MAKE BELIEVE FROM MEISSEN

THE taste for china figurines, once the playthings of Europe's princes, has largely descended to the level of the cheap knickknacks on a dime-store counter. Yet those minor masterpieces of the 18th century which survive today are attracting a growing band of devoted collectors willing to pay up to $15,000 apiece for their finds. One of the most successful, as the newly published catalogue of his Meissen china (Harvard University Press; $25) makes plain, is Manhattan's Irwin Untermyer.

Collector Untermyer, a longtime New York jurist, now retired at 70, inhabits a dark Fifth Avenue duplex crammed to its high ceilings with porcelains, splendid tapestries, bronzes and English furniture. He is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum farther up the Avenue, which should some day inherit the Untermyer collection. About the only thing in his apartment not destined for museum display is the TV set squatting patiently at the foot of his bed. Among his Meissen prizes are the three pieces shown opposite.

Meissen china got its start through alchemy, which produced no gold but bred generations of chemists. The kings of Europe regularly hired alchemists not only to try to produce the elusive gold, but also to discover what made Chinese porcelain superior to European kinds. In 1709 an alchemist named Boettger found the secret (based on using kaolin, a white clay that he found in his wig powder). He made the secret known to Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Augustus established a ceramics works at Meissen, destined to dominate European porcelain for the next 41 years.

All the ceramics opposite are by J. J. Kaendler, chief modeler at Meissen from 1733 to 1763, and the most brilliant in Meissen's history. Kaendler's pieces were intended chiefly for banquet settings of a sort that had previously been made in candy or wax. He could turn his patron's dining table into a miniature park or stage alive with glistening birds or gaily obscene mimes from the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Sometimes he would create a hunt, a concert, or a table-top display of drawing-room conceits. The Hand Kiss is part of a humorous circle of distractions derived from Moliere, in which the gallant's daring is brought to nothing by the lady's jealous lap dog and busy blackamoor.

Graceful and accurate rendition, rich and brilliant color are the obvious attributes of such work. Children and connoisseurs see in them something more important, a magic, as of make-believe caught in mid-fancy and securely held.

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