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During his own crisis of faith, when he had let his paints go dry for a decade, he had written a novel, a Henry Miller–like romp about a middle-aged artist who sleeps with his models. An editor at Knopf had encouraged him, but after three drafts and no contract, Arnold put it away. Soon after we be…

My doubts about conceptual art had been seeded in me during my senior year. Was newness the point of art? Experimentation? Cleverness? Shock? Was it the artist’s duty to rush ahead of humanity and report back from the future? If there was an advance guard, were we at war? Who was the enemy? But my …

Later, she would remember asking the man who answered if his wife would be home, and then listening to a convoluted story about divorce and custody that struck her as more tiresome than suspicious, yet she caught a whiff of something that alarmed her, like the scent of a nearby fire. A moment later…

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…