Bluebeard - Orreadi

English language

Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916–1988) is a 1987 novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut. Told in first-person narrative, it describes the later years of fictional Abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian, who first appeared as a minor character in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (1973). The novel’s circumstances bear a rough resemblance to the fairy tale of Bluebeard, popularized by Charles Perrault, a connection that Karabekian mentions once in the novel.

5 editions

Chris reviewed Bluebeard

4 stars

Reads very much like Catch-22 if the characters had survived and gone on to live an uneasy life in the early days of the new York postwar art scene. Vonnegut is his usual misanthropic self although here he only seems to extend this to men, not women. It's quite clear that WW2 blew his mind and not in a good way and this feeds into his work more in some works than others - this is one of the ones where it does, in the form of Rabo Karabekian, Armenian turned American, artist turned art dealer. It appeared in 1987, at which point Rabo is in his 70s, and still soon enough after WW2 that people shouldn't have been idealising it. There are no very endearing characters - everyone (including the women) is out for what they can get, and Rabo would really like to be allowed to get on …

Reads very much like Catch-22 if the characters had survived and gone on to live an uneasy life in the early days of the new York postwar art scene. Vonnegut is his usual misanthropic self although here he only seems to extend this to men, not women. It's quite clear that WW2 blew his mind and not in a good way and this feeds into his work more in some works than others - this is one of the ones where it does, in the form of Rabo Karabekian, Armenian turned American, artist turned art dealer. It appeared in 1987, at which point Rabo is in his 70s, and still soon enough after WW2 that people shouldn't have been idealising it. There are no very endearing characters - everyone (including the women) is out for what they can get, and Rabo would really like to be allowed to get on and make art only life gets in the way.

Rabo is somehow at the start of the shift from Paris to New York as the centre of the art world - a shift that led to painters such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, and away from people like Serge Poliakoff, a Russian emigre in Paris who might otherwise have been better known. It also quite probably led to art being replaced by money as the principal driver, despite the counter-cultural claims and the legitimate rebellion of people like Basquiat. But who knows where Art will settle next? It's a restless ghost and may go anywhere, if it can escape the howling of AI that threatens to undermine the very notion of what we count as creativity.