, and as far as I’m concerned, well worth the effort. So what if I’m a one-trick pony? It’s a trick I love.

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The Lost Masterpiece by B.A. Shapiro is available via Algonquin.