Art: From the Brink, Something Grand

THERE were drag queens mingling with society matrons, rock 'n' roll blasting through the halls where Rembrandt and Velasquez once reigned in hushed glory, and costumes ranging from fringed buckskin to China Machado chic. "Peace Now" buttons blossomed on satin evening gowns. Pamphlets denouncing David Rockefeller, Viet Nam and the art market were dispensed along with cocktails and tiny sandwiches. Outside, pickets protested the lack of black and women artists in the show. Manhattan's venerable Metropolitan Museum had never before been host to anything quite like it, a fact that was duly lamented by diehard traditionalists. The occasion? The Met's 100th birthday. With the opening last week of its first centennial exhibition, the museum seemed to be deGlaring that it had no intention of getting any older.

Gone were the velvet mounts, the El Grecos and the Goyas, all removed to temporary quarters. In their place were white walls and gray carpeting. And for the first time in the museum's history, the moderns held center stage. The show, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," was organized by the Met's controversial curator of contemporary arts, Henry Geldzahler (see box, page 81). A gargantuan display spreading over 35 galleries, a space that would easily accommodate the entire Museum of Modern Art, it traces the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism through its later manifestations in hard-edged abstraction on to the violent reaction that coalesced in Pop art. Essentially, it is the story of American art's coming of age.

As history, the Met's show is selective and flawed. Geldzahler has limited his exhibition to what he calls the New York School, by his definition a stylistic rather than a geographic limitation, and focused on what he sees as the central figures in the international modernist tradition. Given this definition, however, it is hard to see why he left out such major artists as Naum Gabo, Louise Nevelson, Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, William Baziotes, Richard Lindner, Larry Rivers, Marisol and Lee Bontecou. Even so, with 406 works by 43 artists, Geldzahler has assembled the most exhaustive survey ever of the period.

Something special happened in Manhattan in the early 1940s. For one thing, many of Europe's most innovative artists sought refuge in New York during

World War II. From Holland came Piet Mondrian, from Germany Hans Hofmann and George Grosz, from France Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst, providing the new generation of U.S. artists with direct links to Cubism ana Surrealism.