Manhattan

Manhattan is the city where Rabo Karabekian’s artistic training takes shape under Dan Gregory and where the young apprentice first learns to navigate a world beyond his family’s circumstances. The city’s streets become a working map, while its museum and private artistic interiors frame contrasting ideas of art, labor, and access.

Streets and the Depression

In 1933, Rabo asks a policeman at Grand Central Station for directions to Gregory’s address. The policeman says it is eight blocks away and describes that part of the city as simple as a checkerboard. The short walk brings Rabo to the imposing oak door of Gregory’s home, a door the illustrator had rendered for the cover of a Christmas issue of Liberty magazine. The iron hinges are rusty, and a Gorgon’s head forms the knocker, its hair and necklace made of intertwined asps. The entrance makes the city street the threshold to Gregory’s carefully controlled artistic world.

The walk occurs during the Great Depression, when Grand Central and the surrounding streets are crowded with homeless people. Newspapers report layoffs, farm foreclosures, and bank failures. Looking back, Rabo compares this visible hardship with the present and argues that television can conceal rather than end a depression. Manhattan is therefore not only the setting for his career’s beginnings; it is a place where economic crisis remains conspicuous even as public attention can turn away from it.

Apprenticeship and the Museum

As Gregory’s employee, Rabo learns Manhattan through errands. He becomes adept at finding the quickest routes from one place to another across the island, an everyday skill that accompanies a broader education in looking closely. His most demanding early artistic achievement is a meticulously accurate painting of Gregory’s studio, completed in six months. He renders its materials and surfaces in exact detail, down to water dripping from the skylight, each drop containing a miniature view of the studio. The city’s practical geography and the discipline of representation develop together: Rabo learns to move through Manhattan while learning how to observe and reproduce what is before him.

The Museum of Modern Art is another recurring destination. Rabo and Marilee Kemp go there repeatedly; by the time of one visit, he has worked for Gregory for almost three years and is just under twenty years old. He describes himself as an employee of an artist rather than a budding artist, a distinction sharpened by the precarious employment of the Depression and the prospect of another world war. The museum offers a place they choose to return to, but it is also the site of a decisive confrontation: Gregory catches them leaving it on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1936.

Public Streets and Private Authority

The encounter at the museum unfolds amid the holiday parade on Fifth Avenue. The parade holds up Gregory’s convertible Cord directly in front of the museum; Fred Jones is at the wheel, with Gregory and the others in the car. The street’s public spectacle and traffic bring Gregory face to face with Rabo and Marilee as they emerge from a place Gregory has forbidden them to visit. The episode turns Manhattan’s public spaces into a point of conflict between the apprentice’s and Marilee’s choices and Gregory’s authority over their lives.

Manhattan also connects Rabo’s early apprenticeship to the later history of his paintings. One of his large works, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, is displayed in the lobby of the GEFFCo Building on Park Avenue and later found in a locked chamber beneath the building, formerly the Matsumoto Building. An insurance inspector discovers the canvases during a search for fire hazards and recognizes them by remnants of Sateen Dura-Luxe paint. After the inspector offers to return them, Rabo asks that they not be discarded and arranges for Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage to collect them. The city thus holds both the public display of his work and its obscured, damaged remains.

Artistic Space and Afterlife

The recovered work consists of eight canvases, each eight feet by eight feet, arranged as a continuous surface sixty-four feet long. Rabo later places the panels in the potato barn on his East Hampton property, where they remain connected to his most celebrated and then most disgraced painting. Manhattan’s role in this history is not confined to the moment of artistic success: its commercial architecture preserves the material evidence of a painting’s deterioration, and its rediscovery prompts Rabo to take possession of the canvases again.

Across these episodes, Manhattan appears through distinct kinds of access: the apprentice’s walk from Grand Central, the routes learned through errands, the museum visited with Marilee, the parade-clogged avenue, and the corporate lobby and locked basement where Rabo’s painting changes status. The city organizes movement and visibility, but it also reveals how fragile artistic recognition can be. A painting once displayed with publicity can later lie hidden below ground, its surviving canvases returned to the artist who had believed his painting life was over.