SPLENDID HANDFUL

SUMMER visitors to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week threaded their way through one of the finest shows the museum has ever mounted: close to 160 "modern" paintings (by the museum's definition, "modern" harks all the way back to Edouard Manet), all borrowed from private collectors. The exhibition was eye-opening evidence of the success U.S. collectors have had in capturing some of the gems of 19th and 20th century European painting. From his private contributors, Curator Alfred H. Barr Jr. was able to put together a selection that few public collections in the U.S. or Europe could approach.

This week the Modern announced that six canvases in the show will permanently-grace, its cool halls. Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat (donated by David Rockefeller) helps the Modern correct what it considers the "weakness" of its late 19th century collection. Cezanne's canvases are currently thought to be a sort of touchstone of modern art--he is the idolized grandfather whose very presence lends authority to the struggles of his successors--and the Boy is an excellent example "of his pioneering portraiture.

Others of the splendid handful were a large still life by Joan Miro (donated by Armand G. Erpf), far harsher than the later, playful abstractions that made his fame, and a cheesecloth-and-plaster picture by Paul Klee (donated by Stanley Resor) entitled The Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber. Klee's painted maze symbolized the singer by her initials alone, and her voice by the liltingly arranged vowels. A, E, I, O, U.

Curator Barr was particularly proud of his two new Matisses (donated by John Hay Whitney and Samuel Marx). One, called Goldfish and Sculpture, he had been hoping to get for years. The other was The Moroccans (see color page), a 9-ft.-wide canvas that Matisse painted in 1916 and kept for himself through his life. Barr, a careful and scholarly sort, unhesitatingly describes it as "the greatest Matisse this side of Moscow."*

Most recent canvas on the list was Election Night (donated by Joseph H. Hirshhorn), which bitter, Boston-bred Expressionist Jack Levine finished only last winter. An elaborate satire, coruscating with brilliant bits of still life, filled with unhappy specimens of real life and veiled in silvery, glancing lights, Levine's picture was designed to hold both the eye and the mind. As of the moment, almost no one places Levine among the "masters" of modern art. But at 40, Levine is not afraid to paint pictures that demand mastery; he has brilliance, seriousness and a sense of his own time which may have an even greater impact on museumgoers of the future.

* Russian museums of modern art were stocked by Czarist merchants who wintered on the Cote d'Azur in the balmy days before World War I and were among the first to patronize school-of-Paris art. Leningrad's Hermitage Museum and Moscow's Pushkin Museum between them remain the world's greatest repository of early Matisse paintings.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.