Paris is both a lost destination and an artistic benchmark in Rabo Karabekian’s account: his family was diverted from settling there, a Paris-connected Armenian later helps launch his career, and Rabo eventually makes the city the symbolic rival in his effort to establish New York as the new art capital. Its importance lies less in scenes set there than in the way distance from Paris shapes his opportunities, ambitions, and sense of artistic legitimacy.

A Destination Lost

Rabo imagines that his parents and he might have become Parisians, joining the city’s prosperous Armenian community, had Vartan Mamigonian not diverted them to San Ignacio, California. Paris therefore enters his history as a life that might have been: a cultural home and a possible alternative to the circumstances in which his family actually settled. The account connects that missed migration with the later costs Rabo attributes to Vartan, including the loss of an eye, making the city’s absence part of a larger story of displacement and injury.

The Paris Rabo describes was also, in his retrospective account, the art capital of the world. That status gives the unrealized move a professional dimension: Paris represents not only a place where his family might have lived, but a center whose artistic authority would eventually become the object of his own ambition.

A Parisian Connection and a First Opportunity

Rabo’s route into commercial art begins in Central Park, where he is making caricatures for the price of a cup of coffee when he meets Marc Coulomb. Coulomb is a Bulgarian Armenian whose parents took him to Paris in infancy; the family became part of the city’s lively and prosperous Armenian community. At twenty-five, he has come from Paris to find an American advertising agency that can make the family’s travel business better known in the United States.

Coulomb recognizes Rabo’s facility with drawing materials and tells him that if he truly wants to become an artist, he must go to Paris. Instead of sending him there, however, Coulomb gives him an immediate opportunity in New York. He buys Rabo a suit, shirt, tie, and shoes, then takes him to the advertising agency Leidveld and Moore and offers the Coulomb account on condition that the firm hire him as an artist. The agency does so. Paris thus reaches Rabo through a benefactor and a professional network, while his actual foothold in art begins in New York.

Rabo never sees Coulomb again. Decades later, as he thinks about him, the New York Times carries Coulomb’s obituary: it identifies him as a hero of the French Resistance and, at his death, chairman of the board of Coulomb Frères et Cie, described as the world’s most extensive travel organization. The delayed news gives the encounter an unexpected historical afterlife, while leaving intact the central irony that Coulomb’s Parisian advice helped Rabo begin a career in the city that would compete with Paris.

Paris as Rival and Measure

Rabo later recalls that he and Dorothy spoke grandly of making New York, rather than Paris, the art capital of the world. Dorothy challenges the scale and purpose of this ambition after the war, telling him that he has no need to undertake dangerous, unlikely conquests or to conquer France. Her objection exposes the martial metaphor embedded in Rabo’s artistic rivalry: a contest over cultural standing has taken the language of military victory, even though France had been on their side.

That ambition becomes a recurring measure of Rabo’s career. He understands his eventual membership in the small group of painters that made New York, not Paris, the art capital of the world as an irony awaiting him in the future. Paris is consequently both the authority his family failed to reach and the established center against which his later artistic world defines its success. The rivalry is not simply resolved by a change in the map of art: Rabo’s recollections preserve the city as the standard his generation sought to displace.

Artistic Value, Markets, and Institutions

The novel’s Paris-centered contrast sits within Rabo’s broader account of how art is valued. His collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings is displayed in his East Hampton house, which functions as a museum and draws visitors who ask what the works mean. Rabo describes the paintings as being about nothing but themselves, while the collection’s market and institutional standing are made concrete by high-priced sales: an anonymous Swiss collector offers two million dollars for a Jackson Pollock, and a representative of the Getty Museum buys a Mark Rothko directly from the wall for $1.5 million. These transactions show how artistic authority circulates through collectors, museums, markets, and audiences, rather than belonging to a city alone.

The same tension marks Rabo’s lost monumental painting, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, a sixty-four-foot-long, eight-foot-high work once displayed in the lobby of GEFFCo’s headquarters on Park Avenue. Its title names a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe paint, and Rabo explains that his titles were meant to be uncommunicative; Circe Berman, by contrast, insists that naming should communicate. These arguments give the Paris–New York rivalry a wider context: the struggle for recognition concerns not only which city leads, but also who gets to define what art communicates and how its value is judged.

Rabo’s later public display of his enormous work in the potato barn further unsettles conventional distinctions between art and attraction. Visitors move through the barn’s opened sliding doors, and he tells them the work is not a painting but a tourist attraction, a World’s Fair, and a Disneyland. Against that populist spectacle, the long-standing prestige of Paris and the institutional authority of museums remain part of the story’s inquiry into how reputations are made. Paris is the name for an inherited center of legitimacy; New York is Rabo’s chosen challenger, whose eventual ascendancy does not eliminate the questions of value, communication, and recognition that the rivalry leaves behind.