Terry Kitchen

Terry Kitchen, Rabo Karabekian’s closest friend and fellow painter, is a man of abundant abilities who gives up several conventional futures to pursue art. His emergence as a painter, his estrangement from Rabo, and his death by suicide form a counterpoint to Rabo’s reflections on talent, friendship, drinking, and the limits of explaining a life through its art.

Identity and Background

Before meeting Rabo, Kitchen had already given up the prospect of careers in law, business, finance, or politics. He had graduated from Yale Law School, was a magnificent pianist and athlete, and might, Rabo speculates, have remained in the Army and risen to a senior command. Yet Kitchen chose painting despite having no art lessons and, in Rabo’s recollection, being unable to draw. He explained the choice as a search for something worth doing, and the decision sets his formidable capacities against the uncertain and initially unlikely vocation he selected.

Kitchen’s inheritance of talent included a complicated family legacy. His father was a cellist, chess player, horticulturalist, corporation lawyer, and advocate for Black civil rights. Kitchen recalled a lecture by the poet Conrad Aiken, who argued that sons of gifted men often enter their fathers’ fields where the fathers were weak. Kitchen said he could not do that to his own father. The later confrontation between them gives that remark a grim afterlife: a son who could not imagine competing with his father would eventually become the cause of his death.

Becoming a Painter

Rabo presents Kitchen’s artistic turn as a change that could be seen in him. After Kitchen began producing work that won comparisons placing him above Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Rabo felt that the friend he knew had gone missing. Looking into Kitchen’s eyes, he recalls, was like finding nobody at home. Artistic achievement brought public recognition, but from Rabo’s perspective it coincided with a private withdrawal, making success appear less like the fulfillment of their friendship than a force that altered it.

The decisive practical instrument in Kitchen’s development was a spray rig. Before Rabo acquired it for them from an automobile repair shop in Montauk, Kitchen had nearly given up painting and was preparing to join his father’s law practice. They bought the rig with two cans of red automobile paint. At the potato barn, Kitchen sprayed bursts of red onto a piece of beaverboard, repeatedly urging Rabo to look. Rabo describes the moment as Kitchen tuning in to a signal that his friend could not hear: an abrupt access to artistic possibility, achieved not through drawing lessons but through a new tool and an unfamiliar way of making images.

Kitchen’s later work included a distinctive airbrush manner, often described by Rabo as brightly colored storm systems seen from an orbiting satellite. A painting once displayed in Rabo’s foyer, now generally known as Magic Window, had a small representational insert: an upside-down copy of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. Rabo clarifies that this technically accomplished passage was not Kitchen’s work. At Kitchen’s insistence, Rabo himself, then a self-described hack illustrator, painted it. The picture therefore preserves a layered collaboration: its broader style belongs to Kitchen, while its apparent evidence that Kitchen could draw realistically belongs to Rabo.

Friendship, Drinking, and Distance

Rabo and Kitchen were once inseparable enough to be associated with Pollock as the Three Musketeers at the Cedar Tavern in New York City. Rabo later qualifies the name: it arose from their heavy drinking, not from a shared artistic program. When one or more of them stopped drinking, the trio ceased to function as a group, and Rabo says the friendship had already ended long before the other two died. Their closeness, in this account, was real but organized around a habit that could not sustain it.

The early friendship also included conversations in which Kitchen gave names to experiences. After the war, Rabo told him about a period of contentment after being with Marilee Kemp; Kitchen called the state a non-epiphany, a concept he said he had invented. Rabo remembers this as the time when Kitchen was still a talker rather than a painter, before the spray rig redirected his life. Kitchen’s idea distinguished rare intervals of being left alone by God from the more familiar demand to find purpose. He said that the only moments he experienced as non-epiphanies were those after sex and on the two occasions when he took heroin. Rabo’s account holds together Kitchen’s search for worthwhile work and his longing for temporary release from that search.

Rabo was named Terry in honor of Kitchen, a sign that his friend belonged to the intimate history of Rabo’s family as well as his artistic life. The naming does not prevent their friendship from eroding. Years later, Rabo could describe himself as having been a painter’s groupie and Kitchen as having become a celebrated artist, while also insisting that the fame did not explain their separation. His recollections resist a neat story in which painting made the friends rivals or drove them apart: he attributes the Three Musketeers’ bond to drinking and says their deaths had nothing to do with their painting.

Crisis and Death

At one point Kitchen destroyed paintings in the studio he shared with Rabo, slashing them with an ivory-handled straight razor inherited from his paternal grandfather, a former president of the New York Central Railroad. Rabo found Kitchen asleep on his cot after the act. The razor’s family provenance and the damaged paintings make the scene an encounter between inheritance and repudiation, while Rabo’s account gives no settled explanation for why Kitchen destroyed the work. His immediate fear that Kitchen might also have harmed himself anticipates the later death without making the earlier incident equivalent to it.

Six years after Kitchen’s discussion of his father, the two men met in the front yard of Kitchen’s shack, about six miles from Rabo’s home. Kitchen was drunk, as Rabo says he often was; his father had come once again to urge him to seek treatment for alcoholism. Kitchen fired a pistol and struck his father in the shoulder. Rabo says the shot cannot be proved to have been intended only as a gesture, but believes that it was. When Kitchen realized that he had actually shot his father, he killed himself with the pistol. Rabo calls the shooting an accident, distinguishing the apparent gesture from the fatal consequence that followed.

Kitchen’s death belongs to a larger roll call of deaths among Rabo’s painter friends. Rabo recalls that Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956 and that Kitchen died by suicide three weeks later; Mark Rothko died by suicide in 1970. He also names Arshile Gorky, who died by suicide in 1948. The sequence gives Kitchen’s death a place among repeated losses, but Rabo sharply resists interpreting that pattern as a verdict on art. He says the violent deaths were like the men’s drinking and had nothing to do with their painting. The distinction is not an explanation of why Kitchen died; it is Rabo’s refusal to let artistic achievement or artistic failure stand in for the human causes of a death.

Narrative Role and Legacy

Kitchen’s story is assembled through Rabo’s retrospective, emotionally unsettled testimony. Rabo remembers the instant the spray rig opened a new direction for his friend, the uncanny distance that accompanied Kitchen’s artistic success, their drinking fellowship, and the fatal encounter with Kitchen’s father. These memories do not resolve into a single account of Kitchen’s character: he appears as a gifted man choosing a difficult vocation, a friend capable of inventing a name for spiritual respite, an alcoholic in crisis, and an artist whose work could become an object of destruction.

That unresolved variety matters to Rabo’s broader reflections on survival and art. Kitchen had abilities that could have secured him many different lives, yet he chose painting; he reached distinction, yet Rabo experienced that distinction as a loss of the friend he had known. In death, Kitchen becomes part of the grief that Rabo carries, but not a cautionary symbol whose fate can be reduced to the practice of art. The recurrent image of a signal heard by Kitchen and not by Rabo captures both the intimacy and the separation between them: they shared tools, a studio, and years of friendship, but Rabo could not enter the private frequency to which Kitchen seemed to listen.