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There was a small canvas on the wall, an unimposing size, maybe a square foot. I was the subject matter. He had rendered me naked, in profile, sitting on the edge of our bed, looking over my shoulder at the observer. I had never before seen myself from his point of view.

The girl in the painting…

The late ’50s were America’s economic boom years. The Red Scare had all but saturated Hollywood. The stars and screenwriters and art directors who had once bought his art were blacklisted. The polemics of social realism were not only out of fashion; they were dangerous. Abstract painting was in. Ar…

He began what he believed were his most important paintings to date, the War Series, inspired by the photographs of the concentration camp survivors taken only minutes after they had been liberated. When he first showed his father the photographs in LIFE magazine just after the war, his father spen…

He got a job at Warner Bros., as an assistant art director, drawing storyboards for a Tarzan movie, King of the Jungle (a bildungsroman, by the way). Hollywood went on strike a week later, October 5, 1945. The picket line was walked by movie stars and screenwriters and artists—not commercial admen …

He should have waited another semester before summoning her. He realized that only after she had quit her job as a salesgirl, packed her two suitcases’ worth of belongings, slammed the door on her ragpicker father, and moved across the country into his tiny studio apartment at the foot of the Holly…