A novel about an aging painter, a locked barn, and the search for meaning in art
What the Work Is
Mavi sakal is the Turkish title of Bluebeard, a novel by the Swiss-born American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1991. Its full English title is Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988). The book is written in the first person and presents itself as the life story of a fictional Abstract Expressionist painter, Rabo Karabekian, who had earlier appeared as a minor character in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973). The novel’s situation loosely echoes the fairy tale of Bluebeard popularized by Charles Perrault — a connection Karabekian himself mentions once in the course of the narrative.
What the Book Is About
The novel opens with the narrator, Rabo Karabekian, apologizing to arriving guests: he had promised them an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. He describes himself as a museum guard who answers visitors’ questions about the priceless art he has collected, sharing his lonely home with his live-in cook and her daughter, Celeste.
The story turns on the arrival of Circe Berman, a woman living nearby who wanders onto Karabekian’s private beach. She surprises him by immediately asking how his parents died. He tells her the story, invites her back for a drink and supper, and eventually asks her to stay — as his friend Paul Slazinger already does. Over time he finds her charm manipulative, since she generally gets her way. She has no respect for his abstract art collection, including works by Jackson Pollock, and she explores every corner of his home, asking constant questions. The one place off-limits to her is the potato barn.
The potato barn houses Karabekian’s studio and his secret. It has no windows; he has nailed one end shut and immobilized the other with six padlocks. The mystery of the barn has drawn outrageous offers from collectors and suspicions of stolen masterpieces. With Berman’s help, Karabekian arrives at a realization about his life — that he had simply been afraid of people — and opens the painting in the potato barn to the public.
Key Ideas and Themes
A number of critics have identified the possibility of creating art with meaning as a central theme of the novel. David Rampton, writing in Studies in Contemporary Fiction, argued that Circe Berman’s challenge to Rabo to make meaningful, moral art amounts to Vonnegut directly confronting meaninglessness in art by asking for “committed art.” Rampton also proposed that Vonnegut may be questioning whether truly moral art is possible, given the lack of morality in the lives of many artists. Other critics have described meaningful art as Karabekian’s way of battling his own demons.
Donald Morse argued that Karabekian’s accomplishment in the novel is the realization that, through self-acceptance and the serious use of imagination and creativity, human beings can become reconciled to their weaknesses while still remaining outraged at human greed. Morse added that Karabekian’s final masterpiece, “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” achieves meaningful art by developing a backstory for each of the 5,219 characters in the composition before painting it.
Critics have also discussed survivor’s syndrome, family, and relationships with women as themes. One critic wrote that Rabo escapes the survivor’s syndrome his parents suffered from by painting “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.” It has also been said that Karabekian’s mission in the narrative is to find a family he feels part of, which he achieves through the army and the Abstract Expressionism community. Women are likewise a theme: New York Times reviewer Julian Moynahan wrote that Circe Berman sees Karabekian’s main life struggle as his strained relationships with women.
Structure and Approach
The novel is told in the first person as Karabekian’s autobiography, framed by his apology to guests at the opening. Donald Morse identified a distinctive feature of the book compared with other Vonnegut novels: its protagonist is happy and satisfied at the end of the narrative. Morse also observed that Karabekian as a writer closely resembles Vonnegut as a writer, and that the criticism Circe Berman directs at Karabekian’s writing parallels the issues critics have raised about Vonnegut’s own writing.
The Paintings
Several of Karabekian’s paintings are described in detail in the novel. The first is a photo-realistic painting of Dan Gregory’s studio. The second is an abstract painting of a lost Arctic explorer and a charging polar bear, consisting of a white background with two strips of tape, one white and one orange. The third depicts six deer and a hunter and is titled “Hungarian Rhapsody Number Six”; it later fell apart in storage at the Guggenheim Museum. The scene is represented by a greenish-orange background with six strips of brown tape for the deer on one side and one strip of red tape on the opposite side for the hunter.
His most famous work, which once hung in the lobby of GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue, is titled “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” Composed of eight 8×8 panels hung side by side, it displays nothing but paint in the shade named in its title, applied in Sateen Dura-Luxe. The painting literally fell apart when the Sateen Dura-Luxe began to shred itself from the canvas, becoming Karabekian’s biggest embarrassment as an abstract expressionist. Those same panels, once fully covered by Windsor Blue, became the canvases Karabekian would prime back to pure white and use for his last work, locked within his potato barn.
That last painting is the secret in the barn: an enormous photo-realistic picture of Karabekian’s experience of World War II, when he and 5,219 other prisoners of war, Romani people, and concentration camp victims were dumped in a valley after the German forces realized the war was lost. The painting, which becomes enormously successful as a tourist attraction, is meant to be the only painting Karabekian created that contained “soul.”
Significance and Influence
Bluebeard received positive reviews from many critics, some of whom considered it a milestone in Vonnegut’s career. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “Vonnegut at his edifying best,” and the Chicago Tribune described it as “a major breakthrough for Vonnegut” and “a new and vital phase in his career.” Newsday said it was “worth reading twice,” and the Atlanta Journal & Constitution wrote that “Bluebeard ranks with [Vonnegut’s] best and goes one step beyond.”
The novel also met with significantly negative reception. Julian Moynahan wrote in a New York Times book review that Bluebeard was a “minor achievement” and that Vonnegut “isn’t moving ahead.” In Library Journal, the novel was identified as “not among [Vonnegut’s] best.”
Rabo Karabekian is seventy-one years old, one-eyed, and a first-generation Armenian-American painter. He lives in a nineteen-room house on the waterfront of East Hampton, Long Island, which he inherited from his second wife, Edith.
Circe Berman selects Rabo’s home as a place to research and write about working-class adolescents living with multi-millionaires. While living there she more or less takes charge of Rabo’s life and tells him to start writing an autobiography, which he does. After she impulsively renovates Rabo’s foyer without his permission — removing many of the things Rabo’s dead wife had used to decorate it in doing so — the two get into a heated argument which results in her departure, although she soon returns and is accepted back. This is the most notable example of Circe’s disregard for other people’s privacy and personal space. Although Rabo does most of the things she wants him to, he will not tell her what is in the potato barn no matter how much she pressures him to do so. She is a well-published novelist under the pen name “Polly Madison.” Her novels, although very popular, are criticized for tainting the world’s youth.
Paul Slazinger is a poor, wounded World War II veteran. Though he owns his own home, he stays with Rabo and eats from his kitchen. He refuses permanent residence on the grounds that “he can only write at home”. He has had eleven novels published, but is not in the league of Circe Berman. Circe is pretending not to be Polly Madison, so Paul looks down on her and condescendingly gives her writing advice.
Dan Gregory was originally named Dan Gregorian before moving to America and changing his name. A magazine article estimates him to be the highest-paid artist in American history. That he is Armenian like Rabo’s family causes Rabo’s mother to believe he is a great man, an example of an Armenian who has become a success in America. She insists that her son write to “Gregorian”, as she calls him, to ask for an apprenticeship. Rabo became “Gregorian’s” apprentice at the age of seventeen. He is extremely pro-fascist and is obsessed with Benito Mussolini, whom he greatly admires. His high opinion of Mussolini results in him getting into arguments with such men as W.C. Fields and Al Jolson, who subsequently refuse to associate with him. He eventually goes to Italy to work directly for Mussolini during the Second World War. He is accepted by Mussolini, who welcomes the public support of such a famous artist, but is finally killed in battle by British troops.
Marilee Kemp is Dan Gregory’s mistress, who persuades Gregory to take Rabo as his apprentice. She eventually becomes Rabo’s love interest and later the two of them are expelled from Gregory’s studio when he catches them leaving the Museum of Modern Art together. They have a very brief affair which Marilee ends, claiming that Rabo is not the man she needed at the time. Through a series of events she becomes a rich countess in Italy.
Edith Taft is Rabo’s second wife of twenty years. Dorothy Roy is Rabo’s first wife; she has left with their two boys, Terry and Henri.
Rabo’s parents are survivors of the Armenian genocide who are then tricked by a con man into buying a fake deed for a house in San Ignacio, California, where they move in order to create a better life. His father, having been a teacher in Turkey, ends up becoming a cobbler when they reach their new home. When the Great Depression hits the family falls on very hard times.
Allison White is Rabo’s live-in cook, though he never refers to her as anything besides that until she becomes upset with him for never using her name. She has a daughter, Celeste, who also lives with them.
