Rabo created "Now It's Women's Turn"

Rabo’s creation of “Now It’s the Women’s Turn” begins not with a burst of inspiration but with Edith’s death and the reopening of a locked barn. After buying painting supplies, he withdraws from the household and works unseen for six months. The result is an eight-by-sixty-four-foot panorama, revealed to Circe Berman as a spring valley holding 5,219 people. Its title directs attention to women’s experience of war, while its scale and painstaking realism make the scene a world to enter rather than a picture to survey at a glance.

From Edith’s Death to the Barn

Edith had made the house a lived-in place through the daily work of cooking alongside the cook, gardening with the gardener, shopping for food, caring for pets and birds, and befriending wild rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. She also filled the house with visitors, especially friends and relatives who sometimes stayed for weeks. Her death abruptly removes the domestic presence that had animated the home. Her heart stops, and she falls into a flower bed; the doctor says there was no pain. At her burial in Green River Cemetery, near the graves of Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen, Rabo imagines souls released from the unruly body as neon tubes gathered around the grave’s rectangular opening.

Rabo had once imagined that he would die first. He had asked Edith to hold his wake in the barn and, when mourners asked about the whiteness there, to call it her husband’s last painting, though he had not painted it. The reversal is stark: Edith dies first, and the barn becomes the place to which Rabo returns. After her burial, he unlocks its sliding doors, turns on the lights, and looks at the white space. He drives to a hardware store in East Hampton that also sells art supplies and buys everything a painter could want, apart from the soul he believes he must supply himself. A young clerk, unaware that Rabo is a painter who stopped making pictures decades earlier, asks whether he is one. Rabo answers with a single word: “Renaissance.”

Seclusion and Making

The servants leave, and Rabo describes himself as an untamed old raccoon again, living in and around the potato barn. He keeps the sliding doors closed so nobody can see what he is doing and works there for six months. The seclusion is not simply a practical arrangement: the barn that had held a vast whiteness and a deferred explanation becomes a protected working space, concealed from the household and its visitors. Rabo’s return to painting follows the loss of the person who had made the house feel inhabited; his first act is to turn away from the house and back toward the locked studio.

The painting’s physical dimensions determine how it can be seen. It is eight feet high and sixty-four feet long. From the extreme right end, with the floodlights switched on, the full work is foreshortened into an apparent triangle only five feet wide. That view cannot disclose what the image really is. The painting withholds its subject until Circe is led away from the edge and toward the middle, where thirty-two feet of canvas extend on either side. The act of revelation is therefore also a change of position: the work cannot be understood from the narrow vantage point at which it first appears.

The Valley and Its Inhabitants

At the center, the painting opens onto a beautiful green valley in spring. Rabo counts 5,219 people on the rim or below it; the largest figure is the size of a cigarette, the smallest a flyspeck. Farmhouses dot the landscape, and the ruins of a medieval watchtower stand on the rim. The realism is so pronounced that the scene might be mistaken for a photograph, even though its minute human scale makes the viewer confront the labor of looking closely.

The painting’s apparent peace is complicated by what its details disclose. At either end stands a farmhouse closed up like a small fort, with its gates shut and animals inside the courtyard. Rabo has cut schematically through the earth beneath the buildings to expose their cellars, as a natural-history display might reveal the underground burrows of animals. In one cellar, women shelter with beets, potatoes, and turnips. They are delaying rape as long as they can, while knowing from the history of earlier wars in the region that it will come. The orderly, almost museum-like presentation does not make this violence remote; it makes the structures of fear visible within the landscape.

Near the ruined watchtower, a Japanese soldier remains apart from the sheltered groups. Circe identifies him as Japanese, and Rabo confirms that he is a major, pointing to the gold star and two brown stripes on the cuff of his left sleeve. The soldier still carries his sword and, Rabo explains, would rather die than surrender it. The figure gives the panorama another form of refusal: amid the aftermath of war, surrender has not yet become universal, and the image holds together the defeated, the endangered, and those still resisting.

Title, Time, and Revelation

When Circe asks for the title, Rabo gives it: “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.” The name shifts the center of attention away from the familiar public account of military victory and toward women’s exposure to the violence that follows armies. The women are not abstract symbols of suffering; the painting locates them in a cellar among stored vegetables, behind closed gates and beneath a fortified farmhouse. Their predicament is presented as part of the valley’s history, not as an isolated incident.

Rabo identifies the pictured moment as the sunrise on the day the Second World War ended in Europe. The bright spring setting therefore holds two times at once: the announced end of the war and the continuing danger experienced by people in its aftermath. Its vast horizontal span, tiny figures, and precise details make the ending of hostilities neither a simple triumph nor a clean release. Circe’s movement from the painting’s compressed edge to its middle makes that complexity legible: what first seemed only a narrow shape becomes an inhabited world, with shelter, threatened bodies, ruins, and a soldier still gripping his sword.

The Barn’s Opening and the Work’s Significance

Once the painting is finished, Rabo buys five more locks and hasps for the barn’s sliding doors, shuts them, and arranges in his new will that the barn remain locked until after his burial. The work’s making is thus followed by a renewed concealment: he has returned to painting, but he does not immediately offer the result to the world. Only when Circe asks to see it does the closed space become a place of encounter. She sees the enormous canvas not as an inventory of forms but as the scene of a war’s end and its gendered aftermath.

The creation also changes the meaning of Rabo’s return to art. “Renaissance” names his first spoken acknowledgment of the new beginning, but the painting itself complicates any easy account of rebirth. Its beautiful valley contains the expectation of rape; its realistic detail resembles a museum display, yet the disclosed cellars refuse the detachment of a specimen case. The work gives form to the people and consequences that a victory-date alone might leave outside its frame. Rabo’s renewed painting is therefore both a private act made in grief and a large-scale act of communication, brought out of the barn only when another person is willing to look.