The 200

Manhattan's huge Metropolitan Museum confronts the strong-legged visitor with almost every sort of art object, from Egyptian soup spoons to a colonial American sugar cutter. But critics have often accused the Met of being overcool to 20th Century U.S. painting. Last week the Met answered its critics by putting on exhibit 200 of the best paintings from its collection of U.S. art since 1900.

Hung in chronological order, the show went back to the 19th Century masters who had lived on beyond the turn of the century. Ranged against their contemporaries and followers of the last 50 years, they still ranked with the best the U.S. has produced. Two of them--Whistler and Sargent--had been polished expatriates whose works reflected London and London society with all the elegance and sheen of an opera hat. Landscapist Winslow Homer and Philadelphia Portrait Painter Thomas Eakins, who stayed at home, painted with a directness and clarity that no U.S. artist has yet surpassed.

Wide & Windy. The next generation of reportorial artists, concentrating on city life and emphasizing its seamy side, never approached the consistent quality of their four great predecessors. But they had long outlived their early scornful nickname: the "ashcan school." Now the work of such men as Henri, Luks, Glackens and Bellows looks far more lively than grim. And the school produced a couple of the show's near masterpieces: Bellows' wide and windy Up the Hudson and Glackens' sparkling Green Car.

Best of the regional paintings of the '30s was the late Grant Wood's neat, cleverly staged bit of imagined history, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Though few contemporary U.S. paintings ever sell for more than $3,500, the Met had peeled off $15,000 to acquire it from the Memphis Y.W.C.A. this year.

The Met's exhibit as a whole showed once again that realism in the U.S., as in Europe, has been on the wane for the last 50 years. Before the turn of the century, Albert Pinkham Ryder was laughed at for his dreamy, semi-abstract seascapes. Successors such as John Marin made abstraction an important part of U.S. art history, and today it is the language of hundreds of young American painters.

Soapy & Foggy. Not many of those younger painters were represented in the Met's exhibition, though a bequest from the late great Photographer and Art Promoter Alfred Stieglitz helped bring the Met's collection up to date, and the museum had bought 50-odd paintings in two years to fill some of the remaining gaps. Among its selections were a soapy surfscape by Frederick Waugh, a dusty studio composition by Robert Brackman, and a foggy abstraction by Theodores Stamos. The conservative Met had clearly done its backbending best to give contemporary art a fair, inclusive showing.

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