Fresh Old Masters

Were all the 2,000-odd works in the art collection of Manhattan's Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum ever put on view at one time, some observers might wonder just how it got to be so famous. Since its original commitment was to nonobjective art, it is about 80% abstract, but even in its chosen field, its omissions--Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell. to mention only a few--are glaring. Nevertheless, the corkscrew museum's new director. Thomas Messer, last week put on a show from the collection that was a delight from the third spiral to the ground floor: an exhibition of the museum's ''old masters.''

The old masters of a museum of nonobjective art tend to be those who led art to eliminating the image. The show begins with Cezanne's famed Clockmaker, a portrait whose rugged angularity foreshadowed cubism. Next come two of

Braque's finest works; both have musical instruments as their theme, but they also undertake to show the instruments' rhythms. Robert Delaunay's Eiffel Tower is cubism at its most liquid, as if it were a scene reflected in a pool of troubled water, A few feet away, Delaunay uses powerful swirls of clashing colors to prove that "color alone is both form and subject." Rousseau was never more endearing than in his Artillerymen, who are all stiffly lined up as in a regimental photograph. And Marc Chagall was never more touching and imaginative than in his fantasy called Birthday. The painting shows a husband floating in, mid-air as he lands a kiss on his wife's lips. Chagall said it was inspired by the phrase "head over heels in love."

A yellow cow by German Expressionist Franz Marc looks like something out of a child's nursery rhyme. Small Seurat peasants bend to their toil near some childlike magic created by Paul Klee and a few austere and haunting landscapes by Lyonel Feininger. And near them hang the museum's latest acquisitions--two perfect chrysanthemums, one in pencil, the other in watercolor--done by Piet Mondrian in the days before he began painting his color-laden grilles.

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