Destruction of Rabo Karabekian's paintings

The destruction of Rabo Karabekian's paintings was a material failure with lasting artistic and personal consequences: an acrylic wall paint reacted with the canvas sizing and colored tape in his work, causing the paintings to come apart. Most consequentially, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, a 64-foot-long mural once displayed in the lobby of the GEFFCo Building on Park Avenue, became a notorious ruin. Its collapse exposed the distance between the postwar promise of durable new materials and the uncertain physical life of art, while leaving Rabo to confront the remains decades later.

The painting and its materials

Rabo had made his name with a painting whose title, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, described the shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe acrylic wall paint he used straight from the can. The 64-foot-long, eight-foot-high work occupied the entrance lobby of GEFFCo's headquarters on Park Avenue. The company's publicity presented its display as evidence that an established business could keep pace with developments in both technology and the arts. At 512 square feet, the mural was large, though Rabo later noted that it was not the world's largest and was exceeded by other murals in New York City and elsewhere.

The work's eventual failure was not simply an unfavorable judgment about its appearance. Rabo attributes it to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing on the canvases, the acrylic wall paint, and the colored tape he had applied. His account makes the materials—not a later change in taste—the immediate agents of the painting's collapse. The product's name and advertised promise of endurance could not protect the work from the interaction of its components.

A postwar promise reverses

Rabo places the destruction in the early 1960s, describing himself as among the first people to be thoroughly undone by a postwar miracle. He recalls a period when new technologies and products were credited with the power to transform everyday life: instant coffee, DDT, nuclear energy, antibiotics, and new fibers all figured in the era's confidence in progress. Sateen Dura-Luxe belonged to that same promise. Its advertised colors, the slogan suggested, would outlast the smile on the Mona Lisa.

The irony is concrete and severe: the Mona Lisa remained intact, while Rabo's paint failed, and paint dealers eventually stopped carrying Sateen Dura-Luxe. The gap between sales language and physical outcome gives the collapse its broader significance. A supposedly durable modern material proved unreliable in the very work that had made its name visible in a corporate lobby.

What the failure left behind

The consequence for the paintings' buyers was stark. People who had paid fifteen, twenty, or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture found themselves looking at a blank canvas, with rings of colored tape and crumbled remnants on the floor. The finished image had disappeared, leaving both the support and the waste of its failed materials behind. The loss was not confined to Rabo's reputation: it changed what purchasers physically possessed and made the promised object unusable as a painting.

Rabo connects this professional humiliation to a private recollection of his father. Thinking that his father would have laughed at the ruined paintings, he imagines the same response his father might have given to Rabo's postwar work and to the Abstract Expressionist painters whose art drew public scorn. The destruction thus returns him to an old fear of being ridiculed by his father, rather than remaining only a story of defective paint. The event's force lies in the way a failed object reopens that personal resentment.

Recovery and preservation

The original panels eventually resurfaced in a locked chamber on the lowest of the three basement floors beneath the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. An insurance-company safety inspector found them while searching for fire hazards. Shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe still clung to the canvases, identifying them as the panels of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen. The inspector obtained permission to open the locked space and contacted Rabo about returning them; she offered them back because she did not want them to go to waste.

Rabo initially believed he had no use for the canvases and had no expectation of painting again. The potato barn had room to store them, but their return also meant having the worst embarrassment of his past close at hand. He nevertheless asked that they not be thrown away and arranged for Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage to collect them. His decision did not restore the lost painting or erase its failure; it preserved the damaged supports, allowing the ruin to remain part of his life and the history of the work. Later, the eight recovered panels—each eight feet square—stood together in his potato-barn studio as a continuous 64-foot surface, carrying both the scale of the original mural and the evidence of its collapse.

Artistic significance

The episode complicates Rabo's earlier confidence in technique and materials. As an apprentice to Dan Gregory, he had learned to value carefully chosen supplies and the painstaking accuracy of illustration; Gregory's paints, brushes, pastels, inks, and canvas came from specialist makers in Germany, England, Paris, and Belgium. Rabo's own account distinguishes those professional materials from the acrylic wall paint that destroyed his later work. The contrast is not a guarantee that any material will last, but it makes the mural's failure an especially pointed reversal: a painting celebrated in the language of technological progress succumbed to the chemistry of its construction.

The ruined mural also sits beside Rabo's earlier belief that cameras could reproduce what he and Gregory could see, and that his own abilities might amount to little more than those of a reasonably good camera. The collapse does not answer that artistic doubt, but it gives it a material setting: a work once displayed and sold as an object of value becomes blank canvas and scraps, while its recovered panels survive as a record of what the promised image could not withstand. In the novel's account, artistic reputation, market price, and physical permanence do not move together.