Swinging-girl pictures in the foyer

The Swinging-girl pictures in the foyer are chromos of little girls on swings, displayed at the entrance to Rabo Karabekian’s East Hampton house. Their decisive significance lies in the reversal they produce: visitors first see them as trashy pictures, but Circe Berman’s account makes them emblems of the suffering that awaits the girls. Hung where the museum tour begins, they turn a domestic foyer into a threshold where looking is not enough; interpretation changes what the pictures seem to show.

Identity and Setting

The pictures belong to the redecoration of the Karabekian home, where Edith Taft had the wallpaper stripped away, the chandeliers replaced by track lighting, and the walls and woodwork painted oyster white so modern art could be shown throughout the house. The foyer already contained works that could serve as the core of a small museum’s permanent collection. The girls on swings altered the character of that display: instead of simply introducing distinguished modern art, they gave the entrance its own unsettling subject and interpretive problem.

The house’s exhibition role was not incidental. Rabo regarded himself as little more than a museum guard, answering visitors who asked what the pictures were supposed to mean. The foyer’s contents had been carefully arranged as part of a major domestic renovation, but the meaning of the swinging-girl images was not self-evident. They would become the opening lesson in a tour shaped by the owner’s and Circe’s explanations as much as by the objects on the walls.

First Visitors and a Change in Meaning

When Rabo received three Soviet writers escorted by a State Department employee, they showed themselves sophisticated and appreciative of Abstract Expressionism. Yet, as they were leaving, they asked why he had such trashy pictures in the foyer. The encounter sharply separates aesthetic competence from understanding: the visitors could appreciate the abstract paintings and still misread the images placed at the entrance.

Rabo answered with Circe’s lecture about the horrors awaiting the girls. The explanation brought the visitors close to tears. They apologized for failing to understand the chromos’ true import, then went from picture to picture lamenting the pain each girl would endure; Rabo gathered that their predictions included cancer and war. What had appeared to them as cheap, sentimental decoration became a sequence of imagined futures, and the pictures’ emotional force came into view through that change in attention.

As they departed, the visitors called back to Rabo with affectionate grins and shaking heads. Through the interpreter, he learned that they had said, “No more war, no more war.” Their response widened the pictures’ implications beyond the individual girls: the images had prompted viewers to imagine forms of suffering that included war, and the visitors left expressing a wish that it would end.

The Foyer as Museum Entrance

The pictures also function as the first stop in the house’s later museum route. Rabo describes the tour as beginning with the doomed little girls on swings, proceeding to early works by the Abstract Expressionists, and then moving into the potato barn to encounter the enormous work there. The ordering matters: visitors enter through images interpreted in terms of vulnerability and anticipated pain before reaching art that resists easy classification.

The foyer’s presentation does not settle the girls’ meaning once and for all. Rabo reports the images through Circe’s lecture and through what he can infer from the Soviet visitors’ translated reactions; the pictures’ force therefore emerges in an encounter among image, guide, and audience. The later museum tour makes that encounter repeatable, bringing new visitors through the same threshold and establishing the swinging-girl pictures as an interpretive frame for what follows.

Insanity and the Fragility of Looking

The foyer’s images recur in a sharply different scene when the Springs Volunteer Fire Department’s rescue squad brings Paul Slazinger to Rabo’s house in a straitjacket. Circe comes downstairs in her nightclothes, takes one hard look at the restrained, frantic man, then turns away and begins straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. Her precise, ordinary gesture occurs in the presence of a crisis she cannot bear to face directly.

Rabo reads the moment as evidence that Circe is petrified by insanity: she can look away from Slazinger and attend to the pictures instead. The paintings thus share the foyer with both an audience’s newly awakened compassion and a visitor’s terror. They do not merely decorate the entrance; they become objects to which attention returns when the human scene nearby is too difficult to meet head-on. In the house’s museum, the first pictures already hold together interpretation, distress, and the limits of looking.