“About absolutely nothing but themselves”

The phrase “About absolutely nothing but themselves” names the claim that Rabo Karabekian’s Abstract Expressionist paintings are self-contained rather than representations or messages about something outside themselves. It defines his view of the collection while also exposing its central tension: the paintings can command immense prices and reverence, yet visitors keep asking what they mean, and Circe Berman objects that art should communicate and instruct.

Definition and Use

Rabo describes the pictures as being “about absolutely nothing but themselves.” For him, this is not a dismissal: it is an account of what the paintings are, and of what their titles deliberately do not provide. Asked repeatedly by visitors what the pictures are supposed to mean, he answers as their owner and self-appointed museum guard, making the phrase both an aesthetic position and a refrain in the collection’s public reception.

He emphasizes that the paintings were his property long before his marriage to Edith Taft. They also represent substantial wealth: Rabo says the collection is worth at least as much as the real estate, stocks, and bonds Edith left him. His insistence on their self-contained character therefore coexists with their status as valuable possessions, placing the paintings’ aesthetic identity beside their financial and social value.

Dispute Over Communication

Circe Berman challenges the premise directly. She says she needs information and judges that, in Rabo’s paintings, he seems to hate facts. Rabo answers by invoking representational art, asking whether she would be happier looking at George Washington crossing the Delaware. Her objection is not simply that she dislikes a particular picture: she questions an art whose titles and images, as Rabo presents them, do not communicate outward.

The disagreement sharpens when Circe sees visitors from Switzerland and Japan treat the paintings almost like gods, and witnesses Rabo sell a Rothko from the wall to a representative of the Getty Museum for $1.5 million. She calls the work bad rubbish and urges him to get rid of the rest. The contrast is pointed: institutional and international esteem, together with a spectacular sale, does not persuade her that the paintings offer meaningful information.

Collection, Market, and Display

The phrase also sits within the book’s criticism of the art market. The author’s note connects the work to the distressing seriousness produced when concentrated wealth enables very high prices for art and even children’s games. In Rabo’s account, the paintings’ autonomy does not keep them outside the market: they are privately owned, stored at significant expense, admired by wealthy visitors, and sold for large sums.

That material history includes both costly success and failure. Rabo recalls that the storage bills for his first great collection were making paupers of his family, while nobody wanted the paintings at any price. Later, Circe’s criticism accompanies public veneration and a million-and-a-half-dollar Rothko sale. The phrase thus marks a contrast between what the paintings supposedly are about and what people make them signify through ownership, price, prestige, or rejection.

Public Meaning and Reversal

In the house, the collection becomes part of a museum-like display. Edith Taft had the walls stripped, the rooms painted oyster-white, and track lighting installed so the modern art could be shown; a design magazine described the foyer as the core of a small museum’s permanent collection. Rabo answers visitors’ questions about meaning within this setting, where the paintings’ arrangement and reception make them public objects even as he calls them self-contained.

The later tour brings the tension into sharper view. Visitors pass from the foyer’s swinging-girl pictures through early Abstract Expressionist works and into the enormous work in Rabo’s potato barn, which has been opened to accommodate the flow. Asked what kind of painting it is, Rabo says it is not a painting but a tourist attraction, a World’s Fair, and Disneyland—specifically, a gruesome one. The description unsettles the earlier claim without simply replacing it: the work attracts and affects viewers, while resisting the conventional categories through which they might explain it. The phrase remains the collection’s governing provocation, not a final answer to what art can mean.