POLLOCK’S LAST LOVER by Stephen P. Kiernan

This review was published in the May 2026 issue of Historical Novels Review.

In early 2007, just a few months after a Jackson Pollock masterpiece sells for a record amount, an older woman named Ruth Kligman contacts a second-tier New York City auction house to handle the sale of what she claims is a Pollock painting. Young associate Gwen must verify with certainty Ruth’s claim that she received Pollock’s last painting as a personal gift while she was his muse, shortly before he died in 1956.

Gwen’s obsessive investigation impacts her personal life, while flashbacks to the last months of Pollock’s life portray Ruth’s quest for survival upon arrival in the Big Apple, and her calculated entry into Pollock’s world as his much younger, pretty seductress. Ruth’s unabashed social-climbing pursuit of Pollock leads to an illicit affair that is the backdrop for exploring the demons that haunted Pollock and stifled his creativity in the last years of his life.

Ruth’s motivations are explored with depth, as are Pollock’s addiction and behaviors that ultimately made him a tragic character. Story pacing is very good as the reader toggles between Gwen’s quest to validate Ruth’s claim and Ruth’s pursuit of Pollock, with parallels being drawn between young women decades apart both dealing with challenges and yearning for respect, and with the sometime cynicism of surviving difficult big city daily life. Narrative provides impressive detail on the abstract expressionist movement and its painting techniques, and on the inner workings of a New York City auction house. Several sexual scenes, not only within the affair that is central to the story but also in Gwen’s personal life, are presented more suggestively than graphically, and often wittily. A terrific suspenseful novel for readers open to a fictionalized filling-in of some of the blanks of Jackson Pollock’s tragic ending.