Sateen Dura-Luxe

Sateen Dura-Luxe is the acrylic wall paint that turns a modern promise of permanence into the material cause of Rabo Karabekian’s artistic collapse. In the early 1960s, reactions among the paint, his canvases’ sizing, and colored tape caused his pictures to destroy themselves: the painted surfaces disappeared, leaving blank canvases, curled tape, and flakes. The paint’s failure outlasts the paintings themselves, remaining in stored cans, surviving on recovered panels, and marking the work of restoration as well as the work of ruin.

The Promise of Permanence

After the Second World War, public faith in technological miracles extended from instant coffee and antibiotics to new materials. Sateen Dura-Luxe was one of those materials, an acrylic wall paint whose advertised colors would outlast the smile on the Mona Lisa. The boast made its apparent durability sound almost timeless. In practice, the paint became notorious for failing on Karabekian’s canvases, and local paint dealers eventually laughed when customers asked for it.

The discrepancy between the advertisement and the result is central to the object’s significance. The paint is not merely a symbol of a failed artistic movement or a disappointing era: its specific chemical interaction with canvas sizing and applied colored tape is what physically destroyed the pictures. A product sold as a way to make color endure instead made the painted image come apart.

The Paintings Come Apart

By the early 1960s, Karabekian was among the first people, in his account, to be wrecked by one of the postwar miracles. Paintings that had drawn serious critical attention and sold for fifteen, twenty, or even thirty thousand dollars became blank canvases. The colored tapes curled away, while fragments of paint fell to the floor. The transformation was not an ordinary change in reputation: the physical works themselves ceased to hold together.

The material failure also reshaped Karabekian’s recollection of his father. Thinking back on the destruction, he imagines that his father would have laughed at the ruined paintings just as he would have mocked Karabekian’s postwar work and his Abstract Expressionist associates, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Terry Kitchen. That thought returns through the conversation with Circe Berman and a time-machine image: the paint’s failure reopens an old grievance rather than leaving the past safely past.

Stored Paint and Its Afterlife

The failed medium did not simply disappear when the paintings fell apart. Circe Berman explored the house and basement and counted sixty-three gallons of Sateen Dura-Luxe still stored there. Its afterlife was a practical problem as well as a reminder: the paint could not legally be disposed of in an ordinary dump because it had been found to degrade into a deadly poison over time. Proper disposal required shipping it to a special site near Pitchfork, Wyoming, and Karabekian had not arranged to do so. The cans remained in the basement.

The contrast between the ruined pictures and the surviving stock makes the paint’s material consequences unusually persistent. The image may vanish, but the medium remains—stored in quantity, subject to disposal rules, and capable of becoming dangerous as it ages. The uncompleted task of sending it away leaves the failed artistic experiment physically present in Karabekian’s home.

Paint as Ground and as Concealed Image

Sateen Dura-Luxe was also part of Karabekian’s artistic process before it became synonymous with destruction. After the war, he left his life-insurance sales job and became absorbed in making large fields of a single color. He used the paint as a ground for strips of colored tape, describing a private imaginative life beneath the appearance of pure abstraction: each strip could stand for the soul of a person or animal. He imagined an orange strip as an Arctic explorer and a white one as a charging polar bear. The paint’s broad, featureless fields thus coexisted with a hidden narrative that he continued to see in paintings and in people.

That tension appears in a particular eight-by-eight-foot canvas begun in the potato barn. Karabekian rolled on a shade of greenish burnt orange called Hungarian Rhapsody, unaware that Dorothy was using the same color to paint their bedroom. He covered a caricature he had made with his thumbs, then applied tapes that he called pure abstraction but secretly imagined as six deer in a forest glade and the soul of a hunter. The resulting picture, Hungarian Rhapsody Number Six, was bought by the Guggenheim Museum. When it began to fall apart in storage, a curator saw the tape and paint flakes on the floor and reported that a large face had emerged from the canvas: the caricature underneath had become visible as the paint failed.

Ruin, Recovery, and Restoration

Sateen Dura-Luxe’s failure returned most consequentially through Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, Karabekian’s eight-panel painting, whose total surface measured 512 square feet. After the paint and tape had shed from it, the panels were found years later behind a locked steel door in the lowest of the three basement floors of the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. An insurance inspector, searching for fire hazards, recognized the canvases by the shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe still clinging to them. She arranged for their return rather than letting them be discarded; Karabekian asked that they not be thrown away and arranged to have them picked up.

He then had every trace of the failed paint removed from the eight panels, which were restretched and reprimed. In the potato barn, the restored, dazzling-white canvases stood side by side as a continuous surface sixty-four feet long. Karabekian understood the project as an exorcism of an unhappy past and a symbolic repair of damage he had done to himself and others during his brief career as a painter, while acknowledging that such explanations could not fully state how or why a painting came to be. Even the barn and its powerful ceiling floodlights belonged to the work’s conditions: he had installed the artificial lights for the original commission, and their energy now illuminated the panels in their restored whiteness. When Edith asked what he would do with the restored work, he answered that it was done.

Sateen Dura-Luxe therefore remains present in the story in several forms at once: as a failed promise of permanence, a cause of actual material loss, a hazardous remainder in the basement, and a residue whose removal makes a different kind of artistic beginning possible. Restoring the panels does not make the original disaster unreal; it turns the surfaces left behind by that disaster into the setting for Karabekian’s return to painting.