Art is communication

Art is communication is the contested idea that a painting’s significance depends on what it communicates to a viewer, not merely on its market price, institutional standing, or formal intention. Through Circe Berman’s insistence on facts and narrative, and Allison White’s description of a painting she could imagine continuing, the novel tests Rabo Karabekian’s defense of art that communicates nothing beyond itself against the possibility that images can instruct, provoke, and invite interpretation.

Circe’s Challenge to Abstract Painting

Circe announces her standard bluntly: she is not on Earth to be pleased, but to be instructed, and she needs information as she needs vitamins and minerals. Judging from Rabo’s pictures, she tells him, he hates facts. Her demand is not simply that art entertain her or match her taste. She asks for a work that conveys information about human life, including realities its viewers might rather avoid.

When Rabo proposes familiar subjects such as George Washington crossing the Delaware, Circe describes a different imagined picture. It includes the bodies of the dead, a living girl pinned beneath a man, and a dead woman whose open mouth spills jewels. The scene brings human suffering and material wealth into one disturbing image: the girl is alive among the dead, while the jewels emerge from a body. Circe proposes that a picture like this could support a new religion. Her example defines communication as more than supplying an agreeable subject; an image can make violence, survival, and value available for sustained thought.

She contrasts that imagined painting with the Jackson Pollock hanging in Rabo’s home. In her view, the Pollock could serve only as an illustration for an advertisement for hangover remedies or seasickness pills, not as the basis for the kind of meaning her imagined scene might carry. The exchange is an argument about what abstraction can communicate, but the novel presents it through a clash of judgments rather than an impartial verdict: Circe’s confidence is forceful, while the painting’s meaning remains contested.

Titles, Facts, and Intention

Circe also questions Rabo’s titles. She argues that painters should hire writers to name their work, while Rabo explains that his titles are meant to be uncommunicative. His most famous painting, a work sixty-four feet long and eight feet high once displayed in the entrance lobby of GEFFCo’s headquarters on Park Avenue, bore the title Windsor Blue Number Seventeen. The name referred to a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe paint, straight from the can. Its factual precision identifies a color and material while withholding the kind of subject or story that might guide a viewer toward an interpretation.

Against this deliberate withholding, Circe asks what the point of being alive is if one is not going to communicate. The line turns the disagreement about naming into a broader disagreement about art’s relation to other people. For Rabo, a title can refuse to explain the work; for Circe, refusing communication risks abandoning a basic human purpose. Her criticism is aimed not only at the paintings but at the distance she sees between their formal presentation and the facts of experience.

That distance is also exposed by the difference between reputation and response. During the five weeks Circe has been living in Rabo’s home, visitors from Switzerland and Japan have treated his paintings with reverence. Rabo has even sold a Mark Rothko directly from the wall to a representative of the Getty Museum for $1.5 million. Circe’s reply is to call it bad rubbish and say that it was rotting his brain because it was about absolutely nothing. The sale establishes a work’s institutional and financial standing; it does not settle for her whether the work communicates anything worth receiving.

A Viewer’s Story and a Painting’s Reach

Allison White supplies a counterexample drawn from Rabo’s earlier representational work. When Rabo asks which of his paintings she had liked, Allison names one depicting two Black boys and two white boys. She explains that she used to look at it and try to guess what would happen next. Her response gives the picture a temporal, narrative dimension: it does not merely present figures for recognition but prompts her to imagine events beyond what is shown.

That painting had been hanging in the bathroom of one of Rabo’s guest rooms, a place he had no reason to enter, until a real-estate and insurance millionaire in Lubbock, Texas, sought work by Dan Gregory and bought it. The collector said he had the most complete collection of Dan Gregory’s paintings in the world and had built a large private museum for it. For Allison, however, the significance of the picture lies neither in the collector’s prestige nor in its place among Gregory’s works. She calls it the only picture that was really about something. The disagreement makes communication a relation between image and viewer: a painting’s capacity to provoke expectation can matter to someone who otherwise says the pictures around her mean nothing.

Allison’s response also complicates the neat opposition between abstract and narrative art. Her liking does not amount to a general appreciation of Rabo’s collection, and she says that the one picture she really liked is the one he sold. Its subject and her wondering about what might happen next offer a kind of narrative access that the abstract works, in her account, do not provide. The novel thus makes communicative force specific rather than automatic: a picture may reach one viewer through the story she can imagine, while other works remain unintelligible or empty to her.

Meaning Beyond Price and Reputation

The paintings’ movement through collections and markets repeatedly separates value from communication. The Pollock has attracted an offer of $2 million from an anonymous collector in Switzerland; the Rothko sells to the Getty Museum for $1.5 million; the work Allison remembers is acquired by a wealthy collector in Texas. These sums, institutions, and acts of collecting show that paintings can command attention and status. They do not prove that a viewer has found information or meaning in them. Circe’s contempt and Allison’s selective praise expose the gap between public recognition and personal response.

The pattern extends to the collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings associated with Marilee Kemp. Leo Mamigonian, son of Vartan Mamigonian, bought all the contents of a palazzo and thereby must have acquired Marilee’s collection, described as the best in Europe and second in the world only to Rabo’s. The ranking places artistic value within a system of comparisons, ownership, and reputation. Yet the novel’s other examples insist that a collection’s standing does not guarantee that its paintings communicate to any particular person.

Rabo’s own career makes the difference between intention, reputation, and reception especially sharp. After his offer to reproduce a painting for the Guggenheim in more durable materials is rejected, he imagines his surname entering dictionaries as a term for a fiasco in which someone destroys his own work and reputation through stupidity or carelessness. That imagined definition recasts an artist’s public meaning as a joke, not as the meaning he intended to create. Across these episodes, communication cannot be secured by a title, a declaration of artistic purpose, a high price, or institutional recognition. It takes place—or fails—between a work and the people who encounter it.