Three months later, Ms. Livant left her family and went to live with Mr. Kahn, who was 10 years her junior, in Provincetown. To support them, she took a job cleaning houses. “People said, ‘Leda must have gone crazy,’ ” Ms. Livant says. “It wasn’t craziness, it was like a rebirth. Within three weeks of my moving to Cape Cod, I got pneumonia and almost died, I was in such mourning for my family and so vulnerable, and the sadness of having left my kids has never left me.”

She pauses, and her eyes tear up. “I always get a lump in my throat when I realize  but I have been forgiven.”

Her daughter steps in, reminding her mother of her own work, her weaving and painting. “When you connected with Mike, there was something else,” Ms. Jones says. “I think there was a connection between the artists’ lives.”

Ms. Livant is still unable to discuss her own work. “The hardships of my psychological life did not outweigh the fact that I was so in love with Michael that I would have and did put up with anything,” she says. “Cold in winter, not enough food sometimes, on my hands and knees to do housework, when I had paid people to do my housework.” In 1979 the couple came to Sedona, where Mr. Kahn had read that the rocks so inspired Max Ernst. There they met Bob and Joan Crozier, two business people who offered them three acres rent-free.

The work on the first structure, which was built into a side of a hill, began immediately  when a friend with a backhoe didn’t show up, Mr. Kahn picked up his shovel and started digging. The building would have a piano set into a wall, driftwood sculptures and stained glass. During the five years it took to complete, the couple lived in an 8-by-10-foot shack with a wood-burning stove but no electricity or plumbing, which Mr. Kahn also built. They called it the Winter Palace, and Ms. Livant says it was the best home she has ever lived in. When they were not building, they made art.

There was never any money. Occasionally, Mr. Kahn sold a painting. Ms. Livant’s father sent about $50 a month. Ms. Jones recalls sending $40 a month, directly to a supermarket in Sedona; it was the only way to insure it would be used for food, not paint, she says.

Ms. Livant and Mr. Kahn continued painting and building. Sometimes others, like Michael Glastonbury, a British-born contractor who today lives in Oregon, joined them. “Whatever wood floated down the creek during the winter floods was salvaged,” says Mr. Glastonbury, who has worked on the compound for the last 20 years. “If it was a particularly nice shape, we’d twist it around and fit it in.”