Classics of Modernism

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art got to thinking back, and then went rummaging in the cellar. Result: the biggest display yet of the Museum's permanent collection. "Painting and Sculpture," some 375 items strong, was also the Museum's clearest statement, to date, of its own taste.

Opening-nighters, strolling through an atmosphere of suave showmanship, got a strong impression that modernism's most resounding salvos are still being fired by French-school painters long dead (Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh) or artists now aging (Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse).

For "Painting and Sculpture" (which included photography and drawings) the Museum had prepared no special catalogue and skipped the usual expository wall-texts. Out from Museum vaults -- which house twice as much again as the current show -- came such familiar modern land marks as French Primitive Henri Rousseau's haunting, tactile Sleeping Gypsy, Pablo Picasso's monumental, screeching, early cubist Young Women of Avignon (painted in 1906-07 and considered the first cubist picture), Van Gogh's swirling Starry Night. Art lovers who looked for samples of what the Museum is buying today, or accepting as gifts, found:

P: Russian-born Marc Chagall's I and the Village, one of the forerunners of surrealism, painted in 1911.

P: A bold, hard, mechanistic abstraction hot off the easel of expatriate Frenchman Fernand Leger--The Great Julie, painted in 1945.

P: Manhattanite Stuart Davis' abstraction-from-nature, Egg Beater No. 5.

The Museum of Modern Art, 16 years old this summer, is now one of the most imposing fortresses of culture in the U.S. Last week a few advance-guardists were muttering that the Museum is growing conservative--i.e., sticking too close to modernism's reliable Old Masters.

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