BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : The 500 Cats of Theodor Geisel : THE SECRET ART OF DR. SEUSS, With an introduction by Maurice Sendak <i> (Random House: $30; 96 pp.)</i>

Remember the sensation created by Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga Pictures”? Or when the treasures of Tutankhamen arrived at the Metropolitan Museum as if they had just been unearthed from the desert sands? There’s an incomparable thrill in suddenly finding hidden treasure under a vein you already thought was rich. No wonder I was intrigued at the prospects of seeing “The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss.”

Who isn’t familiar with Seuss’ “public art”? He produced almost 50 books in the 50 years before his death in 1991, featuring jealous Sneetches, Yertle the Turtle, the Grinch and that playfully anarchic Cat in the Hat. However, when Seuss, a.k.a. Theodor Geisel, wasn’t working on his picture books, he was creating for his own amusement paintings, drawings and sculpture.

A mysterious cat peers out at you from the book jacket. It’s fitting to lead off with a cat. Perusing the book, I find lots of them, in all sorts of places: pool halls, gondolas, emerald mines. In one painting alone there must be several hundred. The old notion that artists instinctively depict characters in their own image makes me think Dr. Seuss might have had whiskers and a tail.

The first quarter of the book is devoted to what I’ll call Seuss’ brown or sepia period. These are mostly drawings in ink and watercolor, rich in intensity and strong in design, but lacking, for some reason, the color blue. Among them are some great early examples of his outlandishly curvaceous architecture where, in and among the spindly columns and spiraling stairways, humans happily coexist with a familiar stock of large hairy creatures.

This section is followed by sculptures. Well, not exactly sculptures. More like hunting trophies from a safari through “On Beyond Zebra.” Made of plaster, tiny-headed, huge-horned creatures smile fondly from wooden plaques. Even the most cold-hearted sharpshooter would have lost his aim chuckling at the visage of the “Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn.”

But, the highlight of the book is Seuss’ oil painting. Here is all the brightness of his picture books with an even freer range of color and style. There’s one picture, of a man holding a bird, that’s fluffy and pastel-colored like a Chagall and another, of an extremely long cat, that’s sharp-edged and dark like a Braque. A couple of strange, hallucinogenic landscapes recall the paintings of Max Ernst or Yves Tanguy--except that in each case, somewhere in the scene, there’s a cat. Surrealism, even Cubism, is apparent, as in the fractured perspective of a city where a feline detective pursues its quarry. The titles of the paintings (“The Rather Odd Myopic Woman Riding Piggyback on One of Helen’s Many Cats”) are comparable to those of the Dadaists.

Of course, what we’re experiencing here, is Seussism:

Seussism ( Soos-izm ), n. Fine Arts. A style of art characterized chiefly by a grandubulous sense of ornamentation and color, where exotic, snergelly architecture twists, turns and schloops into countless grickelly filigrees and flourishes, and rippulous shapes loom about in space as if they were some kind of new-fangled noodles let loose in zero gravity.

Unfortunately, the book that contains all this dynamic energy is designed as if it were a catalogue for an auction house. An insightful introduction by Maurice Sendak and a note from Seuss’ wife could have been the basis for a more thoughtful presentation. We’d like to know when and where the work was done, and what it may have been motivated by. However, nothing really diminishes Seuss’ secret art. Like Wyeth’s nudes and Tut’s gold, it’s worth the price.