Ninety years ago, planning for the 1939 World’s Fair got underway. Called “The World of Tomorrow,” it would open in Flushing Meadows, Queens, at the end of April, not quite finished but ready for a crowd. The month was ominous – Hitler’s 50th birthday. Germany had no pavilion at the Fair, but it did have a fierce group of Nazi supporters in the city, the German-American Bund, who rallied, 20,000 strong, at Madison Square Garden just two months earlier. They denounced so-called “degenerate” movements in politics but also modern art, which was at the aesthetic heart of the Fair. World War II began later that year in September.
Murder mystery writer Helen Harrison sets her latest novel, A Fair Corpse, at this moment in time. The story begins with an elderly artist on a scaffold, touching up his mural. He falls to his death. Was the artist’s fall an accident? The competition for Fair commissions and mural assignments had been heady, and two artist unions were vying for supremacy. The push to get any job was fierce. The WPA, the Works Progress Administration, established under President Roosevelt’s New Deal, provided pay to qualified workers, including artists, who were still recovering from the Depression. Soon, other accidents occur.
Enter Police Officer Brian F.X. Fitzgerald, Fitz, son of a former police captain, and Harrison’s protagonist from earlier murder mysteries in the series. His tour of duty is the fairgrounds, preferably at night, zipping around on his scooter, where he can look closely at the buildings and exhibits going up. He’s clearly in awe at what he sees and will soon meet several of the abstractionists doing the murals. Their work fascinates him, and he learns about the painters themselves, meeting them, and in the case of Elaine Fried, Willem De Kooning’s free spirit lover, later wife, meeting them in bed. It’s a new move for the young, good-looking, red-haired Irish rookie, whose steady, sweet Mary won’t marry him as long as he holds a dangerous job.
As always, Harrison, an art historian, journalist, scholar, and former director of the Pollock / Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, delivers a mix of characters, fictional and real, and a story that, while not as compelling as the history, provides the scaffolding for the narrative. Not to mention interesting tidbits. A nickel for the subway, then? (It sounds like you don’t like this book much.)
The general reader likely knows about some of the real-life walk-ons presented here, but A Fair Corpse is a good way to learn about others: Stuart Davis, Philip Guston, Arshile Corky, Lucienne Bloch, Corinne Michelle West, Salvator Dalí, Lyonel Feininger, Balcombe Greene, to name a few.
Harrison’s research is catching. The reader may well be prompted to look up related information, both about artists and the times.
It’s no surprise, though, if the fictional folks pale before the real ones, some of whom Harrison admits she took a bit of poetic license with– iconic painters, sculptors, architects, and visionary politicians depicted as a formidable lot – experimental, multi-talented, passionate. But up for murder? Fitz has some mulling over to do.
As we enter the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, A Fair Corpse reminds us that when the '39 World’s Fair opened, it was in part dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington . . . in New York City. And it reminds us of the political power of art.
