New Mexico had only been a state for 15 years when Willa Cather, the muted pistol of American letters, published Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927. “The country in which he found himself was so featureless,” she wrote on its first page, “or rather…it was crowded with features, all exactly alike.”

From Sarajevo, head south on the M20 motorway until the road signs change from Roman to Cyrillic. Drive on into the Republika Srpska, and continue into the Sutjeska National Park. But stay on the main road; the area is still studded with landmines.

“He was an unbelievably talented guy. He lost his confidence. He lost tremendous confidence because of, honestly, bad-bad-bad surgery. He had the worst. He had people that did numbers on him that were just unbelievable. Facially, you know, the plastic surgeons.”

The German painter, whose recent work playfully bathes and prances in a complex network of citations and revisions, has always taken a male-dominated history of art as her rightful inheritance. Now at last comes the “turn of Madame”: of the lady, of the whore, of the heiress.