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. Art was no longer about stirring the masses, but about interiority and process.

He tried his hand at abstraction, but it was lonely in his studio without the models. He found that pushing paint around without the goal of creating imagery felt pointless. He couldn’t let go of the belief that art had something to teach—empathy, humility; otherwise it was only decoration. The more he faltered as an artist, the more he chased women.

He had a constant supply now in his private classes, wives whose husbands played golf or traveled for work or were dead. Someone always wanted to be the teacher’s pet. And the models. They now posed for his students (he had stopped painting), but that only made the assignations in his private studio next door sexier.

The models stayed the same age as he grew older. He put on weight for the first time. Two gray streaks, one under each nostril, appeared in his beard. He let his hair grow long, not hippie long, but artist length. He called women “love” and “sweetheart” so he would not mix up their names. He thought he was in love with a twenty-four-year-old redhead. He had an affair with a director friend’s twenty-year-old stepdaughter. By the time he looked up from his private orgy, abstraction was out. Pop art was in.

He was forty-five, disgusted with himself for having wasted a decade. He settled down to one wife and one mistress (age appropriate) and entered psychoanalysis.