Ghosts at Noon

An old paddle steamer with high, spindly funnels lies composedly beached in a red desert. Saplings enclose it; years ago the river vanished. From a circus cage on wheels, a bearded paterfamilias glowers, serenaded by a man in tails (on cornet), a bus boy (French horn), a girl in evening dress (violin), and a child perched in a potted shrub, tapping on a drum. A scattering of vacant chairs inhabiting an empty, silent landscape marks the spot where a party died. Philip C. Curtis, 63, is possibly the only Surrealist now living in Arizona. But Surrealism is a term he uses "quietly, incidentally, to express my ideas. Most Surrealists are on the brutal side. I always have a note of tenderness."

Despite his chosen isolation in the West--where he retreated after some years as a peripatetic museum curator, a stint at Harvard's art history school and service as an art consultant with the OSS in Washington during World War II--Curtis has his international admirers. John Russell, art critic of the London Sunday Times, calls him "one of the last of the great hermits--St. Jerome without the lion." In the foreword to the catalogue for a retrospective of Curtis' work, Clare Boothe Luce observes: "To accept, as Philip Curtis does, that human folly and wisdom alike lead only to death, and still not give way to despair, but to the making of lovely and magic pictures, is the triumph of one human spirit." The show has toured the major art centers of the Southwest, next week opens at Manhattan's Coe Kerr gallery.

Curtis' paintings have none of the conceptual density or revolutionary aims of surrealist imagery; they are gentle, mannered, elegiac, peopled with doll-like Edwardian women and dandified men. These ghosts, thin and sharp as memory in the preservative desert air, flit through empty, curlicued facades or congregate amid their elaborate furniture, radiating a wistful chic; as image maker, Curtis is more elegant than challenging. His objects do not confront one another in shock, like Lautreamont's famous sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table--they nod, as it were, with mild and civil assent, a little surprised to find each other surviving in Arizona. Survival, in fact, is the keynote of such art. In the end, even the nostalgia of Philip Curtis' vision serves its purpose, which is to beguile the viewer into meditating on time and its erosions.

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