Hot Capriccios

Philip C. Curtis paints like no one else under the sun, in whose bright bath he lives on the Arizona desert near Phoenix. Born in Michigan 57 years ago, and trained in art at Yale, Curtis moved to Arizona mostly to soothe a severe case of arthritis. Yet his parched art now appears as if it were formed solely in the spread-eagle landscape, the quartz-clear air, and the human isolation of a land where nature seems with out scale. The figures in his paintings float like mirages, their pinpoint eyes sad as those of pedestrians in hell.

This mystical country stirs such admiration in Arizona that five years ago Phoenix boosters formed a syndicate to finance Curtis for three years' work. Then Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. took him on, selling his better oils at $3,000 apiece. Now the bachelor artist lives in a cool wooden bungalow on a dirt road called Cattle Track, paints prolifically and has no link to any school.

Style in Curtis is closer to old-fashioned capriccios than to surrealism. He puts familiar objects in unfamiliar settings with cavalier abandon. Almost every dreamlike painting is set on an undifferentiated desert stage. Bearded sages tote trays of naked dolls on their heads as if bearing man's fate on their minds, while disputing some unknown subject. A balloon bobs over a barren strand carrying a pipe organ. In The Drummer (see opposite page) the images on flaking and fading billboards alternate between stage flats and solid figures in a wistful play of appearance and reality.

Curtis charges his thin, unpainterly work, stronger in thought than technique, with static neurosis. He uses the color red liberally because, says he, it "has a sort of unrelated strength and isn't seen much in nature." He uses doorways and chairs in abundance. "An empty chair has great impact," he notes. "Sometimes I think chairs are thrown out because there is so much of a person in it that he can't stand it any longer." He likes to point out that psychiatrists admire his work. His painted desert provokes the viewer to questions like unverbal, mysterious charades.

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