Manhattan Menu

Manhattan's galleries and museums were offering something for every taste, and in Thanksgiving-size servings.

For the cultural trendspotters, the big attraction was the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting--a serious effort to cull the best 150 U.S. pictures of the year. If the Whitney is right, it was a great year for introspective tube-squeezing and brush-squiggling. Typical example of the nonobjective work that dominated the show: William Baziotes' Phantasm, with weird blues, greens and mauves melting across the canvas like sherbet on warm linoleum.

The Museum of Modern Art's big fall show was a retrospective exhibit of 145 works of Henri Matisse. Matisse milestones such as the handsomely detailed Red Studio showed what can be done with bold colors, sprawling canvases and abstract designs when a master is at the easel.

In many ways, the most magnificent show of the season was the one displayed at Wildenstein & Co. To celebrate the firm's soth year in the U.S., Wildenstein's borrowed back 62 of the masterpieces the gallery had sold to U.S. museums and collectors. Among them: Titian's heroic Man with the Falcon, Watteau's romantic The Mezzetin and Cezanne's spacious Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffon.

The Metropolitan Museum was buzzing, too. Besides displaying the impressive private collections of Museum Benefactors Edward S. and Mary Stillman Harkness and Sam Lewisohn, the Metropolitan is getting set for next month's show, "American Sculpture, 1951." Last year a group of advance-guard artists blasted the museum (and boycotted its "American Painting Today, 1950") because the jury was too conservative for them. So far this time, three conservative sculptors have boycotted the show, and blasted the jury as too advanced.

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