Love, Lies and a Lost Pollock: Pollock’s Last Lover by Stephen P. Kiernan

BY HELEN PIPER

Jackson Pollock has often been described as the Hemingway of the art world: a self-destructive genius whose brilliance and machismo became inseparable from his legend. In Stephen P. Kiernan’s new novel Pollock’s Last Lover (William Morrow, May 2026), that mythology is placed under the microscope.

The novel revolves around Red, Black & Silver, a painting supposedly gifted by Pollock to his lover Ruth Kligman shortly before his death. The story unfolds across two timelines — 1956 and 2006 — as the fictional curator Gwen is tasked with authenticating the painting for an auction house. For Gwen, the assignment represents a career-defining opportunity. But her encounters with the aging Ruth Kligman quickly become charged with hostility, exposing not only personal tensions but also a generational divide in how women navigate the male-dominated art world.

As Kiernan explains: “In my novel about Jackson, I do not pit Lee Krasner against Ruth Kligman so much as Ruth against Gwen — which is to say one generation of women against another. These two characters have acutely divergent ideas about ambition, sex, success, work, and love. I hope their friction enables the reader to see both the progress our culture has made and the considerable room for improvement that remains.”

The novel draws heavily from historical fact. Ruth Kligman really was Pollock’s mistress, and she did attempt to sell Red, Black & Silver, insisting it was Pollock’s final work. She even featured the painting on the cover of the second edition of her memoir about their affair. Yet decades later, no consensus exists regarding the painting’s authenticity.

author Stephen P. Kiernan

Ruth Kligman maintained until her death that Pollock had given her the work as a love letter. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, however, never authenticated it as a genuine Pollock. Complicating matters further, the foundation was run by close associates of Lee Krasner — Pollock’s long-suffering wife and a major artist in her own right. Ruth herself, another aspiring artist orbiting Pollock’s world, at one point claimed the painting as her own work. Yet forensic analysis later uncovered microscopic hairs belonging to Pollock beneath the paint layers.

For Kiernan, this ambiguity became fertile literary territory. “Historical ambiguity is an appealing opportunity to investigate characters’ biases and justifications,” he says.

Pollock’s death itself has long carried the force of tragic myth. In 1956, the painter crashed his car while driving drunk with Ruth and another young woman inside. Only Ruth survived. The accident haunted her for the rest of her life; she became known cruelly and reductively as “the death-car girl.”

To Kiernan, Pollock’s trajectory resembles “almost a morality play” — “the Hemingway of the art world, a genius who becomes decadent and reaches an ugly end.”

Encouraged by fellow novelist Chris Bohjalian, Kiernan began researching Pollock’s life. But during the process, he discovered that the women surrounding Pollock were as compelling — perhaps even more compelling — than the artist himself.

Rather than writing a straightforward novel about Pollock’s downfall, Kiernan widened the lens to capture the culture surrounding him. The 1950s were marked by record birth rates, suburban conformity, and rigid gender roles. In sharp contrast stood the downtown art world: chaotic, experimental, sexually liberated, and fueled by alcohol and jazz.

Kiernan captures this divide vividly in one scene where Jackson and Ruth, after a night of drinking and listening to jazz with fellow artists, sit on a park bench at dawn watching businessmen hurry past in gray suits toward office jobs. A decade earlier, many of those men had been soldiers returning from war.

“What interested me,” Kiernan explains, “was the difference between these cultures — especially their ideas about the role of women. That struck me as more interesting than simply following Jackson’s descent.”

The dual timeline adds another layer to the novel by contrasting how women acquired and exercised power in 1956 versus 2006. The result is not merely a novel about a troubled genius, but a broader meditation on art, ambition, authenticity, and the stories history chooses to preserve.

Kiernan immersed himself deeply in research for the book. He interviewed art appraisers and conservators to understand the opaque world of high-end auction houses, and he visited Pollock and Krasner’s Long Island home repeatedly. During group tours, he often asked visitors what they thought of Ruth Kligman.

“The answers were mostly critical, even bitter,” he recalls. “But when I asked about Jackson’s conduct, the replies became more nuanced, more forgiving.”

He also read Kligman’s memoir Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, which he diplomatically describes as “saccharine.” In his view, Ruth’s romanticized account of Pollock and their destructive relationship positioned her less as a muse than as an enabler. Other readers have been less charitable, dismissing the memoir as fan fiction.

So how did Pollock meet the much younger Ruth Kligman? Indirectly, through his unconventional therapist Ralph Klein, who encouraged patients to reject repression and pursue freedom, creativity, and instinct. According to reports, Klein minimized Pollock’s alcoholism and even encouraged him to act on his sexual impulses. Pollock subsequently began propositioning women indiscriminately — acquaintances and strangers alike. That’s when he met Ruth.

Yet perhaps the greatest surprise Kiernan uncovered during his research was unexpectedly simple: Jackson Pollock could not draw.

“It is a plain fact from his history,” Kiernan says, “and that inability fostered a deep insecurity. But his paintings proved that he nonetheless possessed an immense capacity for imagining. He could create complex ideas — on giant canvases — guided only by instinct and vision.”

In many ways, Pollock’s Last Lover becomes an attempt to paint Pollock’s world rather than merely recount his biography. Like Pollock’s own canvases, the novel is layered, and open to interpretation — a story not only about art and deception, but about the dangerous allure of genius itself.

About the contributor: Helen Piper is a published poet currently working on her first novel. Previously she worked as a lawyer.