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Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Amy Weiss-Meyer, an Atlantic senior editor and frequent contributor. Most recently, Amy profiled the legendary children’s author Judy Blume for the April issue of the magazine and, in November, co-authored an article on the teenage Holocaust victim Marion Ehrlich, whose name is depicted in a plaque on the cover of the December 2022 issue. She is looking forward to watching Season 4 of Succession, enjoyed two recent museum exhibitions of artists named Alex, and was taken aback by last year’s stunning memoir by the writer Hua Hsu.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Life is worse for older people now. The Trump AI deepfakes had an unintended side effect. Marriage isn’t hard work; it’s serious play. The Culture Survey: Amy Weiss-Meyer

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I didn’t love Season 3 of Succession as much as I loved 1 and 2, but I will absolutely be watching the premiere of the fourth and final season today. After that crazy Season 3 finale, I’d be lying if I said I’m not excited to see what happens! Plus, it’s been long enough since last winter that I’m once again ready for a weekly dose of Roy family drama. [Related: A perfect—and cyclical—Succession finale]

An author I will read anything by: Lauren Groff is the only author who could get me to read a book about medieval nuns; her writing is so beautiful, so human, so surprising and moving no matter the subject. She can also be wickedly funny. Her Atlantic essay from last year skewering luxury beach resorts—complete with a loving roast of her in-laws’ vacationing style—is simply delicious. [Related: Beware the luxury beach resort.]

The last thing that made me cry: Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, was such a poignant portrayal of college friendship and loss. I knew exactly what was going to happen (it’s written on the book jacket) and still felt totally unprepared for the emotional force of it. [Related: Six memoirs that go beyond memories]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: It’s hard to pick just one! I loved the Alex Katz exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum when I saw it last fall. The scale of the individual paintings—many of them portraits—and of the show itself (which spans an eight-decade career) was breathtaking but somehow not overwhelming. I left feeling much better acquainted with an artist whose work I only vaguely knew before.

Another incredibly immersive solo show that I loved last year, by an artist also named Alex, was an Alex Da Corte exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside Copenhagen. All the rooms were completely transformed into a kind of neon-lit fantasyland that served as the backdrop for his playful yet serious work. The museum’s promo materials described the vibe as “like stepping into a parallel reality” and “pop-art on acid.” I’m still not convinced that Da Corte’s video of himself dressed up as Mister Rogers wasn’t a dream.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: When I interviewed Judy Blume in Key West late last year, we discussed our mutual love for Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. They first came out in the ’40s and ’50s, when Blume was young, and were reissued again in 2000, when I was in grade school. In the airport on the way home, I downloaded the third book in the series, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, on my iPad (I chose that one in part because Blume had written an introduction to the newer edition). It was so charming and fun and honest about the experience of being a kid (one of the major plot points is Betsy’s ambivalence about turning 10), and featured a secondary story line I had completely forgotten, about the perils of xenophobia and the importance of showing kindness to immigrants—even (or especially) if you don’t understand their language or customs. [Related: Judy Blume goes all the way.]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Elizabeth Weil’s recent profile of the computational linguist Emily M. Bender, in New York magazine, helped me understand the possibilities and pitfalls of artificial intelligence (specifically large language models) in a way that no other piece of journalism has. If you, like me, are kind of avoiding the whole AI thing, if you know this is something you should care about but aren’t quite sure where to start, I can’t recommend this article enough.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I spend far too much time on Instagram, sometimes to keep up with friends and family and restaurants I like, and sometimes (more shamefully) going down extremely weird algorithm-generated rabbit holes or following links from freakishly well-targeted ads. I’m not especially crafty, but lately, for whatever reason, the algorithm has been serving me very crafty content—how to mend a hole in a garment in a cute way that looks like a ladybug, or pretty ceramics, or stop-motion wool animations, which are quite soothing to watch. [Related: The strange brands in your Instagram feed (from 2018)]

I’m also in two active word-game group chats with extended family members: one for Spelling Bee and one for Wordle. I don’t play either consistently at this point, but I like getting pings on my phone from people I wouldn’t otherwise be in touch with on a daily basis, and seeing how others are scoring. My mom and my uncle have become real Spelling Bee snobs—they both get to Queen Bee almost every day now, which is annoying. [Related: I figured out Wordle’s secret.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Nikki Giovanni’s “Just a New York Poem” is a gorgeous celebration of the city and of a certain kind of love. [Related: Nikki Giovanni on Martin Luther King Jr. (from 2018)]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Jerusalem Demsas, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, Amanda Mull, Megan Garber, Helen Lewis, Jane Yong Kim, Clint Smith, John Hendrickson, Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead Succession, the aforementioned HBO drama about the diabolical Roy clan, launches its fourth and final season (premieres tonight at 9 p.m. ET on HBO) Above Ground, the second poetry collection, and third book, by the author and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith (on sale Tuesday) Rye Lane, the buzzy British rom-com that charmed audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (begins streaming in the U.S. on Friday on Hulu) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Girl With a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis; Girl With a Red Hat, Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art.

Vermeer’s Daughter

By Lawrence Weschler

Fifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.

I happened upon Binstock’s book, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, not long after it was published, in 2008; at the time, I was picking up pretty much anything about Vermeer (and writing about Vermeer myself). I found the author’s argument by turns absorbing, perplexing, and confounding, but also curiously plausible and certainly worth entertaining. I was struck by how Binstock’s account helped explain the smattering of “misfit paintings”—those strangely uncharacteristic efforts, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s career, whose attributions were regularly being contested (or defended) by experts. So I was eager to see how the wider community of scholars and curators was going to respond.

The establishment did not respond at all. There was not a single academic review—not then and not ever.

Read the full article.

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ifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.  

I happened upon Binstock’s book, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, not long after it was published, in 2008; at the time, I was picking up pretty much anything about Vermeer (and writing about Vermeer myself). I found the author’s argument by turns absorbing, perplexing, and confounding, but also curiously plausible and certainly worth entertaining. I was struck by how Binstock’s account helped explain the smattering of “misfit paintings”—those strangely uncharacteristic efforts, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s career, whose attributions were regularly being contested (or defended) by experts. So I was eager to see how the wider community of scholars and curators was going to respond.

The establishment did not respond at all. There was not a single academic review—not then and not ever. I started broaching the subject with some of the experts I’d encountered during my own forays into Vermeer and was urged to give the book the widest possible berth. Its arguments were ridiculed (privately) as preposterous, and Binstock himself was dismissed (privately) with disdain. No one seemed willing to engage with Binstock’s actual contentions.

Which was strange, because I could imagine the arguments the Vermeer establishment might have made. If Vermeer didn’t paint all of the works attributed to him, then why is there no record of Vermeer ever having had any kind of assistant, despite the strict rule of the local painters’ guild (of which Vermeer was for a time the head) that assistants be registered? How could a girl as young as Maria—a teenager, if Binstock’s chronology is correct—have possibly created a painting as extraordinary as Girl With a Red Hat? Also: Why would Maria have suddenly stopped painting—and isn’t it too much of a coincidence that she stopped painting when her father died? And is Binstock’s chronology even correct? The dates he assigns to paintings are crucial to his narrative, but some differ significantly from the dates proposed by others, providing ample scope for debate. Critics could have raised these and other questions—but again, no one did.

I decided to seek Binstock out, and across a series of visits more than a decade ago began to see what may have been some of the reason for the lack of engagement. Then living in northern Manhattan, Binstock was no longer academically affiliated—he’d somehow managed to burn through not one but two highly competitive tenure-track positions—and seemed a bit lost. He had a Gibraltar-size chip on his shoulder, and he could be prickly and cantankerous. And yet he was so guileless—his modus operandi, he once joked, was to shoot himself in both feet and then shout “Nobody move!”—that his manner could be almost endearing.

At the time, I happened to be directing something called the New York Institute for the Humanities, at NYU, and I decided to give Binstock’s theory a whirl in a public symposium. In the months leading up to the day-long convocation, in 2013, I spent hours trying to coach the protagonist (“Be nice!” I’d insist. “Can’t you just be nice?”), and he succeeded in presenting a civil and indeed congenial demeanor. (You can access a video of Binstock’s presentation here.) Others who spoke that day included artists (Chuck Close, April Gornik, Vincent Desiderio) as well as generalist art historians and other scholars (Martha Hollander, James Elkins, Anthony Grafton). The idea was to subject Binstock’s arguments to a stress test, and I myself—eager to hear the strongest arguments against Binstock, as I still am—occasionally took the position of devil’s advocate. Those who spoke at the symposium had a wide range of responses but were unanimous in feeling that Binstock deserved a hearing. Not a single Vermeer specialist could be persuaded to participate.

The years passed. I moved on, and, to an extent, so did Binstock. He married a clarinetist named Meighan Stoops and the couple moved to Amsterdam, where they soon had two children. Binstock established a niche for himself as an independent scholar and editor working with wealthy private clients in a range of areas involving art connoisseurship and other fields in the humanities.

And then, just recently, things began to shake in the conventionally staid world of Vermeer. Restorers in Dresden made a drastic and controversial intervention upon one of their own Vermeer canvases, the beloved Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. They literally peeled away the exquisitely rendered, light-bathed blank background behind the woman to reveal a painting of Cupid hanging on the wall, which was clearly Vermeer’s initial impulse, though it may also have been Vermeer himself who’d chosen to paint over it (don’t get Binstock started on this!). Meanwhile, senior curators and technical experts at the National Gallery built an entire show around its curators’ surprise revelation that one of the gallery’s Vermeers, Girl With a Flute, wasn’t by Vermeer at all—as Binstock had already argued—and must instead have been painted by some assistant, though no such assistant had been previously known (by them, anyway) to have existed. Finally, the Frick, closed for renovation, announced that it would allow its own three Vermeers to travel for the first time ever; curators at the august Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, took advantage of this to mount the most ambitious Vermeer retrospective of all time—28 works in total. Notwithstanding the National Gallery’s misgivings, the Rijksmuseum decided to include Girl With a Flute as an actual Vermeer. (“The doubt,” one of the curators assured a local newspaper, “will disappear somewhere over the ocean.”) The exhibition opened to ecstatic acclaim in February.

I decided it might be a good time to visit Amsterdam and pay another call to Binstock.

A man looks at Girl With a Pearl Earring during a press event at the Rijksmuseum. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

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lthough Benjamin Binstock regularly gets cast (if he is even acknowledged) as some kind of wild-eyed outsider, he is not an outsider at all. He was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1961, the third child in a high-powered though dysfunctional intellectual family. Alighting as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, in 1979, he began by majoring in Dutch. (He had a Dutch girlfriend; his mother, after her divorce from his father, had married a Dutch diplomat.) A class taught by the charismatic Svetlana Alpers—“Types of Dutch and Flemish Painting”—made him switch to art history. Binstock displayed a savant’s capacity for noting and memorizing detailed visual subtleties across virtually the entirety of the 17th-century Dutch painterly canon, coupled with an extravagant inability to observe even the most rudimentary of social niceties. “And the two were of a piece,” Elizabeth Razzano, a friend from those days, told me. “It’s not that he’s insensitive. He’s oversensitive. And yet I can’t think back on him without a wide smile spreading across my face.”

In graduate school, Binstock began falling away from current trends in art history, which variously favored esoteric iconographic readings of individual paintings, or specialized technical analyses, or ever more narrowly focused investigations of topics pitched to ever more siloed academic readerships. He began instead to revel in what he saw as the core, originary task of art history: coming to terms with the entire arc of any given artist’s career, figuring out which works belonged and which works did not, and determining the order in which the confirmed works would have been created. He paid close attention to the paintings themselves—the subject matter, the models, the style, the maturity—and how they might be informed by what one knew about an artist’s life at any moment (and vice versa). For instance, if we know that the artist’s wife gave birth to more than a dozen children, and many of the artist’s paintings feature a pregnant woman, do any possibilities suggest themselves as to who the model might be? If two paintings seem to portray the same model, does the fact that the model is a girl in one and a young woman in another offer a hint as to when the paintings were created?

After research fellowships in Germany (focusing on Rembrandt) and graduate work at Columbia (where he studied under such eminent scholars as Richard Brilliant, Leo Steinberg, and David Freedberg), Binstock completed his doctorate and accepted a post at NYU, where, alas, he was expected to teach theory and criticism rather than his true passion, the painters and paintings themselves. So that didn’t work out. Meanwhile, his attention came to focus on Vermeer and on Vermeer’s immediate precursor in Delft (and Rembrandt’s greatest student), Carel Fabritius. Armed with a book contract from the British academic publisher Routledge, Binstock spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and then moved to the American Academy in Berlin.

[From the April 1954 issue: Sacheverell Sitwell on the artistic genius of Holland]

At the time, only 12 paintings had been attributed to Fabritius, who died tragically young, but Binstock became convinced that he’d painted many more. In 2006, after months of visits to European museums and their storage vaults, he delivered an address to a conference in Berlin, effectively informing the top figures in Netherlandish art that they had been wrong about paintings they had been studying their entire lives. He claimed to have identified nearly 50 unacknowledged works as being by Fabritius. The talk did not go over well—one by one, participants rose to question his findings. “A career-ending performance” is how the late Walter Liedtke, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, summarized the event for me years later. Binstock returned to New York and taught briefly at Queens College (the second tenure-track fiasco) and as an adjunct at the Cooper Union. Then, in 2008, he published his book, with its claims about Vermeer’s daughter Maria.

In Vermeer’s Family Secrets, Binstock did not merely go against the grain of conventional wisdom. He saw himself as an apostate, a heretic rising up from the very heart of the profession. At least, that’s the message of the last of the nine extraordinarily detailed and useful appendices at the end of the book (on such topics as the Vermeer family tree, the provenance of Vermeer paintings, and the disputes over dating). In the last appendix, with typical cheekiness and disregard for scholarly convention, Binstock contrived to distill the entirety of his argument into “Ninety-Five Theses,” an obvious allusion to the tract Martin Luther was said to have nailed to the door of All Saints Church, in Wittenberg, effectively launching the Reformation.

Benjamin Binstock at his home in Amsterdam. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

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eviving close contact with Binstock after almost a decade, I found him more sedate; domestic life obviously agreed with him. Of course, I sometimes still had to weather the churning roil of his stream of consciousness. I won’t try to replicate his frenetic, perseverating mode of expression here. But when Binstock grows focused, and whenever he writes, he sets out his arguments with precision.

During the five days of my visit to Amsterdam, on the eve of the Vermeer show, we visited the Rijksmuseum together and stood spellbound in front of The Milkmaid and The Little Street. We went down to the Mauritshuis, in The Hague, to visit Girl With a Pearl Earring and, opposite her, View of Delft, which we argued about—not the attribution but the image’s deeper meanings. I thought the vantage conspicuously alluded to the devastation caused by the explosion of the armory a few years before the painting’s creation, which had killed, among many others, Carel Fabritius; Binstock disagreed. Off to the side was Fabritius’s exquisite Goldfinch (1654), on which I could still make out, once Binstock drew my eye to them, tiny pockmarks left by spray from the explosion. We went to Delft, where Binstock showed me the house (now a Delftware souvenir shop) where Vermeer had grown up; and then the site of his mother-in-law’s house, no longer there, into which Vermeer had moved when he married.

Across these various perambulations, Binstock unfurled for me the story of how, to his astonishment, he came to realize that although most catalogs and monographs provided general date ranges for Vermeer’s individual works (say, “1660–62”) and overall thematic summations, many of the date ranges varied and nobody had yet attempted a painting-by-painting analysis that put chronology and the family’s biography in the foreground. Such a timeline, with its emphasis on the relations between paintings and the artist’s development over the years, could prove immensely clarifying: Nailing down the sequence would be revelatory in itself and at the same time provoke questions. Binstock began trying to work out this timeline, using a long wall in his apartment on which he spread accurately scaled reproductions of all the paintings, shuffling and reshuffling. (The painting dates provided below are based on Binstock’s array; most of them track mainstream opinion in a general way but depart from it with respect to a number of specific paintings, in particular the ones he assigns to Maria.)

As Binstock worked on his wall, several things became apparent to him.  For starters, plenty of information exists regarding Vermeer’s life, despite the endlessly repeated lament about a lack of just that. Ever since the Yale professor John Michael Montias published the results of his heroic labors—sifting through the Delft municipal archives and church registries and auction records for his highly regarded book Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (1989)—we have had a great deal of factual data. Scholars have mined the book for their studies of individual paintings. Binstock, by contrast, employed the information as one form of evidence for his chronological reconstruction of Vermeer’s life.

Moreover, using the evidence in the paintings themselves—for instance, the apparent reappearance of certain individuals—combined with what can be known or surmised about Vermeer’s life and household, Binstock attempted to identify the various models. The idea that Vermeer may have used family and household members in his paintings is not that controversial, but Binstock assigned specific individuals to specific works. In his telling, some individuals appear in multiple paintings, and their gradual aging can be used as a clue to establish—or revise—the proper chronological sequencing of Vermeer’s work.  

And finally, try as Binstock might to piece together a sequence, things got somewhat bollixed, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s life. If the chronology was right, then several paintings didn’t seem to fit. For various reasons, such as style and quality, they seemed inconsistent with other Vermeer paintings that had been made, according to Binstock’s reckoning, at about the same time. Could they have come from someone else’s hand?

Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632, the son of a tavern keeper and part-time art dealer. At age 21, he married Catharina Bolnes, a neighbor and the daughter of a well-to-do matron named Maria Thins. In its general outline, especially toward the start, the course of Vermeer’s life and work as laid out by Binstock dovetails with the course laid out by others. But much of the detail Binstock provides, connecting family members to Vermeer’s paintings, is novel. His scenarios amount to hypotheses, buttressed by evidence and argument, but still hypotheses. That said, in his book, he has a disconcerting way of slipping from the conditional (Vermeer could have been …) into the self-evident indicative (Since we now know that Vermeer was …), presenting possibilities as settled facts.

One of Binstock’s key early contentions is that, in most of his paintings across the first decade of his career, Vermeer used his wife, Catharina, as his model. As Binstock sees it, she appeared initially in biblical or mythological guises—as Martha in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1653) and as Diana in Diana and Her Companions (1655). In both cases, the woman in the painting is shown to be pregnant. Soon, however, the artist began shifting from such portentous themes to genre subjects celebrating everyday life. These years saw the birth of Johannes and Catharina’s daughter Maria, in 1654, the first of what would eventually be 11 surviving children. Catharina, Binstock believes, is shown pregnant again in 1657, likely with another daughter, Elisabeth, in the exquisite Girl Reading a Letter, with its evocative bowl of ripe fruit: the earliest of Vermeer’s signature portrayals of a woman standing alone, seemingly unaware that she is being gazed upon. Binstock notes that, throughout this period, Vermeer was an achingly slow and exacting painter, his canvases taking eight or nine months to complete so that, in a sense, the husband and wife were involved in a parallel and overlapping roundelay of conception and creation.

In 1664, Vermeer began to work outdoors, first to paint his enchanting The Little Street, which Binstock believes must show the mother-in-law’s house, where Vermeer and his family lived. (He is not entirely alone in this conjecture.) Binstock points out how the differently gridded windows on the various floors align perfectly with the side windows that feature so prominently in Vermeer’s various interiors—so much so that he can tell you which painting was painted in which room. If this is indeed Vermeer’s house, then the figures in The Little Street, Binstock argues, likely include Catharina, pregnant again, sewing at the front door; the housemaid Tanneke Everpoel in the narrow side alley; and 10-year-old Maria crouched at play on the sidewalk. After The Little Street, Vermeer set off for the town’s outskirts to create what many regard as his single greatest painting, View of Delft (1665), in which, incidentally, one can make out a woman (Binstock says it’s Catharina) carrying a baby, having just disembarked from a boat.

Once Vermeer began working again in his studio, in 1666, a new figure appears in the paintings: a model Binstock identifies as Maria, now 13. In Binstock’s reconstruction, Maria took over the main role as model beginning in Woman With a Pearl Necklace and, the next year, The Art of Painting. Continuing the reconstruction: In 1670, Vermeer immortalized Maria, who would have just reached 17, as the blue-turbaned subject of Girl With a Pearl Earring. (The suggested dates of the paintings are entwined with the age of the supposed model.) Binstock is not the first to have identified the girl as the painter’s daughter—and any father of a daughter can tell you that her expression of fondness tinged with exasperation is a familiar one. Marcel Proust’s friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer made the same connection between daughter and portrait. Writing at the time of the famous 1921 Paris Vermeer show, he trained his eye first on the young woman who posed for The Art of Painting, then at the girl wearing the pearl earring: “Here is the model with lowered eyes, probably the painter’s daughter, a child who is without any doubt the same whose divine head in the blue turban is included to torment our hearts in the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume.” An outing to that show, at Vaudoyer’s urging, was one of the largely bedridden Proust’s last excursions before his death the following year.

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p to this point, the main difference between Binstock’s narrative and that of other scholars involves the way he pinpoints specific models and the conclusions he draws about specific dates. But as Vermeer enters the 1670s, Binstock’s account begins to diverge more sharply from that of the scholarly mainstream.

The most heterodox element of Binstock’s thinking has to do with Maria. In these years—starting in the late 1660s—she had been serving not only as her father’s model, Binstock argues, but also as his assistant, grinding his paints and the like. If this is so, she would have had ample opportunity to study his methods at close quarters. In time, Binstock believes, Maria began to produce paintings of her own, starting with two works on wood panels (the only two such works in the entire Vermeer canon), both self-portraits, as was often the case with beginning painters. (What other model is so easily available?) The first of the paintings Binstock attributes to her is the National Gallery’s decidedly awkward Girl With a Flute (1672) and the second, produced that same year, is the accomplished and ravishing Girl With a Red Hat. (He gives a later date for both of these paintings than other accounts do, in part because of the age of the person he believes to be the model.)

Was Vermeer known to have had an assistant? Were the daughters of other artists known to have ever taken up the brush? To the first question: No documentation says so, but last year, when the National Gallery of Art decided to reclassify Girl With a Flute as not from Vermeer’s hand, it pointed to an apprentice or student as having been the painter. I saw the gallery’s exhibition and afterward spoke with Betsy Wieseman, the head of the museum’s department of Northern European painting. She said, “For the first time, we have concrete evidence, against all previous thinking, that suggests to us that Vermeer had an apprentice, that he had a workshop with at least one such student; and that, in turn, opens all sorts of avenues for further study.” Of course, the museum’s finding did not go against all previous thinking—Binstock had made the case years earlier. He had also advanced an explanation for why no documentation from the painters’ guild, which required members to register apprentices and students, had ever turned up: There was an exception to this rule. As he wrote in his book, “A painter’s own children were never registered.”

[From the May 2022 issue: Susan Tallman on the Melville of American painting]

To the second question: After the National Gallery made its announcement, an article in The Guardian included a comment from Eric Jan Sluijter, an art-history professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam. Sluijter spoke to various theories—including Binstock’s, though his name was not mentioned by the professor or the newspaper—about who the painter of Girl With a Flute might be, including that she was the painter’s daughter. “It’s not that eccentric,” Sluijter said of the idea. “It is a possibility. We know of other daughters working in their father’s studio in the seventeenth century. Often they married and then stopped painting, so they didn’t become independent artists.” As for Maria’s youthful age: Fresh and dynamic work by young artists is hardly unknown in the history of art, especially in the case of those reared in the family of other artists—the Italian Renaissance, for instance, provides many examples.

From left: Girl With a Flute (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art); Girl With a Red Hat (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art); Girl With a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis, The Hague).

Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat constitute the first of three principal tentpoles, as it were, in Binstock’s argument for assigning the late misfit paintings to Maria Vermeer. The two paintings are clearly—Binstock insists—by the same artist. The model is the same in both, as are the chairs, and both have tapestry-like backdrops; both are on wood panels; in both, the figures occupy the same relative scale. And the artist, whoever it was, seems to have had trouble painting hands—they are awkwardly pudgy in one and occluded in the other.

Furthermore, he argues, Girl With a Red Hat in particular affords a conspicuous mirror image of the model in Girl With a Pearl Earring. Flip the image, and Red Hat girl is remarkably similar to Pearl Earring girl.

Left: Girl With a Red Hat flipped (Johannes Vermeer / National Gallery of Art). Right: Girl With a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer / Mauritshuis, The Hague).

Binstock’s explanation is that Maria was painting a self-portrait—looking at herself in a mirror, trying to replicate and in a sense take ownership of the very pose she herself had had to maintain for all those hours for the earlier painting of her father’s. And if Red Hat seems slightly more static, there may be a reason for that. At the Institute for the Humanities conference, years ago, Gerri Davis, a prolific portraitist and self-portraitist, pointed out a big difference between the two genres: The faces in portraits tend to be more animated, the artist having been engaged across time in a lively interaction with the subject, whereas in self-portraits, the face muscles tend to slacken and the gaze becomes more silently intent—on itself—as is the case here.

Binstock surmises that Maria followed up Red Hat with Study of a Young Woman (1672). This painting, he believes, depicts a new sitter in the Vermeer household, whom he identifies, in part on the basis of age, as Maria’s sister and Vermeer’s second daughter, Elisabeth.

The high forehead and the bulging eyes would recur in several paintings by both Vermeers—as Binstock would put it—but in this one, the blocky, relatively rudimentary treatment of the enveloping shawl (and where exactly is the shoulder?) calls to mind similar treatments in both Flute and Red Hat. And once again there’s the inability to deal with hands. Years ago, standing beside me before this painting at the Met, the curator Walter Leidtke had zeroed in on the truncated stump as definitive proof of Vermeer’s genius, the inspired way the master had tucked the hand itself behind the frame, adding to the image’s three-dimensionality. I didn’t quite buy it.

The second tentpole of Binstock’s argument involves the three paintings at the Frick, and specifically a comparison between the two that are almost always displayed in close proximity, Officer and Laughing Girl (1658) and Girl Interrupted at Her Music (1673).

Left: Officer and Laughing Girl (Johannes Vermeer / The Frick). Right: Girl Interrupted at Her Music (Johannes Vermeer / The Frick).

Because, seriously, Binstock asks, how could these two paintings be by the same artist? The first shows a master at the peak of his powers—the even tidal flow of light across the room; the intricate and contrasting treatment of the clothing fabrics, chair backing, and wall hanging; the subtle play of expressions across both faces; the assured placement of figures in space. The second, which mainstream dating puts closer to the first, is more tentative in every respect, and steeped in a countervailing gloom. Binstock dates it later and attributes it to Maria, noting that across history, the initial virtuosity of many young artists becomes momentarily constrained as they begin to take on the full weight of the achievements of previous masters and start bending their work accordingly. In this instance, the master is her father, and the result is a sort of pastiche, a mash-up of some of his earlier paintings—The Glass of Wine (1658), now in Berlin, and The Girl With the Wine Glass (1659), now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, in Braunschweig—that his daughter would have had occasion to study at the nearby home of Vermeer’s principal patron. (Not that the painting isn’t arresting all the same.)

Similarly, the third Frick painting, Mistress and Maid (1673), which Binstock reassigns to Maria, is a pastiche that plays off A Lady Writing (1669), in Washington; The Love Letter (1671), in Amsterdam; and Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid (1673), in Dublin. And again there is the flattened gloom of a backdrop curtain, and the lobster-claw hands. Furthermore, recent X-rays reveal that the deep-brown background curtain covers an earlier flat backdrop, the same sort of tapestry found in Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat.

The third tentpole in Binstock’s argument involves a final Vermeer masterpiece, The Lacemaker (1674), which Binstock considers alongside another canvas, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (also 1674). Two decades ago, a technical investigation of the thread weave of Virginal’s canvas showed that it had been cut from the same bolt of canvas as The Lacemaker, leading to the painting’s wide acceptance as a Vermeer. The authors of an analysis in Burlington magazine after a 2004 Sotheby’s sale summed up the matter: “The evidence thus suggests that, if the artist who painted Young Woman Seated at a Virginal was not Vermeer, it can only have been someone who was not only intimately acquainted with his materials and practice, but also with his individual style. No such painter is known to us, and the facts therefore provide compelling arguments for accepting the painting as a work by Vermeer.”

Left: The Lacemaker (Johannes Vermeer / Louvre Museum). Right: Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Johannes Vermeer / Leiden Collection).

Of course, one of the facts—about a possible apprentice—has changed significantly since 2004; the case for an apprentice has now won support from the National Gallery. Binstock regards Virginal, too, as one of Maria’s paintings. There are suggestive features: the clunky shawl, the awkward hands (“those pig trotters,” as one critic characterized them). Further, Binstock asks: Is it really plausible that these two paintings (though clearly of the same model, again Elisabeth), so markedly different in quality, could have been rendered by the same painter, one after the other, as they would have had to have been given the proximate positions of their underlying canvases on the same bolt?

T

he Lacemaker was Vermeer’s last painting, as Binstock sees it; and, in his telling, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal was Maria’s last painting. If it is not her best, in Binstock’s view—a step below Girl With a Red Hat—it is still fresh and vivid.  

I asked Binstock why Maria, if the artist was Maria, would have suddenly stopped painting. Perhaps she didn’t, Binstock said—maybe other paintings will turn up. But Maria had married in 1674 and Vermeer had died in 1675, and “she and the family would have had ample reason to keep her authorship secret and to destroy any supporting documentation.” How so? “Well, that has to do with the circumstances of Vermeer’s own death,” Binstock said.

It’s not as though Vermeer was an old man, he explained, despite the way that some historians try to chalk up the decline apparent in his later production—the various misfit paintings—as evidence of his onrushing senescence. He was only 43, and—witness the The Lacemaker—still capable of work that was among his best. Senescence-school historians try to put The Lacemaker much earlier in his career—the Rijksmuseum catalog places it as early as 1666—but the subject seems to be his grown daughter Elisabeth, or at any rate the same model as in so many of the other later problem paintings. (This is the kind of dating issue—which also involves Girl With a Red Hat, Girl With a Flute, and Study of a Young Woman—that might lead to fruitful debate if Vermeer experts were to take Binstock’s challenge seriously.)

“Vermeer had been suffering blow after blow during those last years,” Binstock told me. The basic facts are not in dispute. In 1674, his main patron died and Maria married and left the household. More to the point, two years earlier, Louis XIV had invaded the Netherlands, cutting a terrible swath across the south of the country, and in defensive response the Dutch had breached their dikes—which, incidentally, is why you come upon so many paintings of the pharaoh’s armies being swallowed up by the Red Sea in subsequent Netherlandish painting. The tactic proved successful, but severely damaged the economy.

Vermeer’s side business as an art dealer dried up, and there he was with all those children and no income. He became frantic. At one point we know he settled a debt with the baker by giving him a large painting (which Binstock believes was the Met’s Young Woman With a Water Pitcher), but another debt was coming due, and as Catharina subsequently reported (Montias, the Yale professor, found her statement in an inquest document), “he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead,” leaving the surviving family in desperate circumstances.

To follow Binstock’s reconstruction: One can imagine Maria and her mother huddling together in the weeks after Vermeer’s death and gazing over at her canvases propped against the wall, thinking, Huh. The family settled their remaining debt with the baker and secured future supplies by passing along two more paintings (which in Binstock’s view happened to be two of Maria’s)—the Frick’s Mistress and Maid and the Met’s Young Woman With a Lute. Others likely found their way into circulation in similar fashion. “Maria and the family,” Binstock told me, “would have had every reason to keep the matter secret, and that circumstance may have played into Maria’s own decision to stop further painting, or calling attention to herself, if that is indeed what she did.”

“The trouble with Binstock,” David Freedberg, his old doctoral supervisor, told me, “is that he just knows so much, has such prodigious visual and cultural-historical information at his continuous command, that he can always produce convincing material to support his side of the case, however unusual.” After a pause, he went on, “Still, it’s a real shame that the field has not found some way to incorporate his thinking.” Shame, as in too bad for him? “Oh no,” Freedberg clarified, “too bad for the field.”

On that day 10 years ago when we’d tarried before the Young Woman with the disappearing hand at the Met, Walter Liedtke, in response to prodding on my part about Binstock, had given way to exasperation. A person can build up the most magnificent edifice and just be wrong, he explained. “You can come up with scenarios that are internally consistent, even cogent, but that doesn’t make them historically accurate. When you’re looking for something, as in a Rorschach, you will find it.” Just as if you aren’t, I suggested, you won’t—that kind of thinking cuts both ways. “No,” Leidtke countered. “Two things are required: documentation and consensus, and Binstock has neither.”

Documentation and consensus. The issue with the first is what gets to count as “documentation”—or as evidence more generally—given the current mindset of this academic field. I was reminded of the presentation by James Elkins, at the 2013 symposium, in which he ticked off the many avenues Binstock had pursued: conservation studies, provenance tracing, legal records, church records, art-market records. Elkins lamented that most of those sources of insight are “peripheral to the current concerns of the discipline.” (Elkins devoted a chapter to Binstock and to this and other questions in his 2017 collection, What Is Interesting Writing in Art History?) Whether or not one goes along with Binstock’s interpretation, any reader of Binstock’s book cannot help but be struck by the onslaught of factual information, over and beyond the internal evidence of the paintings themselves. There is, of course, no bill of sale bearing the name Maria Vermeer, but there is enough documentation to underpin considerable circumstantial speculation about Vermeer’s life and family.

As for consensus, the difficulty with that concept is its self-reinforcing circularity. How can one be expected to affect the consensus if one is not already of it, or is steadfastly ignored by the gatekeeping establishment? And the stakes are very high, not just in terms of money. As Eric Jan Sluijter told The Guardian: “There is so much invested in these paintings, literally, but also in the reputations of art historians or museums.”

On my last day in Amsterdam, I went to visit Pieter Roelofs, the dapper young head of painting and sculpture at the Rijksmuseum and one of two co-organizers of the Vermeer show (though he is not a Vermeer specialist himself). I found him somewhat exhausted (how would he not be?) but excited at the prospect of the coming weeks. “Every generation deserves an exhibition of Vermeer,” he said. “The last exhibition on Vermeer was Washington in 1995–96, meaning that anyone under 40 has never had the opportunity to see a monographic show of Vermeer.” When I brought up some of the recent controversies, such as the Dresden restoration and the attributional disagreement with the National Gallery over Girl With a Flute, he said he was looking forward to a symposium in Amsterdam at the end of March, when the greatest Vermeer scholars in the world will be able to thrash such matters out in the presence of the paintings themselves. I raised the question of Binstock, with whom he was familiar, and the conversation came around, as ever, to the lack of documentation; he said that Vermeer scholars would “dream” to discover a document proving that a member of Vermeer’s family was involved in his workshop. He didn’t seem to realize that Binstock had actually been living right there in Amsterdam for the past four years. Would Binstock be part of the symposium? “He will be. I mean, he will attend.” In what capacity? “Not as a speaker, but he will attend.”

The Rijksmuseum displaying a banner advertising the Vermeer exhibition, 2023. Photograph by Dana Lixenberg for The Atlantic.

Emerging from the building into a brisk Dutch winter afternoon to meet up with Binstock, I took note of the banners on two sides of the museum’s exterior, fluttering in the breeze and grandly proclaiming the coming extravaganza. The banners bore crisp, enlarged details from three of the featured paintings: the plush yellow jacket from Mistress and Maid, the eternally emptying jug from The Milkmaid, and the exquisite blue shoulder wrap from Girl With a Red Hat. When I mentioned the coming symposium to Binstock, he told me that he knew nothing about it. No one had yet reached out to him (and no one has reached out since). He himself spoke recently about his theories to a standing-room-only audience at the prestigious Koninklijke Industrieele Groote Club, in Amsterdam; Roelofs was invited but did not attend.

One needs to be careful about a theory like Binstock’s. For obvious reasons, it has a certain emotional appeal; one can almost see the movie. We know that a central element, long dismissed—that Vermeer had an assistant—has now won support from at least a corner of the establishment. Whatever else establishment scholars might determine—or definitively disprove—will remain conjecture until they take up the matter. Even then, we may never know the absolute truth one way or the other—and for myself, I can live in a perhaps necessary state of uncertainty. (“How can you say that?” Binstock bristled when I suggested as much. “What could possibly be more important?”)

Binstock may of course be completely wrong in his ideas. But if he is right, then two of the three paintings on the museum’s exterior banners are by Maria Vermeer. And if he is right, the Rijksmuseum exhibition, no matter what else it may be, constitutes the greatest Maria Vermeer show ever, with six of her presumed canvases gathered in one place for the first time since 1675.

Photographs by Ryan Pfluger

Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly killed me.

I had joined him one morning as he rushed through his daily routine. Schwarzenegger gets up by six. He makes coffee, putters around, feeds Whiskey (his miniature horse) and Lulu (his miniature donkey), shovels their overnight manure into a barrel, drinks his coffee, checks his email, and maybe plays a quick game of chess online. At 7:40, he puts a bike on the back of a Suburban and heads from his Brentwood, California, mansion to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. From there he sets out on the three-mile bike ride to Gold’s Gym, where he has been lifting on and off since the late ’60s. The bike ride is his favorite part of the morning. It is also, I learned while following behind him on that foggy day in October, a terrifying expedition.

Schwarzenegger can be selective in his observance of traffic signals. He zipped through intersections with cars screeching behind him. I braked hard and, being neither an action hero nor a stunt double, barely stayed upright. Drivers honked and yelled at the speeding cyclist in the lead until they realized who he was. “Heyyyy, Mister Arnold!” the double-taking driver of a landscaping van shouted out his window.

Schwarzenegger does not wear a helmet and seems to enjoy being recognized, startling commuters with drive-by cameos. He describes his ride as a kind of vigorous nostalgia trip, a time when the former Mr. Universe, Terminator, Barbarian, Governor of California, etc.—one of the strangest and most potent alloys of American celebrity ever forged—can reconnect with something in the neighborhood of a pedestrian existence. “It’s like a Norman Rockwell,” Schwarzenegger told me. “We talk to the bus driver. We do the garbage man, the construction worker. Everyone’s got their beautiful, beautiful jobs and professions.” These days, Schwarzenegger’s own beautiful profession is to essentially be an emeritus version of himself.

We made it intact to Gold’s Gym in Venice, the birthplace of bodybuilding in the ’60s and ’70s, and a cathedral to the sport ever since. Schwarzenegger will always be synonymous with the place, and with the spectacle of specimens at nearby Muscle Beach. The Venice Gold’s is a tourist attraction but also a serious gym—loud with the usual clanking and grunting, and redolent with the pickled scent of sweat.

“Say hi to Heide,” Schwarzenegger told me, pointing to 82-year-old Heide Sutter, who was working out in a skintight tracksuit. “She is a landmark,” he said. “She’s actually the girl who is sitting on my shoulder in the Pumping Iron book. She was topless in the shot.” Perhaps I recognized her? Not immediately, no. I didn’t even realize that Pumping Iron was a book. I knew it only as a movie, the 1977 documentary about the fanatical culture of bodybuilding. “Everybody wants to live forever,” went the opening refrain of the title song. Schwarzenegger, then 28, was the star of the film and a testament to the idea that humans could mold themselves into gods—bulging comic-book gods, but gods nonetheless.

“The most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the pump,” he says in the movie. “It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as in having sex with a woman and coming … So can you believe how much I am in heaven?”

Now the aging leviathan jumped into a series of light repetitions. He likes to emphasize a different body part each day of the week. He was focused today (a Thursday) on his back and chest muscles. He did light bench presses, pectoral work on an incline chest machine, and some lat pull-downs. I did a few reps myself on an adjacent machine, to blend in.

For the most part, the muscled minions at Gold’s left the king alone. “This is one of the few places where Arnold is treated normally,” said Daniel Ketchell, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, who hovered between us. A few tourists from Germany defied protocol and approached the bench, asking for selfies. “Don’t worry about it,” Schwarzenegger said, blowing them off. “We have a mutual friend,” tried another intruder, and Schwarzenegger scowled, muttering indecipherably, possibly in German.

As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwarzenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981, when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’ ” Wachter recalled. “He said, ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’ ”

Schwarzenegger is now 75. He observed his birthday on July 30 by trying not to notice it. The only memorable thing about the milestone was that he tested positive for COVID that morning. He felt lousy for a few days and recovered.

I wanted to talk with Schwarzenegger because I was curious about what aging felt like for someone with a name, body, and global platform so huge that they hardly seemed subject to time. What does it feel like to be perpetually compared with your long-ago peak? “They play Pumping Iron in a loop in some of the gyms,” Schwarzenegger told me, grinning at the idea of his souped-up old self still presiding over the pretenders. We all get soft and dilapidated, but it cuts much harder when you’ve been “celebrated for years for having the best-developed body,” as he put it. “You get chubby. You get overweight, you get older and older.” Just imagine, he added wistfully, “the change I saw.”

Left: Schwarzenegger at the Mr. Steiermark competition in Graz, Austria, 1963 or ’64. Right: Performing in “Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art” at the Whitney Museum in New York, 1976. (RGR Collection / Alamy; Elliott Erwitt / Magnum)

As I watched him complete his workout, Schwarzenegger was barely clearing 120 pounds on the bench press. After decades of abuse, the man’s shoulders are toast. His knees are shot, his back is sore, and he has undergone multiple heart procedures, including three separate valve-replacement surgeries, the last in 2020. Two of them devolved into 10-plus-hour ordeals that nearly killed him on the table. Still, let it be recorded that on a foggy October morning at Gold’s Gym in Venice, I was lifting heavier weights than Arnold Schwarzenegger was.

After our workout, Schwarzenegger stood a few feet away and looked me over, paying particular attention to my bare legs.

“You have very good calves,” he observed. “Very well defined.” And calves are important, he added: “They are one of the muscles that the old Greeks used to idolize.” Big deltoids are also coveted. In addition to abs and obliques. But he always takes note of a person’s calves. This was easily the highlight of my day, if not my five decades among Earth mortals.

A couple of years ago, Howard Stern asked Schwarzenegger on the air where he thought we all go after we die. “The truth is, we’re six feet under, and we’re going to rot there,” Schwarzenegger said. Some other authority gets to play the Terminator, and on a schedule of their choosing. Schwarzenegger wasn’t afraid of death, he added. “I’m just pissed off about it.”

Emotionally, Schwarzenegger has always been a padlocked gym. But he’s felt a change lately, a more reflective shift. People close to him have noted a degree of openness, a desire to confide, that wasn’t present back when he was young and invincible. Schwarzenegger told me that he recently attended the premiere of the new Avatar film (directed by his old friend James Cameron) and found himself crying in the dark. Someone will tell a story and he’ll choke up out of nowhere. He asks himself: “Why did this have an impact on me today when it would have had none in the 1970s?”

The day before our helter-skelter bike ride, I had caught Schwarzenegger leaning against a doorway of the Chinese Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard. He was waiting to give a brief speech in honor of Jamie Lee Curtis, who was about to get her hand- and footprints embedded in cement.

“I was trying to think of a big word,” Schwarzenegger told me. “You know, a forever thing, or something like that.” He kept landing on verewigt; German for “immortalized.” “It means ‘forever,’ ” he said. Ketchell encouraged the boss to not overthink it. “Just say ‘immortalized,’ ” Ketchell told him. This is Hollywood—speak in the native platitude.

Curtis walked into the theater and greeted Schwarzenegger. They performed ritual Hollywood shoulder rubs on each other. The two go way back: Schwarzenegger once did a Christmas special with her father, Tony Curtis. They have houses near each other in Sun Valley. In 1994, Schwarzenegger and Curtis co-starred in True Lies, the Cameron action comedy. That was the same year Schwarzenegger’s own massive hands and feet were set at the Chinese Theatre. He mentioned this more than once.

Schwarzenegger with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, 1994 (Colaimages / Alamy)

Schwarzenegger introduced me to Curtis, who told me how much she appreciated Arnold’s “showing up” for her. “Showing up” was a big part of the job these days. Then Curtis headed to the stage, while Schwarzenegger stayed behind in the doorway, squinting out into the glare. He looked fidgety, maybe bored. He asked me whether I had seen the spot where his hands and feet were imprinted.

Yes, I’d seen it. I’ll be back, Schwarzenegger had signed in the concrete—his signature line, first uttered in The Terminator, before his character circled back and murdered two dozen police officers. Schwarzenegger has been tossing out “I’ll be back”s ever since. The phrase carries “intimations of the eternal return,” an overheated critic once wrote in The Village Voice. But it lands a little differently now that the aging gargantuan is inching closer to the point of no return.

The reminders are everywhere, the worst one being that Schwarzenegger’s friends keep dying. Jim Lorimer, a sidekick and business partner of more than 50 years, and an early promoter of bodybuilding in America, died in November (Schwarzenegger spoke at his funeral). George Shultz, the Reagan-era secretary of state who became a close mentor, died in early 2021. The hardest loss was the Italian champion Franco Columbu, another Pumping Iron icon, known as the “Sardinian Strongman,” who died of an apparent heart attack in 2019. “I love you Franco,” Schwarzenegger wrote in an Instagram tribute. “You were my best friend.” Schwarzenegger listed a roster of other deaths, each depleting him more. “It’s wild, because these are not just friends,” he told me. “If people have a tremendous impact on your life, that means that a chunk of you is being ripped away.”

On the morning when we went to Gold’s, Schwarzenegger made a small detour afterward to show me the one-bedroom apartment he used to share with Columbu at 227 Strand Street, in Santa Monica. They lived there for about a year in the late ’60s, not long after each had landed in the States, while they were both making a living laying bricks. The dwelling, a blue-and-beige box with institutional windows, betrayed no trace of the behemoths who’d once resided there.

Schwarzenegger stared up at the soulless space. “He was the best,” he said of his friend.

For my ninth birthday, my parents got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated. One of the first issues I received featured photos from the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest, in New York. It was won, naturally, by the man SI called “enough of a legend for his first name to evoke a response wherever a barbell is picked up with purpose.”

Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia seven times, and Mr. Universe four. But he is dissatisfied by nature, and from a young age not easily contained. At 21, he set out for America. He felt alienated by the complacency of his boyhood friends: They aspired to a government job with a pension, maybe; church on Sunday; the usual. “I say to myself, Are we really just clowns? And just do the same fucking things as the guy before? … And I’m like, What the fuck? I better get out of here.” Standing on a stage in South Africa after winning Mr. Olympia yet again, Schwarzenegger felt the same old restlessness. “I looked around and said to myself, I’ve got to get out of this.”

Schwarzenegger at age 11 in art class in Thal, Austria, 1958 (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

He charged into showbiz and became similarly huge, making $35 million a film at his peak. “But then I outgrew that,” he said, mentioning Terminator 3, which brought in a burly $433 million at the box office in 2003. “And somehow I feel like I was standing on that stage again in South Africa.”

Next? Politics! He’d always been intrigued by the business; he married a Kennedy, and George H. W. Bush appointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (he claims to have presented 41 with a calf machine). And then, oh look, California was about to recall its pencil-necked governor, Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger jumped in and won his first attempt at elected office, also in 2003. He loved the job, telling me that of all the titles he has racked up, Governor is the one he cherishes the most.

Schwarzenegger was reelected by 17 points in 2006, though his popularity cratered by the time he left office, devoured by the usual bears of budgets, legislatures, and ornery voters. At that point he was not only term-limited by California law; he was also promotion-limited by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. He has often said he would definitely run for president if he could, except he was born in Austria.

Instead, upon leaving Sacramento, Schwarzenegger was greeted by scandal. He admitted to fathering a son in the 1990s with Mildred Patricia Baena, a family housekeeper for 20 years. Mildred and Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, had been in the house pregnant with his children at the same time.

After the story came out, Schwarzenegger retrenched for a while, tried to repair relations with his five kids, including his no-longer-secret teenage son, Joseph Baena. He and Shriver tried marriage counseling. It did not suit him, and it did not save the marriage. “I think I went two or three times,” Schwarzenegger told me. He dismissed the therapist as a “schmuck” who was “definitely on her side.” He admitted that he’d “fucked up” but did not believe the situation required any deeper exploration. “The fucking weenie gets hard and I fucking lose this brain and this happened,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes that so many successful people make, you know, so what am I going to say?”

What to do next? Susan Kennedy (no relation to Maria), Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff during the Sacramento years, told me that he missed his position as governor. “He had to learn a new role as a senior statesman”—one who was no longer in office. He took on a few film projects and did his various events and causes and summits. His friends saw that he was struggling. “To wake up without a purpose is a dangerous place to be,” Jamie Lee Curtis told me.

Meanwhile, another celebrity tycoon, Donald Trump, jumped into politics and landed in the White House on his first try, leaving Schwarzenegger with the dregs of The Celebrity Apprentice. Arnold’s Apprentice went about as well as Trump’s presidency.

“Hey, Donald, I have a great idea. Why don’t we switch jobs?” Schwarzenegger tweeted in response to the president’s taunting of the show’s ratings, before it was killed in 2017.

During the scary early months of the pandemic, Schwarzenegger began posting homemade PSA videos on social media as a lark. They showed him drowsing around his 14,000-square-foot mansion in Brentwood, smoking cigars and sitting in his hot tub. He led exercise tutorials and taught proper hand-washing techniques. “I wash my hands a minimum of 50 times a day,” he blustered into the camera from the kitchen sink. An ensemble of whimsical pets roamed in and out of the frame—Whiskey, Lulu, an assortment of tiny and massive (Twins style) Yorkies and malamutes.

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: Don’t be a schmuck. Put on a mask.]

Suddenly, Schwarzenegger was enjoying one of those random social-media moments—quarantined and yet everywhere at once. He was a goofball colossus called back into action. People loved the role: Arnold in winter. Conan the Septuagenarian. I watched the clips again and again. Wear a mask! Don’t party with your friends like a dumbass! Exercise! The videos were an escape from my remote-work quicksand. The protagonist looked unsettled but also purposeful. Or maybe I was projecting. I very well could have been projecting.

Then Schwarzenegger watched the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021. He was horrified, and felt moved to make a different kind of video. Flanked by American and Californian flags, he talked about coming as “an immigrant to this country.” He compared January 6 to Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” in 1938, which, he said, had been perpetrated by “the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.” According to Schwarzenegger’s team, the video was viewed 80 million times. It was the biggest thing he’d done since he’d left office. “You never plan these things,” he told me.

Governor Schwarzenegger celebrating his victory on Election Night in Los Angeles, 2006 (David McNew / Getty)

As he ended the message, Schwarzenegger brandished his famous Conan sword. Because of course he did.

“The more you temper a sword, the stronger it becomes,” he said, suggesting that the same was true of American democracy. “I believe we will come out of this stronger, because we now understand what can be lost.” I remember thinking this was a hopeful take.

Schwarzenegger was born two years after World War II ended and grew up, as he put it, “in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy.” His father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, was a police chief in Graz, Austria, and fought for the Nazis. Schwarzenegger has spoken more freely of late about his father’s activities and his own attempts to reconcile with them. History need not repeat—that has been his essential theme. Hatred and prejudice are not inevitable features of humanity. “You don’t have to be stuck in that,” he told me. Humans “have the capacity to change.”

When Schwarzenegger first made it big in Hollywood, he approached the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Holocaust research and human-rights group, seeking to learn about his father’s complicity. Gustav’s record came back relatively clean. He “was definitely a member of the Nazi Party, but he worked in areas like the post office,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and CEO of the center, told me. Researchers there found “no evidence whatsoever about war crimes.” But it may be more complicated than that. According to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar at American Jewish University, records suggest that Gustav was “in the thick of the battle during the most difficult times,” when some of the “most horrific military and nonmilitary killings” occurred.

Schwarzenegger rarely spoke publicly about his father’s past until Trump became president and emboldened a new generation of white nationalists. “Arnold always told us the goal after he left office was to stay out of politics and focus on policy,” Ketchell told me. “But when the president is calling neo-Nazis good people, it’s hard to just focus on gerrymandering.”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: The America I love needs to do better]

After the violent march on Charlottesville, Virginia, by torch-bearing white nationalists in 2017, Schwarzenegger went hard at the neo-Nazis in a video. “Let me be just as blunt as possible,” Schwarzenegger said. “Your heroes are losers. You’re supporting a lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis.” The video drew nearly 60 million views.

Schwarzenegger can be a bit of a brute and a pig and could easily have been canceled half a dozen times over the years. Just days before the special election for governor in 2003, several women came forward to say that Schwarzenegger had groped them, and a few other accusations of sexual misconduct followed. He denied some and didn’t directly address others, but he issued a blanket apology for his behavior. “I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful,” he said at the time. “But I now recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry.”

The stay-at-home Arnold character from the pandemic videos changed how people viewed him, he believes. “The whole fitness thing was mostly guys, the movie thing was mostly guys, the Republican thing was mostly guys,” Schwarzenegger explained. “Then you had the fucking affair, and now of course the guys are on your side, and the girls are saying, ‘Fuck this, fuck this, I’m out of here, this guy was a creep all along … I hope Maria leaves him,’ and all that.” But the videos—those turned things around. “Now, all of a sudden, I have all these broads coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, you won me over with this video.’ ”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: I have a message for my Russian friends]

After Russia invaded Ukraine, in early 2022, Schwarzenegger made a video urging Vladimir Putin to call off the war and the Russian people to resist their government. He said those who were demonstrating on the streets of Moscow were his “heroes.” And he once again invoked his father, likening Gustav’s experience fighting with the Nazis in Leningrad to that of the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. His father “was all pumped up by the lies of his government” when he arrived in Leningrad, Schwarzenegger said. He departed a broken man, in body and mind.

After COVID restrictions were relaxed and the world reopened, Schwarzenegger receded again from the daily scenery. He had provided guidance and diversion during those rudderless months, and I had begun to miss him. I wanted to see how he was doing.

He was hard to get to, though. Beginning in May 2022, Schwarzenegger had cloistered himself in Toronto for several months filming a spy-adventure show for Netflix called FUBAR. While there, he was informed that he had won a prize for his work combatting prejudice. The first annual Award for Fighting Hatred was given by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF). Schwarzenegger is a sucker for such prizes and displays the biggies in his home and office alongside his gallery of bodybuilding trophies, sculptures of himself, busts of Lincoln, nine-foot replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and whatnot. He couldn’t receive his AJCF award in person because he was tied up with FUBAR, but vowed to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland as soon as he could.

Filming wrapped in early September, and Schwarzenegger went home to Los Angeles for a few days before heading off to Munich to meet some people at Oktoberfest. From there, the plan was to make a quick day trip to southern Poland before returning to Germany to shoot an ad for BMW.

He would be at Auschwitz a few days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Schwarzenegger’s people encouraged me to be there.

I arrived at the town of Oświęcim, the site of the camp, with a group of donor and publicist types who were connected with AJCF. We were met at the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by staff members, Arnold appendages, and a few strays, including a woman in a Good Vibes sweatshirt. No one seemed to know quite how to act. Distinct layers of surreal piled up before us.

Let’s stipulate that celebrity visits to concentration camps can be tricky. Schwarzenegger appeared mindful of this as he rolled up in a black Mercedes. He stepped gingerly into a thicket of greeters, and tried to strike a solemn pose. Originally, the thought was to do a standard arrival shot for photographers. But the keepers of the site are sensitive to gestures that might convey triumphal stagecraft or frivolity. “There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam,” management was moved to tweet after visitors kept posting selfies on the railway tracks leading into the camp. Every visit here is something of a balance beam, but especially for the son of a Nazi.

“Not a photo op,” a staff member reminded everyone as Schwarzenegger began his tour. Photographers clacked away regardless. Schwarzenegger wore a blue blazer and green khaki pants, and appeared to have had his hair tinted a blacker shade of orange for the occasion. He flashed a thumbs-up—always the thumbs-up.

“No autographs please!” a random Voice of God from within the entourage called out. “Please be respectful.”

Schwarzenegger was accompanied by his girlfriend, Heather Milligan; his nephew, Patrick Knapp Schwarzenegger; and Knapp Schwarzenegger’s Texan wife, Bliss. They toured the grounds like students. “What happened here?” Schwarzenegger asked his guide, Paweł Sawicki, pointing up at a watchtower. Sawicki delivered a recital of unimaginables: 1.3 million people were exterminated at the 500-acre camp, about 1.1 million of them Jews. Victims were pulled from cattle cars and triaged by SS doctors deciding who among them was fit to work, who would be used as guinea pigs for Nazi scientists, and who would be murdered immediately.

Nearly all of those “spared” upon arrival would eventually die of starvation, exhaustion, hypothermia, or random beatings. They were gonged awake at 4:30 a.m., then fed rations of moldy bread, gray soup, and dirty water. “The word I will use a lot today is dehumanization,” Sawicki said.

Schwarzenegger viewed the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, had been hanged. He asked questions about the complicit enterprises—whether the firm that made the crematoria ovens had known what they would be used for (it had). His retinue was led into Block 4A, to a room that contained eyeglasses, dishes, and prosthetics that had belonged to the victims. Another exhibit featured piles of their hair.

The last thing Schwarzenegger did before he left was step toward a black desk where a guest book awaited his inscription. Visitor registers can present a special hazard for celebrities. Some have committed egregious faux pas. Donald Trump at Yad Vashem, for instance: “It’s a great honor to be here with all my friends,” the then-president wrote breezily at the Israeli Holocaust memorial and museum in 2017. “So amazing and will never forget!” This was judged to lack gravity.

But it was not nearly as bad as Justin Bieber’s blunder at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Anne was a great girl,” the pop star wrote in 2013. “Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.” Hopefully Schwarzenegger would attempt nothing like this.

Schwarzenegger has worked hard to place himself on the right side of the genocide. Auschwitz officials were glad to have him visit, because he brought with him media attention and the gift of global awareness. “I have been fighting this cause … for years and years and years,” he said in a brief statement to the Polish press at the end of his tour. “I’ve been working with the Jewish Center of Los Angeles … I celebrated Simon Wiesenthal’s 80th birthday in Beverly Hills. We all have to come collectively together and say ‘Never again.’ ”

Photographers positioned themselves around the register as Schwarzenegger approached. Clearly, the safe play would be to simply sign his name. Please be respectful. Nothing cute, if only as a humanitarian pausing of The Brand. But no.

“I’ll be back,” Schwarzenegger scrawled.

After leaving the complex, Schwarzenegger visited a small synagogue in Oświęcim, an otherwise charming village if not for, you know, the history. There, he met an 83-year-old Jewish woman, Lydia Maksimovicz, who as a toddler had spent 13 months at the camp as a “patient” of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She told him about how Mengele had performed experiments on her: drained her blood, and injected her with solutions in an effort to change the color of her irises. Mengele apparently had taken a liking to young Lydia and privileged her life above the other children’s. Now, eight decades later, Arnold Schwarzenegger was engulfing her in a bear hug.

“People like Lydia show us how important it is to never stop telling these stories about what happened 80 years ago,” Schwarzenegger said in brief remarks. “This is a story that has to stay alive.” He vowed to “terminate” hate and prejudice once and for all. “I love being here!” he gushed. “I love fighting prejudice and hatred!” A woman connected with the AJCF tried to hand him a special box of cigars, but was intercepted by an aide. He reiterated that he would be back.

The Auschwitz visit left Schwarzenegger feeling depressed. He stopped off in Vienna afterward to receive a lifetime-achievement award from some Austrian sports outfit, and the friends who saw him there kept wondering if he was okay. He seemed dazed.

“We were sitting on the plane, and we both just shook our heads and were like, ‘Wow, can you imagine?’ ” Knapp Schwarzenegger, his nephew, told me. “It was a somber mood for sure.”

Knapp Schwarzenegger is an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills, and was the only child of Schwarzenegger’s only sibling, his older brother, Meinhard, who died in a drunk-driving accident when Patrick was 3. Schwarzenegger brought Patrick to America as a teenager and effectively adopted him; they remain exceptionally close.

Knapp Schwarzenegger said their family history added a fraught dimension to the experience of visiting Auschwitz. They’d been particularly struck by the tour guide’s stories of how the Nazis committed atrocities at the camp and then went home to their families. “That was the hard part,” Knapp Schwarzenegger said, thinking of Gustav, “the loving grandfather,” who died when Knapp Schwarzenegger was 4. “How can ordinary people like that do such a thing? … It hits much closer to home when you’ve had personal experience with that.”

Gustav was haunted by the war, his body racked with shrapnel and his conscience with God only knows what. He “would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother,” Schwarzenegger said in the January 6 video. Somehow, Schwarzenegger emerged intact. “My grandmother did the best she could,” Knapp Schwarzenegger told me, “but that affects you as a child. For Arnold, it made him stronger and more determined. And for my dad, it crushed him.”

Rabbi Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speculated that Schwarzenegger’s visit to Auschwitz could have been driven by shame, by a desire “to repent for the embarrassment of having such a father.” But Schwarzenegger does not concede to this narrative—to feeling guilty or embarrassed. His recurring message is more upbeat, if a bit deflecting. “We don’t have to go and follow,” Schwarzenegger told me. “My father was an alcoholic. I am not an alcoholic. My father was beating the kids and his wife, and I’m not doing that. We can break away from that and we can change.”

A few weeks after the trip to Auschwitz, I visited Schwarzenegger at his mansion in Brentwood, located in an extravagant hillside cul-de-sac of celebrity homes. Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen used to have a place down the road (in better days), as did Seal and Heidi Klum (also in better days). Maria used to live here too, in the mansion with Arnold (ditto).

I waited for Schwarzenegger on the patio where he smokes his cigars. He walked in and Whiskey and Lulu greeted him with a maniacal duet of braying. Two dogs wandered over to nuzzle him. An attendant brought him a cigar and a decaf espresso, and some treats for his dog-and-pony show. He took incoming FaceTime calls and kept raising his voice and shoving his face up into his iPad like my mother does.

Milligan, Schwarzenegger’s girlfriend, called to see how his day had gone. They have a comfortable, domestic vibe. She had been Schwarzenegger’s physical therapist, helping him through rehab for a torn rotator cuff about a decade ago. Ketchell, who had accompanied Schwarzenegger to the interview, wanted to make it clear that the pair had not become romantically involved until after Milligan stopped working with Schwarzenegger professionally.

A bust of Schwarzenegger in his office in Santa Monica (Ryan Pfluger for The Atlantic)

Schwarzenegger and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much in Poland, save for a brief kibitz outside one of the gas chambers. I wanted to debrief him. What had it been like to witness the death camp firsthand?

“We know people were killed there and exterminated and blah blah blah.” (He has an unfortunate tic, when speaking about grave topics, of trailing off his sentences and adding filler words like blah blah blah and all that stuff.) It’s one thing, he said, to be told about “all the gassing, the torture, all this misery, and all that kind of stuff. You can read about it, see documentaries about it, see movies—the Schindler’s List, all this stuff.” But actually seeing the eyeglasses, the hair—that added a dimension of reality. “I’m a visual person; it’s one of my things,” Schwarzenegger said. “When I was walking around, I was going back to that era.”

Did he have any regrets about signing “I’ll be back”? Some social-media congregants had criticized the message as “tacky” and “flippant,” among other things. Schwarzenegger said that he had been made aware of the blowback and had meant no offense. “I wanted to write ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ ” he said. Another signature line, this one from Terminator 2. (Yes, he was serious.) “I meant, you know, ‘Hasta la vista to hate and prejudice.’ ” But then he worried that Hasta la vista might come off as glib and dismissive—as in “Buh-bye, I will never come back here again.” So he opted for the more forward-looking “I’ll be back.”

His hosts had felt the need to tweet a defense: “The inscription was meant to be a promise to return for another more indepth visit.” In other words, Schwarzenegger was speaking literally, and did in fact plan to return. “That is what he said, so we expect Mr. Schwarzenegger will come back,” Paweł Sawicki, his tour guide, who doubles as Auschwitz’s chief press officer, told me.

I wondered if this had always been the plan, or if he had I’ll-be-backed himself into a corner and now had to schlep all the way to Poland again to prove his sincerity.

Definitely, it was the plan. In fact, he said, he was thinking about an annual road-trip-to-Auschwitz kind of thing. “I already told Danny DeVito and some of my acting friends that we’re going to take a trip next year,” he said. “Maybe Sly Stallone. I’m going to find a bunch of guys and we’re going to fly over there, and I want to be a tour guide.”

He contemplated the possibilities: “Imagine bringing businesspeople.” Maybe they could auction off some seats on the plane and give the proceeds to the museum. “We have to figure out something that is a little bit snappy and interesting,” he mused. Afterward, they could go to Munich for Oktoberfest, or something fun like that.

In early 2021, a few days after Schwarzenegger made his January 6 video, then-President-elect Joe Biden FaceTimed to thank him. They spoke for a few minutes, and at one point, Schwarzenegger offered his services to the incoming administration. “I told Biden that anytime he needs anything, he should let me know, absolutely,” he said. He’s heard nothing from the White House since. It’s complicated, he figures. Schwarzenegger, who is still a Republican, is not without baggage. The housekeeper-love-child-divorce episode remains a blotch. Celebrity politicians in general have seen better days: The likes of Trump and Dr. Oz have not exactly enhanced the franchise. In any event, Schwarzenegger gave no impression that he’s waiting by the phone.

But in the conversations I had with him, he betrayed a strong whiff of existential stir-craziness. “I felt like I was meant for something special,” Schwarzenegger told me that first morning after our workout, while we talked about his childhood in Austria. “I was a special human being, meant for something much bigger.”

At his bodybuilding peak, in Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger spoke with a kind of youthful yearning—or megalomania—of enduring through time: “I was always dreaming about very powerful people. Dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.”

If only he could have run for president. That remains his recurring lament. Entering the Mr. Universe of political campaigns would have been the logical last rung of his life’s quest for something bigger. Schwarzenegger said he thinks he could win. This is hard to imagine—a moderate Republican prevailing through the MAGA maelstrom of the GOP primaries? And he’s not about to become a Democrat, either. (“I don’t want to join a party that is destroying every single fucking city,” he told me. “They’re screwing up left and right.”) Still, if they tweaked the Constitution, he told me, he would love to run, even at 75, which he insists is “just a number” and not that old. It’s not like he’s 80 or something!

In the meantime, what if Biden asked him to be secretary of state? I admit, it was me who raised the possibility. But Schwarzenegger warmed instantly to the idea, listing several reasons he would want the job and be perfect for it. George Shultz was one of his idols, and pretty much lived forever too (he died at 100). Schwarzenegger is a big believer in celebrity as a global force, in the power of being so widely, unstoppably known. Who would be bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who could possibly compare?

“I mean, look at the guy we have now,” Schwarzenegger told me. Antony Blinken “is, like, a clearly smart guy, but, I mean, on the world stage, he’s a lightweight. He doesn’t carry any weight.” (Blinken, who is leading U.S. efforts to contain Russia and China, could not be reached for comment.)

Schwarzenegger told me he really does want to live forever. Not everyone would, at his age. But not everyone has had his life, either. “If you have the kind of life that I’ve had—that I have—it is so spectacular. I could not ever articulate how spectacular it was.” He was trying to project gratitude, but something else came through—a plaintiveness in that gap between the tenses.

I had a final visit with Schwarzenegger in late December, this time at his Santa Monica office suite. He wore a bright-red atrocity of a Christmas sweater and took a seat next to me at a conference table. Schwarzenegger has always been a creature of obsessive routine, dating to the strict training regimens of his bodybuilding days. But he emphasized to me that he is following no grand plan in this final stage. “The truth is that I am improvising,” he told me. He is trying to pass on what he knows, and just signed a deal to write a self-help book that will codify his advice for life. The working title: Be Useful.

The next morning, I was walking to a Starbucks near Santa Monica Pier, when who should dart by on his bike? “Hey, Arnold,” I called out.

He pulled over and accused me of being a “lazy sonofabitch” for not riding with him. He wore sunglasses emblazoned with I’ll be back, and his white beard glowed in the dawn sun.

We chatted on the street, and Schwarzenegger suggested that I talk to a friend of his named Florian for this story. Florian, who sometimes stays in Austrian monasteries, apparently, has some elaborate theory of Arnold. “He would have an interesting perspective,” Schwarzenegger said. “He’s 6 foot 10, has big hair, and he FaceTimed me last night while he was shaving at 11 p.m. Who the fuck shaves at 11 p.m.?”

Florian does. His full name is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a German and Austrian filmmaker who won an Oscar for his 2006 thriller, The Lives of Others. Later, I emailed him. He declined to share any grand theories. “These thoughts are very personal,” he explained. “At some point soon, I’ll turn them into a book myself. Hopefully to coincide with the release of a movie I direct with Arnold in the lead.” He made sure to mention that Schwarzenegger was his hero.

In the meantime, the hero was idling on his bike, telling me that he has more things in the works—retrospective things (a Netflix documentary about his life) and new adventures (Return to Auschwitz ! ). He was also planning a trip to Ukraine; in late January, an invitation would arrive from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, praising Schwarzenegger’s “honest stance and clear vision of good and evil.”

I imagined Schwarzenegger dropping into Kyiv, unarmed except for the Conan sword. He would drive out the Russians, end the war, and detour to Moscow to take down Putin. At least that’s how the Hollywood action version would end.

“There will be more,” Schwarzenegger promised that morning. I kept expecting him to ride off, but he seemed to want to linger.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Arnold’s Last Act.”