The Masterpiece alternates chapters between the late 1920s and the mid 1970s. In the 1920s illustrator Clara Darden arrives in New York City from Arizona as an art student at the Grand Central School of the Art located in New York City's Grand Central Terminal. She is a promising student and is quickly promoted to class monitor. When a teacher fails to show up for the second semester, Clara is given the class to teach. While she teaches, she prepares her illustrations for a faculty show as well as for presentation to magazines such as Vogue. At the school she meets and befriends fellow teacher Levon Zakarian. Levon becomes both her mentor and her downfall.
Meanwhile, in 1974 Virginia Clay tries to obtain a job as legal secretary with no experience but is fired after the first day. She is fresh off a divorce from a corporate attorney and thought that she had picked up enough information from listening to his conversations over the two decades that they were married to be able to do the job. Her temp agency places her in the information booth at Grand Central Terminal tidying up, getting coffee for the others and refilling the stacks of timetables as needed. While trying to find the bathroom on her first day on the job Virginia stumbles upon the Grand Central School of the Art which had closed during World War II and never reopened. The space was never rented again and she was able to enter and look at some of the artwork that was left over from the students.
The Grand Central Terminal is the center of a big lawsuit to determine whether is should receive landmark status or be demolished and replaced with a high-rise building. Virginia becomes enamored with the Terminal as she begins to see what the building was like when it was built. She also returns to the art school and sees an unsigned illustration that she likes and takes it. Virginia then begins a quest to find out who the artist is.
I loved this novel! In fact, I read it in one sitting. The pace was fast and the characters, all of them, were captivating, especially Clara Darden. You could not help but feel emotion for a woman who left her family as a teenager, traveled across the entire country by herself, and entered art school as a serious student. Most female students were looking for husbands but Clara wanted to be a working artist and an illustrator specifically. Illustration was not considered art at the time. It was considered commercial. She runs into strong male characters and holds her own. Her boss at the school, Mr. Lorette, wanted to fire her as a teacher after the first semester and hid her illustrations at the faculty show because he disapproved of illustration as art. He did his best to quash her attempts to be a working artist. Levon Zakarian was both a competitor and a lover but Clara was able to understand him well enough to maneuver his movements.
Virginia Clay was another strong woman and one that I was familiar with in the 1970s. Divorce was just beginning to be common at the time and many new divorcees had no education or training for a job. These women had to take whatever job they could find and support their children on whatever amount of money they made. These women always made ends meet. I don't know how they did it because it does not always happen to these women in the twenty first century.
There is much to learn here about illustration as an art form. You see it when it was popular in magazines and in advertisements before photography was used. It was replaced by photography and had a renaissance in later decades but that history was not part of the book. In the book almost all of the working illustrators were men. Women just were not given opportunities for this type of work. Clara Darden was an exception. I enjoyed reading about this part of art history.
The Masterpiece was an entertaining historical mystery novel and I rate it 5 out of 5 stars!
