CONTEMPORARY CROSS SECTION

IN 75 years of collecting, the Smith College Museum of Art (at Northampton, Mass.) has kept right up with the times. Among its purchases was a $100 canvas bought direct from Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), who now ranks among the handful of masters America has produced. This week a loan show of 27 more recent paintings in Smith's collection opened at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum. As the American samples opposite and overleaf show, the collection neatly cross-sections contemporary painting.

Robert Motherwell's Collage is apt to strike laymen as just terrible, and young U.S. painters as just wonderful. His "abstract expressionism" might be defined as picturing nothing at all with a minimum of conscious effort--it makes art a game. Yet the thousands of contemporary artists who paint like Motherwell are a solemn lot on the whole, and as dedicated to their lonely games of self-expression as any academic realist is to copying things.

Kenneth Lipstreu makes a living designing layouts for advertisements, paints in his spare time. His Transformer applies Picasso's cubist experiments of 40-odd years ago to the present-day industrial scene. Perhaps because it sticks to an established tradition of abstraction, his picture is much easier to take, and also to forget, than Motherwell's.

Franklin Watkins, who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is an older type of traditionalist. His Solitaire echoes in its modest way the efforts of such masters as Toulouse-Lautrec and such titans as Tintoretto. Combining human pathos and delightful paint, quality, the picture follows the ancient though rarely stated rule of appealing to laymen and artists equally.

Samuel Green is head of Wesleyan University's art department, considers himself an amateur. His thoughtful realism, at the opposite pole from Motherwell's work, creates an effect of mere niggling or near magic, depending on the viewer.

If there is no one to compare with Thomas Eakins in Smith's contemporary show, it does underline what is most encouraging about U.S. art now: its range.

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