The Lost Masterpiece

The skilllful if uneven latest from Shapiro (Metropolis) tracks a purported Édouard Manet painting with supernatural powers from its seizure by the Nazis to its present-day recovery. In 1868 Paris, 28-year-old artist Berthe Morisot falls in love with fellow painter Manet, but he refuses to leave his wife for her, so she marries his brother Eugène instead. Berthe’s art collection remains in the family until the Nazis seize it from her granddaughter Colette in 1940. In the present, biotech executive Tamara Rubin, an orphan with no knowledge of her lineage, learns from an art reclamation agency that as Colette’s only living descendent, she has inherited a painting attributed to Manet: Party on the Seine, which was recently rediscovered in a Nazi hideaway and which depicts Berthe among other partygoers. After Tamara hangs the painting in her Boston apartment, she notices the painted Berthe winking at her. She attributes this to the cannabis gummies she’d recently eaten, until she realizes that the figure shifts when she’s sober, too. Moreover, every time the painting is displayed, all other artworks hanging around it are destroyed. The strained paranormal elements fall flat, but Shapiro shines in her depictions of Berthe’s life and the challenges faced by women artists in 19th-century Paris. Those with an interest in Impressionism ought to take a look. Agent: Miriam Altshuler, DiFiore and Co. (June)