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The latest darling of modern art is a modest, muscular, 33-year-old painter from California named John Hultberg. He was almost unknown until two months ago, when he took the top ($2,000) prize at the Corcoran Gallery's biennial show of U.S. art in Washington. The Corcoran bought the prize-winning picture, and Manhattan's Whitney Museum picked up another. Last week a Hultberg exhibition at Manhattan's Martha Jackson Gallery drew warm notices, and at week's end Hultberg got another prize for his three entries in an international show of artists under 35 at Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art.

For his swift rise Hultberg can thank first a considerable talent, and second the fading of yesterday's fashion. That fashion was for "abstract-expressionist" pictures, which recoiled from perspective and recognizable three-dimensional shapes, instead relied purely on vast, flat swirls and puddlings of paint, paint, paint. Painter Hultberg, who once studied with two leaders of the school, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, was among the first to rebel against it. While the fad was still at its height, he walked Manhattan's 57th Street with his canvases under his arm, vainly trying to interest the dealers in his own new approach to painting. But when the slap and dab of abstract-expressionism began to become a bore, the time was ripe for Individualist Hultberg.

His pictures are semi-abstractions, but most look rather like landscapes. Hultberg borrows from De Chirico the trick of making deep, dark perspectives of converging lines. Instead of placing figures in his perspectives, Hultberg strews about a variety of three-dimensional symbols resembling portholes, ladders, wreckage, trap doors, sudden cliffs, wings and flying boxes.

The prevailing gloom is laced with latent excitement, for he fills his brush strokes with nervous energy and uses crude but dramatic color schemes involving generous clouds of black and ultramarine which emit red and white flashes. Composition is perhaps his strong point: like most of his canvases. Hultberg's Airport (see cut) looks elaborate as a house of cards, yet solid as a concrete runway.

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