Newsday from New York, New York • 6

Cuomo Could Find Reprieve at Polls a- I it' By Miriam Pawel Newsday Albany Bureau Chief Some politicians said it was not a question of the lady or the tiger, but rather a choice of tigers. But a Friday ruling by a state Parole Board panel may actually have relieved Gov. Mario Cuomo of an emotionally charged and sticky political issue. Although the panel that rejected Gary McGi- verns parole overruled Cuomos clemency recommendation, it wasnt necessarily a political defeat for the governor. By commuting McGivems 25-years-to-life sentence, six years after he recommended that former Gov.

Hugh Carey take such a step, Cuomos conscience was clear. His New Years Eve clemency fulfilled promises to McGivems supporters, albeit three years into Cuomos term. By keeping McGivem behind bars, the three-member Parole Board panel blunted the political impact of an issue that could have been exploited by Republicans in Cuomos upcoming re-election cam- paign. ANALYSIS Although McGivems ap- peal will come up before the full Parole Board sometime in the next six months, Fridays decision puts the matter on hold after a storm of protest that followed Cuomos decision. Cuomo and his advisers stressed that the governors decision to recommend clemency for McGivem, convicted for his involvement in the murder of a deputy sheriff, was made without consideration for political ramifications.

"If that were a factor, I wouldnt have done what I did, Cuomo said Friday. Tm no dummy politically. I can count. I know whats popular ml whats not. If I were concerned about doing the popular thing, I wouldnt have done the McGivem case.

But Cuomo advisers said they didn't think the issue would hurt them at the polls, despite attempts by Republicans to draw attention to the case. The Republicans have said the severity of McGivems crime required that he serve the full sentence. "The reason Mario Cuomo is governor is not because people agree with all of his positions on issues, said the governors son and adviser, Andrew Cuomo, who managed the 1982 gubernatorial campaign. "The reason he is as popular as he Continued on Page 28 Tip Tags Suspect The Associated Press One of the state's most wanted men was in custody yesterday after a victim spotted the suspects picture in a newspaper and led police to his door. Raul Carderon Lascano, 33, was scheduled for arraignment last night on charges of first-degree robbery and first-degree assault for a December knife attack on a Manhattan man who required 270 stitches.

He was on the states "12 most wanted list for the murder of a Rochester man in 1984. Authorities said Lascano was arrested at 8:15 p.m. Friday outside 301 Audubon Ave. in upper Manhattan. The victim of the Dec.

8 robbery and knifing, Esteban Romeo, 22, had seen Lascano's picture accompanying the 12 most-wanted list in a Bpaniah-lan-guage newspaper. Romeo then told police where Lascano lived, said Lt. Thomas Fahey. It was not clear how Romeo knew where to find the suspect. AT Photo ft Home for an Overdue Hug Space shuttle Columbia captain Robert Gibson Is wet-corned to Houston by his wife, astronaut Rhea Seddon, and son, Paul, yesterday.

Columbia landed at Edwards Ar Force Base, two days late yesterday, ending a hard-luck, six-day mission that included seven postponed launches and three wave-offs from landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Museum Lures Like a Countess Her own artistic gifts were for displays of melancholia in its more romantic and high-born phases. The 20 of her watercolors that the Manhattan museum assembled run to scenes of women weeping beside drooping willows or on rose carpets in front of gold-leafed dressing tables. She flirted as across the dinner table with republican notions, and a cherished subject of her prose was Byron, to whom she was drawn possibly because he was a radical poet and probably because he was a radical Peer. Not the least of her exhibitions delights is its catalogue, in winch Edgar unhall has achieved a unique mixture of charming gossip with exemplary scholarship.

Her century is irretrievably Balzacs property, and Munhall introduces us, not as magisterially as Ingres but almost as usefully, to an apotheosis of those countesses of Balzacs, who are not, of course, the suspect variety of his own experience but in this case the real thing of his dreams. And, having been made enough aware of what she thought she was, we travel up from the glass cases in the Fricks basement to what Ingres saw she was. She has come home jom the ball in her lilac silk dress and she leans against the blue velvet on the mantle where she has placed the days visiting cards. Ingres has posed her with the inclined head and the pensive finger at the dun that she herself had used to render Didos grief over Aeneass desertion in one of her own little paintings. At last the eye strays from draperies, arms and shoulders to be finally transfixed by a mouth, mall, graceful and totally in command.

The sovereign coquette has announced herself by the very absence of coquetry. Henceforth she can Dido us no more Didoes; this is not a mouth that would have crumpled at the loss of Aeneas; it is The Ingres portrait of the Comtesse dHauason-ville, formidable edifice though it is, sits as just one of so many great things in the Frick Collection that even those of us addicted to worship there are apt to pass it with a hasty nod of respect on our way to the Titians and the Bellini. But now the Frick has mounted an exhibition with no subject except Ingres and his countess. There are studies for the portrait, scraps from her life and works and artifacts from the fashions of the reign of Louis Phillipe. The effect is of having been put under arrest and sentenced to a fixed and concentrated attention upon this single painting.

We have been held in bondage to one woman and one woman only and that process, as always, opens us up for those rewards that hide nowhere except in the regions of the obsessive. de Stael was Madame dHauasonvilles grandmother and her own mother was the Duchesse de Broglie. The Broglies are imbedded in 19th-Century French history as demonstrations in proof of the habit that revolutions have of concluding with the triumph of the very class they set out to overthrow. There were revolutions and counterrevolutions and new revolutions and, after each turn of the wheel, there was a Broglie and a dHaussonville still at its top. Louise dHaussonvilles father, husband, brother and son were each a member of the French Academy and thus consecrated with the authority to blackball Balzac.

precisely the mouth to have sent him about his business nd turned with very little expectation of any pleasant surprise to read her visiting cards. She looks upon us, her unfamiliars, with the gravely courteous face that wonders if and how we lumpen to be amongthose invited. Ana so the Comtesse ITHausaonville has turned out to be not quite the most sublime image in the Frick Collection but certainly the nearest thing to its spirit, which is of the high arrogance that expresses itself in self-effacement. I myself never go. though its gates without the sense that I have been allowed to pass solely because I am delivering a bundle from my mother, the laundress.

The Frick is aingnlar among our major museums for not seeming annexed to a department store. There is not even a snack bar, because the Frick endures us but does not propose to ask us to lunch. But it is, after all, the gift of its founder, Henry Clay Frick, and his were not hands pulsing with warmth. As chairman of the board of Carnegie Steel he broke a strike in Homestead, so savagely that Alexander Berkman, the anarchist, attempted to rebuke him by shooting him. I had long entertained the romantic illusion that this encounter taught Frick to stop collecting Bougereaus and start buying Turners.

But the improvement of hia taste was not at all the work of pnarehiat cultural persuasion, however involutarily absorbed. Frick recovered and went on gobbling up Bougereaus until Carnegie fired him from United States Steel, after which he switched to Turner and began building this temple to his otherwise sooty glory. Wisdom begins not with exposure to anarchist preachment but with the direct experience of vie-timage by a capitalist. i I a 1 fa A 1 1 i t. i isrf A I T'' I yT rr..