• U.S.

Art: Trojan Enterprise

3 minute read
TIME

TOO BUSY TO PAINT? CALL ON THE GHOST ARTISTS. WE PAINT IT—YOU SIGN IT, read an advertisement in the Washington Post last week. Explaining further, the ad said that Ghost Artists were well qualified to turn out work in almost any manner: primitive (“Grandma Moses type”), impressionist, modern, cubist and abstract.

Washington newsmen descended on Ghost Artists and at its headquarters in residential Georgetown, found a prosperous-looking man named Hugh Troy, 44, who described himself as an illustrator of children’s books. His little outfit, said Troy, had been operating for a couple of years (without advertising). Among its satisfied clients, he said, without naming any, have been military men, Government officials, doctors, businessmen and art students, as well as a Wall Street broker who commissioned an entire exhibition in order to break into “arty circles.” Obviously, said Troy, he could not reveal the names of his staff artists, but he identified them as three painters, a sculptor and a Saturday Evening Post cover artist who enjoys doing abstractions in his off hours. “I know what we’re doing is wrong,” said Troy, putting on a repentant look. “Absolutely immoral . . . Once they start coming to us, they can never stop.”

The Washington Post decided that Ghost Artists deserved an editorial. Having recently written a tongue-in-cheek piece “in defense of the ancient and much maligned trade of ghostwriting,” the Post concluded that, “after some reflection, we can’t see anything morally amiss about this proposal . . .”

Hugh Troy’s old friends found his latest enterprise fascinating. They remembered instances of other fascinating Trojan enterprises. In 1927, when he was living in Manhattan, Jokester Troy bought himself a park bench that was an exact duplicate of the kind used by the city. Then he had some merry hours hauling it in & out of Central Park—happily waving his bill of sale after police hauled him off to the station. Later, Troy and a few good friends equipped themselves with work clothes, picks, shovels and roadblocks, spent an industrious evening digging a ten-foot hole in a midtown Manhattan street without being caught. Another time he attached an artificial hand to his sleeve, took a trip through the Holland Tunnel. After fastening his toll ticket between the plaster fingers, he whizzed by the collection station, left both ticket and hand in the grasp of a horrified attendant. In addition, he has diverted himself by planting fake pearls in oysters, coaching South Sea Island native youngsters in fantastic Troy-devised folk tales to be retold to gullible anthropologists.

Troy’s latest jape may not be up to some of his old ones, but he finds that it has helped to relieve the monotony of life in the capital.

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