-The Arts Fuse
Stephen Kiernan’s novel, Pollock’s Last Lover, is an audacious fictionalized retelling of the tragic final years of iconic American painter Jackson Pollock. Art history purists, beware: the author weaves real people and actual events into his speculative narrative. Willem and Elaine de Kooning, along with Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner, serve as secondary characters. The protagonist is the artist’s mistress, Ruth Klingman, who was in the convertible at the time of his fatal car crash.
Here’s the premise: fifty years after Pollock’s death, the story revolves around attempts to authenticate a painting Ruth claims she was given by the artist in his final days. A (fictionalized) auction house assigns a new associate, Gwen, thirty days to establish the artwork’s provenance. The ensuing investigation is complicated by Ruth’s evasions. Questions of whom—and what—to believe make for compelling reading.
Throughout the novel, Kiernan ingeniously alternates between time periods: flashbacks present Ruth as an aspiring model and part-time gallerist in the 1950s, while we watch Gwen ascend within the auction-house milieu in the early 2000s. The mirroring structure works wonderfully—both women struggle for agency amid personal and professional turmoil.
The author draws on Pollock’s well-documented life, death, and legacy. Detailed descriptions of the Pollock–Krasner home and studio, along with the infamous Cedar Tavern, serve as dramatic backdrops for Ruth’s seduction and her dysfunctional relationship with the artist. Through it all, this is Ruth’s story, not Pollock’s—and her life is as complicated and dissolute as his. There are no happy endings.
In earlier books, Kiernan has situated his historical fiction in the mid-20th century: the personal toll of building the atomic bomb (Universe of Two); a young French woman surviving in occupied Normandy (The Baker’s Secret); and the restoration of stained glass windows in post–World War II France (The Glass Château). His latest novel is a worthy addition to his literary travelogue of the last century.