Another

By ROBERT HUGHES

When the Metropolitan Museum opens its new Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for 20th century art next week, New York City's role as the world's main showplace for modern painting and sculpture may fairly be said to have reached its saturation point. After the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum, this is the fourth major institution on the island of Manhattan given over to collecting, showing, classifying and presenting ideas about the art of this century -- not counting the hundreds of commercial galleries and dozens of "alternative spaces" with which the city is studded.

If there is anyone out there who still imagines that modernism is not the official culture of our day, not the secular religion of the U.S., this project will dispel those last illusions. The wing, named for the late co- founder of the Reader's Digest, who was the largest donor, cost $26 million to build and will require an additional $2 million a year for operating expenses. One does not go spending such amounts on the marginal and the controversial -- on what modernism used to be when the chairman of the Met's 20th century department, William S. Lieberman, 62, formerly of MOMA, was scarcely a gleam in his Irish mother's eye.

What has the Met got for this money? In round figures, 60,000 sq. ft. of new exhibition space, bigger than either the Guggenheim (38,000 sq. ft.) or the Whitney (23,000 sq. ft.). It will be a long time before the Met's contemporary wing starts bursting at the seams like its older cousins. Its | architects, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, are masters of institutional tone, with a steely disdain for the outre and the overdeclarative; nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art, as one can see in their handling of such previous Met expansions as the American Wing and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The detailing is exact, the procession of spaces through the 22 new galleries finely modulated and keyed to the contents; where large sculpture needs lots of light and air (plus a whiff of drama), it gets them from a high greenhouse gallery; and where the smaller size of early modernist painting wants a more aedicular and comfortable sense of scale, it gets that.

One carries away the impression that virtually everything in the new wing -- from its roomful of Paul Klees (a gift from that doyen of European art dealers, Heinz Berggruen) to its enormous, rambling and rhapsodical environment by Robert Rauschenberg, 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece -- sits in the right place and space. This is no small architectural achievement. Roche Dinkeloo's plan avoids the inflexible, linear character of many museum layouts, seen at its worst at the Guggenheim, which propels the visitor on a one-way trip down the tunnel of art history; instead, the Met wing invites one to reflect, pause, circle, go back, compare.

This suits the curatorial temper of the Met's 20th century department very well. Its stress lies on connoisseurship and comparison, rather than on telling the whole story of 20th century art. The Met's modern collection is not equal to that task anyway. Apart from decorative arts and furniture, it consists of some 6,000 works and is smaller than the Whitney's; it hardly begins to compare in scope and depth with MOMA's 65,000 objects.

Met Director Philippe de Montebello is careful to point out that the museum has collected and shown the work of contemporary artists for the past half-century and that modernism -- early, middle, late and post -- is part of its mandate as an encyclopedic museum. True, up to a point; but its early relations with modern art were never enthusiastic, and during the crucial years in which great modernist collections could still be formed for not much money -- from 1930 to 1965 -- it fudged the issue of commitment. Despite two bequests totaling $250,000 given early in the century by Retailer George A. Hearn for acquiring contemporary American paintings, the Met did not have an active department of contemporary art until Henry Geldzahler joined it as / curator in 1967; and even then it was seldom in real competition with either MOMA or the Whitney.

Hence its collection is uneven: strong in fauvism and the pre-cubist school of Paris but weak in surrealism, with some early Picassos, like the 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, and the late Braques, like The Billiard Table, 1944-52, of ravishing quality; obstructed by (mostly) dull American figurative works by John Steuart Curry, Jack Levine and the like, bought with Hearn's money in the '20s and '30s, that ought to be a footnote to the American Wing; dense with fair-to-splendid examples of early American modernists (Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others) and later abstract expressionists, but far too light on German expressionism, Dada and constructivism. Lieberman and his associate curator, Lowery Sims, have done a brilliant job with what they have, installing the paintings and sculptures so as to evoke unexpected similarities, rhymes, comparisons, rather than the stolid march of historical sequence. Theirs is a reflective hanging, full of aesthetic surprises, and the most sensible way to make the best of an incomplete conspectus that is, nevertheless, well sprinkled with masterpieces.

They have also plunged deep into the art of the '80s to build a base for the year 2000. Given the shrinking number of 20th century masterpieces filtering onto the market and their relentlessly inflating prices, the Met will never be able to catch up with MOMA. But its gravitational pull as an institution should not be underestimated. The Met is the greatest general museum in America, and its new wing marks what may be the final phase in the competition for modernist icons. Quite a few of the privately owned works that Lieberman was assumed to have lined up for MOMA at the end of his 34 years of curatorial service there now seem to be pointed at the Met. Over the next few years, the battle of the codicils and the wooing of art widows should prove quite intense.