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Thoroughly discredited is the oldtime notion that fine works of art are the rightful property of an elite. But in the U. S. a good contemporary painting would still cost the average citizen half a year's income. A good painting by any one of the famous dead is as far out of his reach as the planet Jupiter. Museums own these things, and most museums try to attract people in to see them. Nothing, however, beats a museum for making the average man uncomfortable on Sunday afternoon.

Public pulse-takers are, nevertheless, agreed that an enormous interest in drawing, painting and modeling has recently arisen in the U. S. Whatever its source, this interest constitutes an economic demand. To meet it, there have been at least two ambitious attempts in the past six months to market excellent pictures at extremely low prices. Each was designed to do for the art of museums what radio has done for the art of symphonies--to bring it into U. S. homes. Last week each reached the stage of significant news.

Viennese. Since last August the Phaidon Press of Vienna has distributed through the Oxford University Press in New York and through Allen & Unwin, Ltd. in London eight volumes of reproductions, over which many a U. S. publisher is cursing enviously under his breath. Until they appeared, nothing of their quality could be bought in U. S. bookstores for under $5. The Phaidon's top price was $3, for an edition of Botticelli containing 101 plates, 14 in color, and an introduction by the eminent Critic Lionello Venturi. Lowest price was $1.50, for The Disasters of War, Goya's series of 85 etchings with a foreword by the late Elie Faure. Others were big books of reproductions of Titian, Cezanne, van Gogh, the Impressionists, Rembrandt.

This week appeared the ninth and cleverest of these jobs: Art Without Epoch, an anthology of 140 examples of "dateless" art from the past 4,000 years. Picked for their impact on the modern eye, Compiler Ludwig Goldscheider's exhibits will be much more fun for most laymen than a walk through the Louvre. An Egyptian mummy portrait* (see cut) done about 200 A. D. looks like the work of a modern illustrator, tricks of brushwork, pretty lifelikeness and all. A Greek idol from 2,000 B. C. is obviously nothing but abstract sculpture. More than any of the impressive books in the series, Art Without Epoch gets at a new popularizing technique.

The Phaidon Press is the 15-year-old creation of a fiery little Viennese bibliophile, Bela Horovitz. Beginning in 1925 to produce art books on a large scale for the German market, he wratched his sales boom for several years, then decline after Hitler came to power. Two years ago he decided to publish some of the same books and some new ones for French and English-speaking countries. Printing first editions of between 70,000 and 100,000 copies, Publisher Horovitz has been able to bring his prices down to the popular novel level. Scholars and critics respect them because European scholars and critics of authority collaborated in their making. Craftsmen admire them because their reproductions are the result of painstaking care and patience which has often extended to six months' labor on a single plate.

U. S. In Manhattan last week a more ambitious enterprise than this was weathering its fifth month. If, as its critics declared, it was a wreck, there was some reason for thinking it a noble one. It was the first attempt in the U. S. at getting out excellent prints of excellent paintings for a mass market. It took form last summer when a Manhattan lithographer named Bernard Metal, and James L. Wick, an Ohio newspaper publisher with educational and promotional interests, approached the idea of publishing color portfolios. Mr. Childs liked the idea and put up the money. He incorporated a "National Committee for Art Appreciation" and succeeded in getting a list of good names as sponsors. As a sure-fire way of marketing Mr. Metal's proposed portfolio of 48 prints of famous paintings, Mr. Childs and Mr. Wick hit on the idea of selling them to newspapers, to retail as circulation premiums. Cost to the public: 39-c- and coupons for each set of four.

What happened then was, by all accounts, unhappy. The first of 41 newspaper contracts required Lithographer Metal to begin delivering his reproductions in October. It was necessary in at least 15 cases out of the 48 to take the color photographs from which the reproductions were made, not from the original paintings but from other reproductions. With a press run of about 160,000 impressions, the process of offset lithography which Mr. Metal had developed for high-speed printing worked well for only about half the pictures. Like all other methods of color printing, this requires successive impressions for each of the primary colors. If the superimposition is not perfect, the "registration" is blurred.

By the time the New York Post started a brass-band circulation campaign with the Committee for Art Appreciation's prints fortnight ago, the quality of this speedy job had begun to draw fire from art critics and printers alike. To Editor Robert L. Leslie of P M, class trade magazine of commercial art, the Committee's Mona Lisa was jaundiced, its paper was cheap, and the whole thing was ''a commercial curse." Last week Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art expressed grave doubts of the value of Messrs. Childs's and Metal's efforts for art appreciation. Said he: "If the National Committee is really an educational or humanitarian organization, it seems to me it has been sadly mistaken in distributing color reproductions which for the most part travesty rather than reproduce the originals."

*On a panel entombed with the mummy as an additional guarantee of immortality.

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