Time and fluidity in art

Time and fluidity in art is Rabo Karabekian’s account of what separates a living painting from a technically accomplished image that merely preserves a moment. A picture, he argues, must register that life is always moving from birth toward death; artistic form fails when it turns an instant into a permanent trophy. His theory makes time not just a subject a painter might depict, but the force that a painting must somehow carry within its stillness.

The problem of the frozen moment

Karabekian formulates the idea while looking back on Dan Gregory, the artist he once regarded as the greatest alive. Gregory was a marvelous technician, but technical mastery, Karabekian concludes, could not by itself produce greatness. He extends that judgment to himself: he had been the best technician among the Abstract Expressionists, yet his own work had not amounted to much. He insists that this failure preceded and exceeded the later catastrophe involving Sateen Dura-Luxe; many of his paintings before and after that material disaster were, in his own assessment, no good.

Gregory’s paintings told the truth about material things but lied about time. They celebrated moments: a child encountering a department-store Santa Claus, a gladiator’s victory at the Circus Maximus, the completion of the transcontinental railroad by the driving of its golden spike, or a man kneeling to propose marriage. Their subjects varied in scale and occasion, but each was treated as a moment worthy of preservation. What the paintings could not convey, Karabekian says, was that no moment stands alone: each runs away, and none is more important than another simply because it has been singled out for commemoration.

He sharpens the criticism by comparing Gregory to a taxidermist. The painter, in this analogy, stuffs, mounts, varnishes, and mothproofs supposedly great moments until they become dust-catching trophies, like a moose head bought at a country auction or a sailfish displayed in a dentist’s waiting room. The image turns a dispute about style into a distinction between living time and preserved display: the celebrated instant may look intact, but its apparent permanence is precisely what makes it lifeless.

Life moving through the image

Against this arrested vision, Karabekian defines life as motion without a stop between birth and death. A painting need not represent an obvious drama to carry that movement. Even a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth can be liquid, he argues, when a master’s brush makes the image hold the passage of time. The still subject does not have to become a literal narrative; the painting’s greatness lies in making birth and death present within what appears to be a single, fixed arrangement.

This standard also complicates Karabekian’s own authority. He says that neither he nor Gregory achieved the miracle he describes, whereas the greatest Abstract Expressionist paintings did. The claim is not a simple declaration that a movement or technique automatically succeeds: his own reputation as a superior technician is set against his admission that his paintings lacked greatness. The distinction rests instead on whether a work can make stillness feel permeated by temporal change.

Karabekian finds the same paradox in a seemingly random piece of beaverboard that Terry Kitchen sprayed long before. Birth and death, he says, were present in it even though he does not know how Kitchen put them there—and Kitchen himself did not know. The comparison makes the desired achievement less like a formula than an effect that can exceed both the maker’s conscious explanation and the viewer’s ability to reduce it to a subject. A work may communicate the movement of life without depicting a plainly recognizable event or offering an explicit interpretation.

Images, objects, and value

The theory’s stakes sharpen when set beside the objects and transactions surrounding Karabekian’s art. He describes his collection as paintings that are “about absolutely nothing but themselves,” and insists that the collection belonged to him before his marriage to Edith. Its monetary value, he says, equaled at least the value of the real estate and investments Edith left him, including a one-quarter share in the Cincinnati Bengals. The comparison gives the paintings both a formal independence and a place within a world where ownership and price invite scrutiny.

Their reception dramatizes the distance between the work’s self-sufficiency and the explanations viewers demand. In the house Edith left him in East Hampton, Karabekian answers visitors who ask what the pictures are supposed to mean. Circe Berman, meanwhile, dismisses one Jackson Pollock for which an anonymous Swiss collector had offered two million dollars, and later calls a Rothko sold directly from the wall to a Getty Museum buyer for $1.5 million bad rubbish. Her contempt does not erase the market’s valuation; it makes the divide between price, public reverence, and a viewer’s judgment impossible to ignore.

Karabekian’s famous lost painting, Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, further joins form to material history. It was sixty-four feet long and eight feet high, assembled from eight panels, and once occupied the entrance lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue. Its title named a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe, used straight from the can. Karabekian says the titles of his paintings were meant to be uncommunicative; Berman counters that naming should help artists communicate. The disagreement echoes the larger question of what a painting can convey: a label may identify a color or refuse interpretation, while the work’s deeper success, by Karabekian’s account, depends on whether time is alive within its form.

Fragile duration and the novel’s frame

The idea of fluidity also acquires a material irony from the early-1960s failure of Sateen Dura-Luxe, an acrylic wall paint advertised as having colors that would outlive the smile of the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa, Karabekian observes, is still smiling, while the paint has vanished from the market. In the war-era vocabulary he recalls, “fubar” meant extreme man-made disorder; he uses the term to describe a planet supposedly transformed by postwar miracles, then identifies his own ruined paintings as an early casualty of one of them. The promise of durability is overturned by the failure of the material meant to secure it.

His account of the sealed potato barn gives the contrast a spatial form. The long, narrow structure had no windows and had been built to keep potatoes at an even temperature; its dimensions also suited painters working on exceptionally large canvases. Karabekian had used it to work on the eight panels of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen as a single piece. Two years after Edith’s death, he nailed one set of doors shut from inside with six-inch spikes and immobilized the other with six padlocks and massive hasps. He says he has not entered since, but insists that something remains inside and that the executors will find more than empty space when they eventually open it after his death. The barn holds its contents beyond ordinary access, but the novel’s account of what it contains is deliberately withheld; the sealed space therefore makes duration a suspenseful condition, not proof that material things last forever.

The concept is presented through retrospective narration as well as through Karabekian’s judgments about paintings. His time-machine transitions return the narrative to the 1930s, where he revisits Gregory’s artistic limitations from the vantage of later experience; elsewhere, he links the Great Depression’s crowded streets and economic failures to a present in which television, he says, can hide a depression or even a possible world war. Past and present are not sealed off from one another: historical recurrence becomes another form of time refusing to remain safely past. Together, the painter’s critique, the damaged materials, the market’s shifting verdicts, and the narrator’s backward glances make fluidity a problem of both art and memory. A painting may be physically still, but for Karabekian it is great only when it does not pretend that life has stopped.