Abstract Expressionist school

The Abstract Expressionist school is a postwar artistic movement and, in Rabo Karabekian’s account, a community that gave him a second artificial extended family. Its paintings are described as concerned with nothing but themselves, yet their lives are bound up with personal loyalties, institutional recognition, collecting, storage costs, and spectacular prices. The novel holds those realities together rather than resolving them: art may claim autonomy from the world, while the social and material systems surrounding it make that claim continually visible and vulnerable.

Identity and Belonging

Karabekian sets the school beside the Officer Corps of the United States Army as one of the two respectable artificial extended families to which he belonged. He contrasts these chosen communities with the large biological families into which his parents had been born among Armenians in Turkey. Born in America far from other Armenians except his parents, he found in the school a collective identity that his inherited background and isolated youth had not supplied. The movement is therefore not only a category of painting in his memoir: it is a social home formed in the aftermath of war.

The school’s significance in Karabekian’s life also reflects the loneliness that preceded his membership in it. He recalls moving through New York City knowledgeable about great events and able to speak in a cultivated trans-Atlantic accent, yet often hungry, cold, and alone. He came to see the promise of education not simply as the accumulation of knowledge but as entry into an enduring, respected extended family. His account makes the artistic movement one answer to that need for affiliation, though not an uncomplicated one: the community offers belonging, while its members remain subject to professional rejection, disputes about value, and personal failure.

A Collective Movement

Karabekian recounts a theory of successful revolutions offered by Paul Slazinger: transformative movements require three kinds of figures. One is a genius who produces the new idea; another is a respected, intelligent citizen able to assure the community that the innovator is not mad; the third can explain complicated ideas in a way that persuades a broad public. Slazinger includes the Abstract Expressionist school among successful revolutions organized around such a cast, identifying Jackson Pollock as its genius. His comparison places the school alongside political and religious examples, presenting artistic change as more than the isolated achievement of a painter: it depends on a supporting cast able to validate and communicate the innovation.

Karabekian later explains that his New York circle’s paintings looked nothing alike except in one respect: they were about nothing but themselves. That formulation gives the school a shared principle without claiming a uniform style. It also creates a productive tension in the account. The painters’ work is presented as self-contained, but the movement’s success, as Slazinger describes it, depends on social recognition and public explanation. An art that refuses an external subject still enters a world of institutions and audiences that ask what it means.

Paintings, Collectors, and Institutions

That tension becomes concrete in the reception of Karabekian’s collection. His house contains what he calls the most important private collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings still in private hands, and visitors repeatedly ask what the pictures are supposed to mean. He takes on the role of an informal museum guard, answering as best he can. The collection’s public reputation is evident in the responses of visitors from Switzerland and Japan, who regard some paintings with near-reverence; it is also evident when a representative of the Getty Museum buys a Mark Rothko directly from the wall for $1.5 million. Yet Circe Berman dismisses that sale as no reason to preserve the rest of the collection. The contrast separates market validation from personal judgment without suggesting that either settles the question of the paintings’ worth.

The movement’s market history reaches beyond one house. Karabekian recalls that Marilee Kemp’s collection was the best in Europe and second in the world only to his own. After Leo Mamigonian bought the contents of a palazzo, Karabekian concludes that the collection must now belong to him. Collections thus register both artistic allegiance and the transfer of ownership: the paintings can gather prestige around an individual collector, then pass with the contents of a building into another person’s hands.

Karabekian’s own most famous painting, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, makes the distance between artistic renown and the object itself especially stark. Sixty-four feet long and eight feet high, it once occupied the entrance lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue. Its title identified the shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe paint used straight from the can; his other paintings bore titles such as Opus Nine and Blue and Burnt Orange. Karabekian says the titles were meant to be uncommunicative, while Berman insists that life requires communication. Their disagreement makes naming part of the larger dispute over whether the paintings should be understood as autonomous objects or as things that must communicate beyond themselves.

The school’s public standing is also shaped by the spaces that display its work. A 1981 article about the renovation of Karabekian’s home describes the entrance hall as containing enough modern art to form the core of a small museum collection, with the remainder of the house offering a larger display. That domestic arrangement was Edith Taft’s idea: she had Karabekian bring his collection out of storage and redesigned the house to accommodate it. A private home becomes a setting in which guests encounter works as a collection, while the owner is expected to supply answers about their meaning.

Value, Material Failure, and Reputation

The novel repeatedly sets the prices attached to the school against the precarious material existence of its paintings. In the author’s note, the book is explicitly distinguished from a responsible history of Abstract Expressionism: it is described as an account of the narrator’s idiosyncratic responses. The note also links the book’s inspiration to the grotesque prices paid for art, observing that concentrations of wealth can give playfulness an inappropriate and distressing seriousness. This framing cautions against treating either the fictional school or its market as an authoritative art-historical record; the movement is presented through a deliberately personal lens, attentive to the systems that elevate works into costly possessions.

The story gives that critique an especially sharp material edge through Sateen Dura-Luxe, the acrylic wall paint that destroyed Karabekian’s paintings. Advertisements had promised that its colors would outlast the smile of the Mona Lisa. The product did not endure as promised: local paint dealers no longer carried it, while Karabekian’s reputation became associated with the failure of his own work. When the Guggenheim declines his offer to reproduce the painting in more durable materials, he imagines his name entering dictionaries as a term for a fiasco caused by one’s own stupidity or carelessness. The episode contrasts the ambition of permanence, the actual instability of artistic materials, and the afterlife of a painter’s name as public shorthand for failure.

The contrast is not simply between expensive art and bad paint. Karabekian’s own collection is worth at least as much as the real estate, stocks, and bonds Edith left him, while paintings by the school remain costly to store and difficult to sell in another context. When Marilee begins assembling a second major American collection, she orders ten paintings unseen, with Karabekian selecting them at $1,000 each. He describes his original collection’s storage bills as impoverishing his family, even as no one else wanted the paintings at any price. The school’s objects move between near-worthlessness, costly maintenance, private devotion, and multimillion-dollar transactions; no single price consistently expresses their artistic, social, or practical value.

Autonomy and the Limits of the Claim

Karabekian insists that the violence and deaths associated with painters’ lives had nothing to do with their paintings. He describes the art’s distinctive achievement as a pure essence of human wonder, separate from ordinary concerns such as food, sex, houses, money, crime, war, and peace. This insistence echoes the school’s principle that the paintings are about themselves, but it also exposes the difficulty of keeping art separate from the conditions that surround it. The painters’ personal histories, the movement’s collective organization, the collection market, and the paintings’ vulnerability to a manufactured coating all remain part of the same account.

The novel’s framing leaves the school neither discredited by its market nor shielded from that market’s distortions. Its collective identity gives Karabekian a place in postwar life; its paintings become objects of devotion and major transactions; and its promise of self-contained art is tested by viewers who demand meaning and by materials that fail. By telling a personal, openly non-authoritative history rather than a definitive movement chronicle, the novel makes that unresolved tension central: Abstract Expressionism is both an artistic idea and a human institution, and neither its prices nor its declarations of autonomy can guarantee permanence.