The disintegration of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen is the collapse of Rabo Karabekian’s most famous painting and the episode that hardens its transformation from celebrated artwork into an art-world fiasco. As its paint and tape detach, a caricature buried beneath the abstract surface emerges; the failure becomes both physical and reputational, and even the Guggenheim Museum declines Rabo’s offer to remake the picture.

The painting beneath the abstraction

Rabo describes covering a caricature with two coats of Hungarian Rhapsody and then laying on tapes that were supposed to produce pure abstraction. To him, the finished picture secretly contained six deer in a forest glade near the left edge, with a red vertical band on the right representing the soul of a hunter taking aim at one of them. He called it Hungarian Rhapsody Number Six. The Guggenheim Museum bought the painting, whose underlying image and concealed caricature would later become central to its unmaking.

The work had already passed through two public identities: it had graced the lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue, and then disgraced it. Rabo identifies the painting as Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, his most famous and then most infamous creation. Its failure was not simply an image fading or a surface acquiring age. The material that was meant to secure the picture instead came away, carrying the painting’s reputation down with it.

The failure becomes visible

The deterioration surfaced while the picture was in storage. Like Rabo’s other paintings, it began to fall apart: flakes of Sateen Dura-Luxe and pieces of tape appeared on the floor. A curator at the Guggenheim happened to pass by, saw the debris, and telephoned Rabo to ask how the work might be restored and whether the museum had caused the damage through inadequate humidity control. Her question showed how far the breakdown had spread: the paintings had become notorious for falling apart, yet she still considered the possibility that the museum was responsible.

The call also disclosed a new image within the ruined one. The curator reported that a big face had emerged from the canvas. It was the caricature Rabo had drawn with his filthy thumbs and covered over before building the abstraction on top. The materials’ failure thus reversed the painting’s original concealment: what had been buried beneath coats of paint and tapes returned as a conspicuous face, while the surface that had carried the abstract composition disintegrated around it.

Rabo’s response to the discovery was a sardonic instruction to notify the Pope. The joke does not repair the work or deny what has happened. Instead, it meets the curator’s account of a face emerging from the canvas with an irreverence that matches the grotesque reversal: the painting bought as abstraction now presents its hidden caricature through the physical failure of its surface.

A proposed restoration and a refused repair

Rabo offered the Guggenheim the same solution he had offered everyone else: he would reproduce the painting exactly, using more durable paints and tapes, which he claimed would outlast the smile on the Mona Lisa. His proposal separates the image from the failed materials. If the composition could be remade, the painting’s visible design might survive even though the original object could not.

The Guggenheim, like the other institutions and people approached, turned him down. Rabo understood the refusal as a preference for preserving the comic footnote he had become in art history over rescuing the work itself. He imagines his surname entering dictionaries as a noun for a fiasco in which someone destroys his own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness, or both. The definition makes the failure sound like a general category, but its sting is personal: the painting’s collapse has become inseparable from the story told about its maker.

The canvases after the collapse

The damaged work later appears as eight primed and stretched canvases, each eight feet square, placed side by side to form one continuous surface sixty-four feet long. They stand upright on two-by-fours like a fence running down the middle of Rabo’s potato barn. These are the panels from which the paint and tape of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen had shed. Their presence in the barn makes the scale of the original painting tangible even after its defining surface has failed.

Three months before Edith died, the canvases were found entombed in a locked chamber on the lowest of three basement floors beneath the Matsumoto Building, formerly the GEFFCo Building. An insurance-company inspector searching underground for fire hazards recognized the panels from shreds of Sateen Dura-Luxe still clinging to them. Behind a locked steel door, the remains had been hidden so thoroughly that nobody knew what was on the other side. The inspector obtained permission to break in and offered to return the canvases to Rabo, explaining by telephone that she was the first female safety inspector at her company and also its first Black inspector. She said she did not want anything to go to waste and left the decision to him, though he would have to collect the panels himself.

The painting’s afterlife therefore repeats its collapse in altered form: first its surface gives way in storage, exposing what it had concealed; later its stripped panels lie sealed away underground, recognized only by remnants of the failed coating. Their return does not undo the refusal to restore the work or the reputation attached to it. Instead, the rescued canvases preserve the physical evidence of both the ambition of a sixty-four-foot composition and the materials that failed to hold it together.