Harrison’s latest book, An Accidental Corpse, published in August by Dunemere Books, re-imagines Jackson Pollock’s fatal automobile accident. On August 11, 1956, speeding up Fireplace Road in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs, the car veered into the woods and overturned, killing Pollock and a passenger, Edith Metzger. That’s what the newspapers reported. But in Harrison’s fictionalized version, Metzger was already dead before the crash. Murdered? Possibly. But by whom? Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a refreshingly original reinvention of artistic history.”
Helen A. Harrison, a former New York Times art critic and NPR art commentator, is an authority on modern American art and the author of numerous catalog essays and articles in scholarly and popular publications. Her non-fiction books include Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (with Constance Ayers Denne) and monographs on Larry Rivers and Jackson Pollock. She lives in Sag Harbor.
This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and the Stony Brook Southampton Library. The talks will be followed by book signings. Made possible by support from the John H. Marburger III Fund of Stony Brook University