The reveal of Now It’s the Women’s Turn is the moment Rabo Karabekian finally shows Circe Berman the enormous painting he has kept hidden in his potato barn. Its staged unveiling changes what first appears to be an ornate, abstract expanse into a meticulously populated landscape, and what had been Rabo’s private recollection into a testimony about thousands of people at the close of the war in Europe. The scene makes the painting’s scale a matter not only of dimensions but of attention: each tiny figure belongs to a particular human history, even when the viewer cannot know it all.

Background and the withheld work

The painting is an eight-foot-high, sixty-four-foot-long mural in the barn. Before the reveal, Rabo has treated it as a forbidden, deeply personal possession; he does not want to be present when the world decides whether it is any good. Circe answers that refusal by calling him a coward. He changes course, fetches the keys, and asks her to accompany him. Their walk through the dark, lit by a moving flashlight beam, carries them off the flagstones onto the stubble path cut through the wilderness by Franklin Cooley’s mowing machine.

The secrecy has a history behind it. Rabo had been captured in Europe and lost his left eye, but he remembers little of the injury itself: a white German tank and soldiers crossing a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg, then awakening in a German military hospital in a church across the border. The wound healed quickly, and he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. His later mural does not present combat as a single heroic action he performed; it returns instead to the crowded, uncertain landscape he witnessed when captivity and the European war ended.

The reveal as a change of scale

Rabo and Circe begin at the painting’s extreme right end. From there, the full mural is compressed by foreshortening into an apparent triangle only five feet wide. Rabo switches on the floodlights but keeps Circe at that vantage point, asking her to describe what she sees before he lets her approach. She calls it a big fence, its surface encrusted with gorgeous jewelry. The first view is not false: it registers the dense, dazzling surface while withholding the scene that surface contains.

Rabo then takes Circe’s hand and leads her, eyes closed, to the midpoint. With thirty-two feet of canvas extending in either direction, she opens her eyes onto the painting’s actual setting: a green valley in spring, viewed from its rim. The image contains farmhouses and the ruins of a medieval watchtower, and Rabo has counted 5,219 people either on the rim or below it. They are so small that the largest is the size of a cigarette and the smallest a flyspeck; from a distance, the scene looks almost photographic. Rabo identifies the landscape as the place where he was when the sun rose on the day the Second World War ended in Europe.

The shift from apparent fence to inhabited valley is the scene’s decisive reversal. The floodlights do not simply make a hidden object visible: movement across the mural changes the viewer’s understanding of what its glittering surface is made of. The work’s scale initially frustrates comprehension, then makes that incomprehension part of the encounter. Circe must move through space before she can see the picture as a place rather than a pattern.

The historical scene inside the painting

Rabo’s image draws on the morning after his prison-camp guards disappeared. In his recollection, the prisoners had been marched out of the camp and into the countryside before the guards vanished overnight. At sunrise, they found themselves on the edge of a valley near the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Below them were thousands of people brought there and abandoned: prisoners of war, people removed from concentration camps and slave-labor factories, inmates of ordinary prisons, and people released from lunatic asylums. Civilians had also fled the advancing fronts. Rabo recalls German soldiers still carrying working weapons, but now docile and waiting to surrender.

His account connects this vast gathering to his own unusually limited experience of physical injury. When Circe challenges his claim to the same Survivor’s Syndrome as his father, she points out that he had told her his wound caused almost no pain and healed right away. Rabo concedes that he does not remember being hit and that morphine kept him unconscious until he awoke in the hospital. He nevertheless insists on his own ordeal. The mural’s subject makes that insistence newly legible: its central matter is not a contest in personal suffering, but the many kinds of survival and confinement assembled in the valley.

Title, figures, and the work of witnessing

After Circe has seen the full scene, she asks whether the painting has a title. Rabo names it Now It’s the Women’s Turn. The title gives the crowded landscape a gendered implication that the first view could not disclose. At one farmhouse, Rabo explains, healthy women are hidden in a cellar with beets, potatoes, and turnips, putting off rape as long as possible because they know from the history of wars in the area that it will come. The women’s danger is part of the valley’s aftermath, not an incidental detail outside the war story.

The painting also resists reducing its inhabitants to an anonymous mass. Rabo says that an average of ten clearly drawn Second World War survivors occupy every square foot. Magnifying glasses in the barn disclose that even the distant figures are concentration-camp victims, slave laborers, prisoners of war, soldiers, local farmers and their families, or people freed from asylums. A war story belongs to every figure, however small. Rabo had invented a story for each person and then painted that person; overwhelmed by visitors’ questions, he eventually stopped serving as a guide and invited them to make up their own war stories as they looked. With Circe, however, he is glad to tell as many as she wants to hear.

A tiny date anchors the immense composition in public history. Near the watchtower, a Maori figure studies a newspaper page that has blown across the valley; the page comes from an anti-Semitic weekly published in Riga during the German occupation and carries gardening and home-canning advice. The figure’s effort to read it is an effort to discover where he is, what is happening, and what may happen next. On a German ammunition box beneath him, the date May 8, 1945, is inscribed in tiny characters. The date is almost lost amid the painted detail, yet it fixes the scene to the day the war in Europe ended.

After the unveiling

The reveal turns the painting from an inaccessible secret into part of a public museum tour. Visitors first see the doomed girls on swings in the foyer, then early Abstract Expressionist works, and finally the enormous painting in the potato barn. Rabo has unspiked the sliding doors at the far end so the growing stream of visitors can pass through without bottlenecks; some walk through more than once. The structure of the visit repeats the reveal’s movement, bringing viewers into the barn and past a work that cannot be grasped from a single distant glance.

Some visitors object that the mural is a tourist attraction, a World’s Fair, or Disneyland. Rabo calls it a gruesome Disneyland, where nobody is cute. That objection and his answer frame the painting’s peculiar combination of spectacle and testimony: it draws the eye with its immense scale and jewel-like density, but what its magnified details disclose is a population of survivors, prisoners, refugees, and armed men at the edge of an uncertain future. For Rabo, showing it to Circe is the moment when the hidden work becomes communicable; for the museum’s visitors, its passage from secret to public display makes the valley a place they can enter, study, and imagine without pretending that one observer can tell every story.