IN 75 years of collecting, the Smith College Museum of Art (at Northampton, Mass.) has kept right up with the times. Among its purchases was a $100 canvas bought direct from Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), who now ranks among the handful of masters America has produced. This week a loan show of 27 more recent paintings in Smith's collection opened at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum. As the American samples opposite and overleaf show, the collection neatly cross-sections contemporary painting.
Robert Motherwell's Collage is apt to strike laymen as just terrible, and young U.S. painters as just wonderful. His "abstract expressionism" might be...