Masterpieces of Modern Art: The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection, photos by Lee Boltin, selected and with a foreword by Dorothy Canning Miller. New York: Hudson Hills Press (dist. by Simon & Schuster). 256 pp. $45.

Nelson Rockefeller, as almost everyone knows, was an important collector of contemporary art, whose collection of modern masters was spread out among his various city and country homes.This volume is a picture-book compilation of that collection. It has an introduction by Mr. Rockefeller (written when this book was in its planning stage), an essay by Alfred H. Barr Jr., a preface by Dorothy Canning Miller, and a text by William S. Lieberman. All are brief and to the point - and leave the vast bulk of the book to pictures. These are in color and are excellent, and pretty much cover the entire range of 20th-century modernism from Arp to Warhol, and from the late years of the 19th century to the mid-1970 s.This book is recommended as a supplement to other more definitive studies of modern art.