THE surging popularity of U.S. painting in the art centers of Western Europe apparently does not stop short at the Iron Curtain. Proof of this is arriving at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art in the form of scores of warm letters of appreciation from painters, sculptors, critics, curators and librarians--many of them speaking out to the West for the first time--from the muted lands of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania. What triggered this spontaneous outpouring of sentiment was a single book: Three Hundred Years of American Painting by Alexander Eliot, an associate editor of TIME, which was published last November. Warmly as the book was received by U.S. critics, it now turns out that its best notices come from intellectuals and painters behind the Iron Curtain.

Hopeful of opening direct channels of communication with art movements in the satellite countries, the Whitney Museum had sent some 300 copies of the book overseas addressed to museums and individual artists. From Warsaw and Cracow, Budapest and Szeged, Prague, Zatec and Bucharest came a stream of letters, catalogues, books and even original drawings and engravings from artists who wished to reciprocate the Whitney's gesture. The letters were scrupulously nonpolitical. Nearly all had two points in common: 1) unstinting praise for the book, and 2) surprise that American painting was so good. One Rumanian intellectual, unreported for years and presumed by his U.S.

friends to have disappeared long ago, wrote carefully: "The book renders me a great pleasure, and it fills a real gap in our knowledge of American art." A Budapest painter wrote: "We marvel at the richness of your art, of which we have only vague knowledge." From a librarian in Szeged: "This excellent work has aroused in our reading public a great interest.

It goes from hands to hands." "Let's do more of this," suggested an impressionist painter from Czechoslovakia. "It is much better to exchange books than missiles." Most of the letters were in good English, a few in German.

Even the weekly Literarni Noviny, published by the Union of Czechoslovak Writers, was moved to mix praise of the TIME volume with big-brotherly caution. It ran a reproduction of Richard Florsheim's Night City from the book and commented:

"This is a step in the right direction. It is certainly better than mailing to our cultural workers various revisionist scribblings dealing with national Communism and earmarked solely for export. While we reject such malicious tricks, it is with the greatest pleasure that we become acquainted, through Three Hundred Years of American Painting, with the true national culture of the American people."

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