“Look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken”

Syd Solomon’s million-paintings maxim is a deliberately practical answer to the problem of artistic judgment: look at enough paintings, and experience will train the eye. Recalled by Rabo Karabekian as the best answer he has heard to how one distinguishes good painting from bad, it makes discernment a habit acquired through sustained looking rather than a rule or definition.

The Maxim and Its Setting

Rabo introduces the saying when Circe Berman asks how to tell a good picture from a bad one. He remembers overhearing Solomon address a very eager young woman at a cocktail party about fifteen years earlier. The scene supplies the maxim with a speaker, an audience, and a small comic portrait: Solomon, a painter about Rabo’s age, is identified as the son of a Hungarian horse trainer and as a man with a magnificent handlebar mustache. The grand practical advice emerges from this specific social encounter, not from a formal treatise on aesthetics.

Solomon’s answer is that one need only look at a million paintings and then one can never be mistaken. Rabo calls it imperfect, but immediately affirms it emphatically. The exaggeration gives the advice its memorable shape: the number is not a measurable threshold so much as a way of insisting that judgment grows through exposure. The maxim promises confidence, while Rabo’s qualification preserves uncertainty; even the best answer he knows is not a complete theory.

Looking, Meaning, and Judgment

The maxim’s emphasis on looking bears directly on the novel’s recurring distinction between seeing a painting and explaining it. Rabo is repeatedly asked what his pictures are supposed to mean, yet he describes them as being about nothing but themselves. His account places the work’s significance in its own presence rather than in a message that can be paraphrased. Solomon’s advice does not solve that interpretive problem: it trains the viewer’s judgment, but does not supply a universal meaning for any particular picture.

That limit matters in Rabo’s conversation with Circe. She objects to titles intended to be uncommunicative and argues that being alive requires communication; her response makes the maxim’s faith in accumulated looking only one side of an unresolved disagreement. Experience may help a viewer recognize a good painting, but it does not make the question of what art communicates disappear. Rabo presents Solomon’s counsel as useful precisely without pretending it settles every question about art.

Art, Value, and the Act of Looking

The story also places the maxim beside the extraordinary economic value attached to painting. Rabo says that his collection was his property long before his marriage to Edith and was worth at least as much as the real estate, stocks, bonds, and football-team share she left him. He calls himself a poor painter but a remarkable collector. The contrast distinguishes his own estimate of his artistic ability from the financial worth of the pictures he owns.

That worth is made concrete when a man from the Getty Museum buys a Rothko directly from the wall for $1.5 million. Visitors from as far away as Switzerland and Japan have worshipped some of the works, while Circe dismisses the collection and urges Rabo to get rid of the rest. In this setting, Solomon’s maxim proposes a kind of judgment grounded in attention and repeated encounter, even as the surrounding scenes show attention entangled with prestige, money, and sharply opposed responses.

The novel’s broader comic critique of art prices sharpens the distinction between value and permanence. Rabo says that a postwar acrylic wall paint, Sateen Dura-Luxe, ruined him in the early 1960s; its advertisements claimed its colors would outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa, but the famous smile remains while the paint has vanished from the market. In another account of artistic value, a second collection of American Abstract Expressionist art begins after Marilee orders ten paintings unseen, selected by Rabo, at $1,000 each. Together these details prevent Solomon’s maxim from becoming a simple guarantee: looking may cultivate judgment, but neither admiration nor price ensures a work’s endurance.

Narrative Function

The maxim enters the narrative as remembered speech inside Rabo’s present conversation with Circe. Rabo interrupts his account of Dan Gregory’s skill at capturing a single moment in the eyes of stuffed animals to offer Solomon’s advice; the contrast sets Gregory’s command of a frozen instant against the broad experience Solomon’s maxim asks of a viewer. The saying thus serves less as a verdict on any one artist than as an answer that redirects attention toward the viewer’s accumulated encounters with art.

Rabo’s enthusiastic repetition of the advice does not erase his admission that it is imperfect. That combination makes the expression both memorable and limited: it gives artistic judgment a concrete practice, a million acts of looking, without reducing painting to a checklist or claiming that experience will settle every dispute. Its force lies in the gap between its absolute-sounding promise and the novel’s sustained evidence that seeing, valuing, and understanding a painting are not the same thing.