In 20th century America, fashions in art have altered just as often and drastically as fashions in women's dress. Cocks of the walk in the 1930s were three Midwestern artists who are scarcely mentioned today: Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton. Their paintings (opposite and overleaf), included in a current retrospective show at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, are nostalgic reminders of a vanished era in recent U.S. history.

Death came to Wood and Curry in the 1940s, when both men were still in their prime. Terrible-tempered Tom Benton, the surviving member of the triumvirate, is 64, has not had a New York show in twelve years.

In his Kansas City home, Benton last week spoke almost mellowly of the good old days.

Benton dates his rise from the Great Crash: "Because of the breakdown of our economic society in 1929 and the early 1930s, the effort to come out of the Depression occasioned a terrific concentration on America -what it meant, what it was composed of, why it was the way it was -by Americans. Frankly, Wood, Curry and I profited from this concentration." With a flash of his old fire, Benton adds: "I will say that in the 1930s, art had more public value than it does now. It belonged to the public. Today it's the property of the dealers, the critics, the art professors and other esoteric specialists." Missouri born and bred, Benton once studied art in Paris, practiced most of the artistic isms then current there. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the only way to achieve universality is by picturing what one knows well. He returned to his own country-boy beginnings for inspiration -and came to be hailed as a Bruegel of the Corn Belt. July Hay, one if his best pictures, suffers from a finicky foreground and stagy middleground, yet shows a solid skill and assurance.

John Steuart Curry of Kansas began as a magazine illustrator. By dint of great effort he outgrew that kind of work, although he never quite shook the slavishness to subject matter that is its mark. But Curry did have the boldness to conceive a Cineramic view of the land he loved. At the height of his fame, he called Wisconsin Landscape "my greatest." Grant Wood, like Benton, sowed some Midwestern oats in Paris. There he sported shocking pink whiskers and a Basque beret, painted hazy, impressionistic canvases. Back home in his native Iowa, he mainly taught art for a living. He shaved his round face smooth, and assumed an exterior as mild as a cup of Ovaltine.

Wood once remarked that "all the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow," yet his best idea occured on a trip to Europe in 1928. It was simply to apply the smooth, meticulous style of the German and Flemish primitives to the American scene. Result: quick and spectacular success. Wood's American Gothic -a head-on portrayal of a sour, bald farmer with a pitchfork and his tight-lipped wife -became an icon for Paint America Firsters.

Midnight Ride of Paul Revere displays the strengths as well as the weaknesses of Wood's approach. It pictures a tidy, table-top model rather than the natural world (genre painters have a weakness for making all things resemble still lifes), and lacks every grace save precision. Yet it does tell its story, lightly, clearly and unforgettably.

The most fashionable figures in U.S. art today are abstract expressionists of the so-called "New York School," De Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell & Co.

Like Wood, Curry and Benton before them, they are touted as pioneers expanding the frontiers of American painting. Their rise gives Tom Benton as much puzzlement as pain. "The art of today," he exclaims, "is the art of the 1920s, which we repudiated!"

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