ABSTRACT
The author have often wondered why he became an art historian, such a glamorous profession for a working-class Jewish girl born in the Bronx to Communist parents in 1941. It's winter 1945, Hurleyville, New York. The Hermitage at Pontoise by Camille Pissarro is the first picture you see when you walk into the Thannhauser Collection at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The women are in jeopardy; the threat of death and violation chew at the edges of the paintings. In the book, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life, dealt with paintings, drawings and prints of ballet dancers, washerwomen, milliners and prostitutes. In fact, the stylistic and literal similarities between "Rape" and "The Doctor" are startling: the almost identical diagonals of the beds in each; the nearly interchangeable pose of the seated figures; the tables with particularized and emotionally laden objects, the triangular lampshades.
