“These Americans dive into the water before they learn to swim”

“These Americans dive into the water before they learn to swim” is an Italian sculptor’s sardonic judgment on the first Abstract Expressionist paintings shown at a major European exhibition. Recalled by Rabo in a story about Dorothy’s challenge to his ability to draw, the line turns an argument about artistic training into a domestic test: Rabo answers not with a defense of the movement but with portraits made on the spot.

Origin and Meaning

The remark concerned the first Abstract Expressionist paintings to appear in a major European exhibition, the Venice Biennale of 1950. Rabo recalls that the sculptor was considered important at the time but had since been almost forgotten. Rabo was not among the American artists exhibited: he specifies that the paintings were by Gorky, Pollock, and de Kooning.

The sculptor’s image of diving before learning to swim means, as Rabo explains it, that the Americans could not draw. It casts their artistic practice as an audacious plunge undertaken without conventional representational skill. The remark is therefore both a put-down and a compact description of the risk associated with the movement: its practitioners seemed to enter unfamiliar artistic waters before mastering the older discipline against which their work was judged.

Dorothy’s Challenge

Rabo recounts the remark to Circe while remembering the family’s move to the country. The house still had no heat, and he tried to keep it warm by lighting fires in three fireplaces. Dorothy, who had resigned herself to being married to an artist, was reading about art and had not seen Rabo draw. He says that he had deliberately stopped drawing and tried to forget what he knew about art, believing this to be the key to becoming a serious painter.

While sitting beside the kitchen fireplace, Dorothy read the sculptor’s judgment in an art magazine. She immediately applied its implication to Rabo and the other Abstract Expressionists, suggesting that they painted as they did because they could not make anything realistic. Her taunt connects the international dispute over the movement’s abilities to a private dispute between spouses: the question is no longer simply whether the Americans can draw, but whether Rabo himself can.

Rabo’s Answer

Rabo does not rebut Dorothy verbally. He snatches the green crayon she had been using to list repairs needed inside and outside the house, then draws life-size portraits of their two boys on the kitchen wall. The children are asleep in front of the fireplace in the living room; Rabo draws only their heads and does not go in to look at them first.

The drawing takes place on new Sheetrock that Rabo had nailed over cracked plaster. He had not yet filled and taped the joints or covered the nailheads, and says that he never would. The unfinished wall, the repair-list crayon, and the children asleep by the fire make the demonstration an impromptu act within the household rather than a prepared display. Dorothy is flabbergasted and asks why he does not draw like that all the time. Rabo answers that it is too easy.

The Remark in the Story

The sculptor’s phrase first supplies Dorothy with a critical language for questioning Abstract Expressionism; Rabo’s drawing then gives the dispute a concrete, personal answer. He demonstrates that he can draw recognizable people, but his response does not amount to a simple rejection of abstraction. Instead, the scene sets his deliberate refusal to draw against the apparent ease of drawing his sons, leaving the choice of artistic direction unresolved by the demonstration itself.

The episode also makes the remark part of a story about what an artist’s abilities can and cannot prove. Rabo’s portraits answer the accusation of incapacity, while his final reply shifts the issue from whether he can draw to why he has chosen not to. The line’s force thus lies in the gap between technical ability and artistic purpose—a gap staged first in a European art debate and then, unexpectedly, on a half-finished kitchen wall.