THE SAD DOORMAN

AT Minneapolis' Walker Art Center last week was a brilliant and very odd exhibition of pictures by Attilio Salemme, who died four years ago at 43. Before he died, Salemme had shaped to near perfection a wholly personal idiom. His retrospective show, which originated at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and will move to Manhattan's Whitney Museum later this month, proved Salemme to have been sad and chill, yet magical, and a colorist of weird subtlety.

A sailor's son, Salemme was born in a Boston suburb, went to Manhattan at 18 and made it his own, educating himself at the public library. For a living he tried many menial jobs: he ran elevators, once worked as doorkeeper at the Guggenheim Museum. He long hesitated between painting and writing, failed to paint a picture that struck him as "a personal statement" until he was 32. In the eleven years of his life that remained, Salemme sold pictures to Manhattan's Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern museums. He was also commissioned to paint murals for posh Manhattan House and the old Moore-McCormack liner Argentina. Yet he was more respected than sought after; Salemme and his family stayed poor.

The odd thing about Salemme's art is that it appears to be abstract and is not. He was a figurative painter, working with multihued geometric figures of his own invention and picturing them, precisely arranged, on vacuum-cleaned stage sets. His figures seem about to spring into action, like the Tin Woodman of Oz. They could not look more mute; yet they speak of the human condition. Vintage of Uncertainties cruelly evokes the uncertain aspects of motherhood. The Oracle delicately poses a horrendous question: Which is the Oracle? Who is to be believed?

Salemme's colors were almost always beautiful and bright, hence the subtlety of their effect: he pictured nightmares in the sunshine, petal-hued evils, well-scrubbed and enameled enigmas. His art gives vividly the same confusing message that he once put into words. "Life," Salemme wrote, "has infinite doors to beckon with, and each day reveals new doors, and men continue to pass through new doors, and we live in an age when men are no longer content with discovering new doors, but have begun to close them and erect them around themselves. But there is no escape from the door that all doors lead to."

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