Museum and Gallery Listings for Nov. 5-11 - NYTimes.com
★ Asia Society Museum: ‘Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool,’ through Jan. 2. This Japanese artist, known for paintings and sculptures of big-eyed toddlers and friendly dogs redolent of children’s books, makes over the entire museum into a homey, deceptively beguiling blend of art, life, music and make-believe that includes a wonderland of wood-scrap passages, rooms, houses and clapboard walls. But the inspirations for the raw emotions of childhood here range from punk rock to Thoreau. Take the under-10 set; don’t be surprised if the kids get ideas. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street , (212) 327-9271, asiasociety.org. (Roberta Smith)
Brooklyn Museum: Fred Tomaselli, through Jan. 2. Mr. Tomaselli became known in the 1990s for paintings in which pills of all sorts, including psychedelics, aspirin, anti-depressants and other prescription medications, as well as marijuana leaves and images clipped from books and magazines, were arranged into compositions of dazzling, hallucinogenic complexity and sealed under glossy, transparent coats of plastic resin. This beautifully organized, two-decade retrospective does full justice to his mind-expanding art. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park , (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)
Brooklyn Museum: ‘Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,’ through Jan. 9. Why have there been no great female Pop artists? That’s the question we are invited to ask by this entertaining hodgepodge of paintings and sculptures by two dozen women who trafficked in mass culture imagery and styles but were overshadowed by the kings of Pop in the 1960s. Though it includes smart and cool works by Rosalyn Drexler, Idelle Weber, Chryssa, Vija Celmins and Kay Kurt, the show won’t overturn standard histories of an era that refused to take female artists seriously. But it infectiously evokes a mood of exuberant creative optimism that affected countless artists, men as well as women. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park , (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: ‘National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?,’ through Jan. 9. The fourth edition of this triennial is the largest yet and the most international in its reach. It is also, hands down, the most ecology-conscious. Design as defined here isn’t about how to make the House Beautiful more beautiful, but about how to keep the globe afloat and give all its occupants access to a healthy patch of it. Reduce, reuse, recycle are the imperatives embodied in the work, which includes a hand-cranked grain thresher made from repurposed materials, a light bulb fueled by dirt, and digital images of a new all-green, no-car city to be built in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The architectural projects included are particularly impressive, and if not every idea in the show is strong, many are already generating winds of change. 2 East 91st Street , (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Holland Cotter)
Frick Collection: ‘The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya,’ through Jan. 9. This special exhibition in the Frick’s lower-level galleries includes diverting studies and sketches by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and others, followed by a scintillating room of 23 drawings by Goya. The works, among them naturalistic figure studies, anguished martyrdom scenes and mischievous grotesques, are drawn largely from New York-area institutions. 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan , (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936,’ through Jan. 9. This unusually probing, incisive and dramatic big exhibition traces the retreat to Classical themes in modern art between World War I and World War II by artists like Picasso and Léger to others, now little-known, favored by Hitler and Mussolini. With its intense fusion of art and politics, the result is totally engrossing: a survey-style piece of investigative history with a bomb ticking away inside. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street , (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Cotter)
★ International Center of Photography: ‘The Mexican Suitcase,’ through Jan. 9. In 1939, at the start of World War II, the photographer Robert Capa fled Paris. Before leaving, he packed up some 4,500 negatives and gave them to a friend to forward to him in New York. The negatives were almost all for images of the Spanish Civil War taken by Capa; David Seymour, also known as Chim; and by Gerda Taro, who had died in action two years before. The negatives, which finally arrived in New York in 2007 after a mysterious journey, are the subject of a fascinating show that rewards the close looking it requires. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street , (212) 857-0045, icp.org. (Cotter)
Jewish Museum: ‘Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,’ through Jan. 30. This smart, surprising look at the women’s art movement as it played out in painting begins with a studious but assertive self-portrait by a young Lee Krasner and ends with Nicole Eisenman’s new canvas “Seder,” a distinctly nontraditional depiction of that festival meal. In between are plenty of other works that grapple with feminism and Judaism, often simultaneously. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street , (212) 423-3200, jewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography,’ through Feb. 13. This lively little collection show gathers photographs and videos about travel of one kind or another. The trip might be Ed Ruscha’s drive down the Sunset Strip, Doug Aitken’s airplane flight, Richard Long’s walk through the British countryside or Bruce Nauman’s jerky, robotic march across the floor of his studio. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art,’ through Nov. 28. In China, birthdays are many-happy-returns-of-the-day affairs. You want to make merry, but mainly you want to live long, and the Ming and Qing dynasty objects in this show, with their symbols of immortality, reflect that sentiment. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,’ through Jan. 9. With this full-dress, lucidly installed retrospective of a prime mover — and jokester — in the Conceptual Art revolution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art may finally be catching up to the 21st century. And Mr. Baldessari’s achievement expands as well, given the gallery of his little-known early Pop paintings and the often imposing large photo pieces toward the end. Saved from its own rigors by a love of color and a passion for film, or at least the film still of obscure B movies, it forms a remarkable line from the Pop 1960s to the appropriation-art ’80s. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met,’ through March 6. This Icelandic New Yorker has created a pair of fanciful, quasi-architectural constructions inspired by two of the museum’s French neo-Classical period rooms. Ms. Sigurdardottir’s versions are all-white abstractions of their models, made with exacting craft but with simplified details. One with skewed windows and doors in a descending spiral of abutted panels could be a Modernist set for “Alice in Wonderland.” At 85 percent life-size, the other, an octagonal interior viewable only through one-way mirrors, has a magical, otherworldly glow. (212) 535-7710, met.org. (Johnson)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasure: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance,’ through Jan. 17. Do not miss the first — and superb — American exhibition devoted to the Flemish artist Jan Gossart, also known as Mabuse, which contains 50 of his 63 surviving paintings and 35 drawings, as well as some 40 works by his predecessors (including Jan van Eyck), contemporaries (Albrecht Dürer) and a follower or two. You’ll see the history of Northern European art nearly turn on a dime, from Gothic (both High and Mannered) to the Italian Renaissance’s special blend of fleshy and mythological knowledge that Gossart extracted from the recently unearthed Greco-Roman sculptures he saw on an early, crucial visit to Rome. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco,’ continuing. The largest exhibition of works from the Met’s extensive holdings in French Art Deco fills a large gallery to overflowing with nearly 150 examples of art, furniture, wallpaper, decorative objects and the odd painting. Far more aristocratic than its American counterpart, French Deco devoted exquisite craftsmanship, opulent materials and historicizing design to the creation of one-of-a-kind luxury items. The desks and cabinets of the incomparable Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann quietly dominate, along with vases by Jacques Dunand and silver by Jean Puiforcat. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania,’ through Jan. 23. This fascinating survey of aural sculpture covers the waterfront from a 19th-century Hawaiian ukulele to a tree-size slit-gong from Papua New Guinea. An Indonesian zither, with a delicate, balloonlike resonator of bent palm leaves, looks ethereal enough to drift away on a breeze and was used to accompany fatalistic songs that depict life as baffling and brief. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,’ through Jan. 2. The Yuan dynasty was established in the 13th century by Mongol invaders in China. No clear profile of their rule coheres in this big, understated show, but there are many fascinating objects to ponder. A much clearer picture of China’s cultural response to the Mongol presence can be found in a concurrent Met exhibition (through Jan. 9), “The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change,” drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Tibetan Arms and Armor From the Permanent Collection,’ through fall 2011. The paradox of militant Buddhism inspired the Met’s fascinating 2006 exhibition “Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet.” Later Donald LaRocca, the museum’s arms and armor curator, created this follow-up installation of 35 objects from the Met’s collection (including five acquired in 2007). This time the focus is on defense rather than offense; examples of horse and body armor, dating from the 15th through the 20th centuries, outnumber swords, guns and spears. Most of these objects have seen more ceremonial than military action. All of them equate supreme craftsmanship with defense of the body and Buddhist principles. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Young Archer,’ continuing. This life-size marble carving, of a naked boy drawing an arrow from his lion’s paw quiver, might be the earliest known sculpture by Michelangelo. Scholars disagree. On a 10-year loan from France, the legless, armless boy with a yearning expression is in the Met’s bright and airy Vélez Blanco Patio, where viewers may decide for themselves if it is the real thing. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,’ through Jan. 2. This brilliant show zeroes in on the large finished drawings that brought Lichtenstein’s bold Pop Art style to full flower. It counters the notion of his anonymous touch by stressing an egalitarian mix of commercial and fine art techniques (and displaying his drawing tools). The works are free of virtuosic refinement but full of striking contrasts — the chiseled density of graphite versus the porosity of soft-edged Benday dots and frottage, for example. Formal and physical resonance keeps pace with the pop-cultural kind, which is no mean feat. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street , (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: Ideas Not Theories,’ through Feb. 28. This exhibition, one of two smaller shows inspired by the Modern’s Abstract Expressionist extravaganza, delves into the movement’s legendary intellectual forum, the Club, with a cornucopia of prints, drawings, small paintings and oddities like a rug by John Ferren and a mosaic by Jeanne Reynal, the early abstract films of Len Lye and architectural projects by R. Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer. The prevalence of lively contextualizing material and sense of MoMA’s incalculably rich holdings impress, although the very premise reinforces the members-only ambience of the larger show. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: Rock Paper Scissors,’ through Feb. 28. The second accompaniment to MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist show examines the objects of 10 sculptors supplemented by prints and other works on, or of, paper. Forgotten names include David Hare, Dorothy Dehner and Seymour Lipton. Other artists are in the main (David Smith, Louise Nevelson) or should have been (Louise Bourgeois, Isamu Noguchi). A prevailing period look suggests that much of the material is of historical interest. But don’t miss Stanley William Hayter’s 1940 plaster “Hand Sculpture,” whose squeezed undulations presage the directness of drip painting. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture,’ through April 25. More generous retrenchment than expansive revision, this landmark show culls some 100 paintings, and related sculptures, prints, drawings and photographs, from the unrivaled permanent collection. Yes, a shortage of works by lesser-known artists makes it all a little too MoMA-as-usual, despite the presence of works unseen for decades. But there is something for everyone — whether the eerily abstract photographs of Aaron Siskind, the immersive gallery of Mark Rothko’s radiant canvases or the no-holds-barred ambition of Jackson Pollock, at full tilt in the show’s astounding first gallery. The total illuminates, thrills and provides much useful grist — both artistic and museological — for the art-world mill. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen,’ through March 14. Sometimes a kitchen is just a kitchen, but not often. This elaborate show, which draws from every department in the museum and includes some 300 design objects, examines the kitchen’s complex role in everyday life (and lifestyle), product development, advertising, sexual stereotyping, at least two war efforts, contemporary art and, throughout, in the evolution of design itself. The centerpiece is a rare, nearly complete example of the cockpitlike, mass-produced Frankfurt Kitchen from 1926-27, an exemplar of the modern spirit that still looks invitingly usable. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘New Photography 2010: Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho,’ through Jan. 10. The four artists in this stimulating 25th-anniversary edition of the New Photography series move freely among art photography, film and editorial work. Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho appropriate images from movies and magazines, with varying degrees of distance and criticism. The installation combines photography, 16-millimeter film and sculpture, often seamlessly. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,’ through March 21. MoMA’s photography collection is sufficiently strong in work by women that this show comes close to meeting the promise of its title. The span of 200 works by 120 artists starts around 1850 and comes up to the present, and it is packed with fantastic things. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Project 93: Dinh Q. Le,’ through Jan. 24. The centerpiece of this moving solo show is a video about the war in Vietnam composed of documentary footage, Hollywood action film clips and contemporary interviews. In the interviews older people recall the terror created by helicopters sweeping down from the sky, but two younger men speak of their recent efforts to build helicopters that, while based on wartime models, are meant for use in farming. The small exhibition, by an artist born in Vietnam, is a swords-into-ploughshares show, with one handmade helicopter, constructed from scraps but neat as a pin, in the gallery. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Notorious & Notable: 20th-Century Women of Style,’ through Jan. 2. This sweeping, three-dimensional best-dressed list pays homage to fashionable women from the wives of robber barons to modern business executives. Their outfits, from the museum’s costume and textile collection, are arranged by color on either side of a long aisle. There’s jewelry, too, coaxed from private collections with the help of the National Jewelry Institute. Everything looks spectacular, though the show isn’t quite as plugged in to contemporary ideas of celebrity as its title would suggest. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street , (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Rosenberg)
Neue Galerie: ‘Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736-1783: From Neoclassicism to Expressionism,’ through Jan. 10. In the annals of creativity and craziness, Messerschmidt holds a secure place with his series of metal and alabaster heads, some of them self-portraits, depicting extremes of human emotion, from hilarity to terror. Several examples of these “character heads” have been assembled for this small but potent retrospective, which also includes the artist’s commissioned portraits of Central European aristocrats and Enlightenment-era intellectuals. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street , (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Cotter)
New Museum: ‘Free,’ through Jan. 23. This group show exploring the Internet as a public art space includes plenty of engaging off-line works: sculptures that use objects found on eBay, or collages of Web-based imagery, for instance. But the art doesn’t always rise to the level of the dialogue, which is heavily influenced by Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” and the artist Seth Price’s essay “Dispersion.” 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
New Museum: ‘The Last Newspaper,’ through Jan. 9. Despite its dramatic title, this visually austere show is far less about the death of print journalism than about how that medium has been recycled and repurposed in contemporary art going back 40 years. As if a vote of confidence in print’s future, two newspapers are being produced in the galleries during the run of the exhibition. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Onassis Cultural Center: ‘Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece,’ through Jan. 3. This touring exhibition, organized by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, offers an unusually down-to-earth look at some major figures from myths and epics. It features about 90 objects from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods (the sixth through the first centuries B.C.), many of which come from major museums across North America and Europe. 645 Fifth Avenue, near 52nd Street , (212) 486-4448, onassisusa.org. (Rosenberg)
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: ‘A Song for the Horse Nation,’ through July 7. Including saddles, riding blankets, clothing, beaded bags and much more, this exhibition brings to light a fascinating and ultimately sad chapter in American history: the hundred-year period during which horses were central to the lives of the Plains Indians. A highly efficient form of transportation, horses enabled Navajo, Crow, Comanche, Pawnee and others to expand their territories and flourish more than they otherwise would have. It also enabled them to make war more effectively, though ultimately not effectively enough. George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan , (212) 514-3700, americanindian.si.edu. (Johnson)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Collecting Biennials,’ through Nov. 28. This permanent-collection show has works by artists who were in past Whitney Annuals and Biennials. It caps an extravaganza of new art with a humbling and diverting mix of classics, oldies and one-hit wonders. Figurative paintings from the 1950s Annuals are paired with contemporaneous Abstract Expressionism, and some big names from the 1980s (Schnabel, Condo) look refreshed. Most eye-opening is the sense that some of the most influential artists (Warhol, Hammons) barely register on the Biennial scorecard. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time,’ through April 10. Mixing and matching 32 of Hopper’s paintings and works on paper with the efforts of nearly 30 artists and photographers whose lives overlapped with his, this is more of a hanging from the permanent collection than it is an exhibition. Friends and mentors like John Sloan, Guy Pène du Bois and Charles Burchfield are emphasized, and some must-see Hoppers from nearby museums beef things up. The ensemble may not get to the heart of Hopper’s sublimely unreal realism, but it outlines the profound, still under-appreciated vastness of his seemingly single-minded art. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective,’ through Jan. 9. Paul Thek, the subject of this ragged, moving and much-anticipated retrospective, was a star in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s but had slipped through the cracks of art history by the 1980s, when he died of AIDS in his native New York City. Now his reputation is high among young artists internationally, and the Whitney has made a valiant effort to restore to view a sense of his varied, provoking, poetic and largely ephemeral work. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Lee Friedlander: America by Car,’ through Nov. 28. The black-and-white, square-format photographs in this exhibition were taken from the interior of standard rental cars on road trips over the past 15 years. In these pictures — nearly 200 in all, in Mr. Friedlander’s characteristically dense installation at the Whitney — our vast, diverse country is buffered by molded plastic dashboards and miniaturized in side-view mirrors. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)
Galleries: Uptown
Jeff Koons: ‘Made in Heaven Paintings,’ through Jan. 21. Whether taken as bad art, nonart or a crucial nadir in the career of an often brilliant mega-artist, painting is too strong a word for these inkjet monstrosities on canvas from 1990-91. Depicting Mr. Koons ghoulishly miming various sex acts with his then-wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller, a k a Cicciolina, they are thoroughly repellent as both art objects and images — all the more for being confined to the small boudoirlike spaces of a swank town house gallery. Yet Mr. Koons clearly had to do them and has been the better, more accessible artist for them. Self-debasement works in mysterious ways. Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 East 77th Street , (212) 452-4646, luxembourgdayan.com. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
C. K. Wilde: ‘Tender,’ through Nov. 13. The gimmick of making collages from paper currency is for the most part transcended here, with works involving the often radiant, maniacally engraved legal tender of some 40 countries, not all of which still exist. Appropriately, the imagery often touches on economics, history and politics. High points include two beautiful redos from Goya’s “Disasters of War.” The collages pay tribute to the amazing color and fastidious craftsmanship typically expended on the printing of money, while repurposing them to brilliant effect. Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 533 West 23rd Street , (212) 675-7490, pavelzoubok.com. (Smith)
Galleries: SoHo
★ Gerhard Richter: ‘Lines Which Do Not Exist,’ through Nov. 18. This small, beautifully proportioned five-decade survey of drawings by Mr. Richter is, without even trying to be, an event; it’s his first career overview in the United States since his much-praised “40 Years of Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. The show presents seldom-exhibited work, most of it abstract, in a medium that would seem a natural adjunct to Mr. Richter’s paintings and that contributes to his reputation for enigmatic virtuosity. Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo , (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Other
James Franco: ‘The Dangerous Book Four Boys,’ through Dec. 1. The determined multitasking of this famous actor has raised skeptical and envious eyebrows, but his first New York exhibition has its moments. The sculpture, installation pieces and drawings rely on received ideas, and the single-action short videos don’t get much beyond Process Art 101, despite the technical finesse. But when he works at an arty tangent to conventional film narratives, as in “Bill and Tenn” and “Masculinity & Me” especially, a genuinely personal sense of style, texture and emotional tone emerges. Clocktower Gallery, Art International Radio, 108 Leonard Street, 13th floor, Lower Manhattan , (212) 233-1096, artonair.org. (Smith)
‘Künstlerplakate: Artists’ Posters from East Germany, 1967-1990,’ through Dec. 4. Before the Berlin Wall fell, Socialist Realism was the officially preferred style in art on the east side. But as this show of 120 posters promoting art exhibitions, print fairs and related events demonstrates, East German artists often worked in more personal styles, expressing dissent in subtle ways. Focusing mainly on the 1980s, when government censorship was loosening, the silk screens, lithographs and etchings in the show tend toward neo-Expressionist style and symbolically obscure imagery. Though not terrifically arousing visually, for students of prelapsarian East Germany it offers a gold mine of historical information. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East , (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)
Out of Town
★ African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers: ‘Permanent Collection, Part I,’ through Jan. 31. If you’re looking for some visual magic — a Yoruba dance mask with a mini-zoo on top; a brocaded body wrap from Ivory Coast that seems to float on air; a 10-foot-high figure of the 1960s Malian soccer hero Salif Keita — this small, unorthodox museum in a stained-glass-windowed hall beside a church, on the residential campus of a Roman Catholic missionary order in a leafy New Jersey suburb, is for you. 23 Bliss Avenue, Tenafly, N.J. , (201) 894-8611, smafathers.org/museum. (Cotter)
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: ‘Rackstraw Downes: Under the West Side Highway,’ through Jan. 2. This exhibition focuses on the creation of one work by a painter of exceptionally vivid, anti-picturesque scenes in and around New York City. Mr. Downes executed the work, a three-panel, panoramic view from under the West Side Highway at 145th Street, on the spot over a 15-month period ending in 2009. Dozens of drawings and diary entries in notebooks shed light on this painter’s process. 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn. , (203) 438-4519, aldrichart.org. (Johnson)
★ Anacostia Community Museum: ‘Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner, Connecting Communities Through Language,’ through March 27. Housed in a converted movie theater in a predominantly African-American neighborhood that is a cab ride’s distance from the National Mall, the Anacostia Community Museum is one of Washington’s cultural secrets. Its current exhibition on the scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972), who documented surviving traces of African languages and customs in modern African-American culture, is both an archival homage and a well-paced drama of ideas. Smithsonian Institution, 1901 Fort Place SE, Washington , (202) 633-4820, anacostia.si.edu. (Cotter)
★ ‘Gods of Angkor: Bronzes From the National Museum of Cambodia,’ through Jan. 23. The 36 metal sculptures in this show are all from the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, where the Sackler recently helped establish a metals conservation laboratory. Some of the Hindu and Buddhist sculptures in this compact have been beneficiaries of restorative treatment; all are resplendent examples of one of the great art traditions of Asia. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1050 Independence Avenue SW, Washington , (202) 633-1000, asia.si.edu. (Cotter)
Hessel Museum of Art: ‘At Home/Not at Home: Works From the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg,’ through Dec. 19. The handmade art object — and generally art as something to be lived with every day — finds a strong advocate in this exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and derivatives or hybrids, mostly from the last decade. David Hammons, Mary Heilmann, Cindy Sherman, Richard Tuttle, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martin Creed and Philippe Parreno serve as eminences grises to fivescore younger artists of wildly divergent sensibilities. Matthew Higgs, director of the Manhattan alternate space White Columns, chose the works and expertly corralled them in related clusters, where they talk vociferously among themselves. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. , (845) 758-7598, bard.edu. (Smith)
★ High Museum of Art: ‘Dalí: The Late Work,’ through Jan. 9. The belief that late Dalí is bad Dalí, and most Dalí is late, is once more disproved — this time by a sprawling show that will not travel. It affirms that Salvador Dalí was some kind of genius with supernal depictive skills and a desperate need to be current, which made him a precursor of Pop, Performance and Pictures art. His self-degrading hucksterism is evident here, along with his willingness to try anything, be it jewelry or holograms. But he is at his feverish best in his paintings, which encompass his faith in God and science, his rivalry with Abstract Expressionism and his determination to modernize Renaissance space. The show is well worth the trip to Atlanta. 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E., Atlanta , (404) 733-4444, high.org. (Smith)
Last Chance
Liz Cohen: ‘Trabantimino’; closes on Thursday. What do you get when you cross a Trabant, the “people’s car” of East Germany, with an all-American Chevrolet El Camino? The “Trabantimino,” a clunkily seductive lowrider conceived and engineered by the Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. It comes from a long line of cars as sculpture, one that includes Richard Prince’s muscle-car hoods, Gabriel Orozco’s narrowed Citroën DS and Damián Ortega’s deconstructed Volkswagen Beetle. But where others might have been content to delegate the manual labor, Ms. Cohen did most of it herself — and satirized macho garage culture along the way, posing as a car-show model in a related series of photographs. Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, at Stanton Street, Lower East Side , (212) 979-0001, salon94.com. (Rosenberg)
Guillermo Kuitca: ‘Paintings 2008-2010 and Le Sacre 1992’; closes on Saturday. New paintings and an installation of hand-painted, child-size mattresses from the early ’90s, in a freight-size elevator designed to serve as a moving gallery, inaugurate Sperone Westwater’s new eight-story edifice designed by Foster + Partners. The building is weirdly narrow — a sliver — and Mr. Kuitca’s paintings, which sample conventions of Cubism, cartography and architectural planning, with coils of thorny vines adding an allegory of tragedy to comment on the trials of modernity, are pretentious and dull. Let’s hope future exhibitions liven up the place. Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery , (212) 999-7337, speronewestwater.com. (Johnson)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered’; closes on Sunday. Extravagant tableware was de rigueur for aristocratic dining in 18th-century Europe, and the silver plates, tureens, wine coolers and candelabra in this exhibition are part of an ensemble made for a daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. If you consider elaborate craftsmanship the measure of beauty, what’s here is pretty breathtaking. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, 1860’; closes on Sunday. This exhibition commemorates a visit 150 years ago by more than 70 samurai, the first known group to leave Japan after the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country in 1630 (in response to Spanish and Portuguese attempts to convert the Japanese to Catholicism). Small cartes de viste and stereograph photographs show the samurai — among the first Japanese ever photographed — stern in their robes, exhibiting Bushido, the strict code of behavior to which the military elite was bound. The jarring collision of cultures is seen in a Japanese woodcut of a hot-air balloon with two American flags poking out of its basket, next to a haiku in Japanese calligraphy. The show offers a lot to think about in terms of photography and its role in early publicity and celebrity culture as well as a fascinating look at how societies responded to 19th-century stirrings of globalization. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street , (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Martha Schwendener)
Brooklyn Museum: Fred Tomaselli, through Jan. 2. Mr. Tomaselli became known in the 1990s for paintings in which pills of all sorts, including psychedelics, aspirin, anti-depressants and other prescription medications, as well as marijuana leaves and images clipped from books and magazines, were arranged into compositions of dazzling, hallucinogenic complexity and sealed under glossy, transparent coats of plastic resin. This beautifully organized, two-decade retrospective does full justice to his mind-expanding art. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park , (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)
Brooklyn Museum: ‘Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,’ through Jan. 9. Why have there been no great female Pop artists? That’s the question we are invited to ask by this entertaining hodgepodge of paintings and sculptures by two dozen women who trafficked in mass culture imagery and styles but were overshadowed by the kings of Pop in the 1960s. Though it includes smart and cool works by Rosalyn Drexler, Idelle Weber, Chryssa, Vija Celmins and Kay Kurt, the show won’t overturn standard histories of an era that refused to take female artists seriously. But it infectiously evokes a mood of exuberant creative optimism that affected countless artists, men as well as women. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park , (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: ‘National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?,’ through Jan. 9. The fourth edition of this triennial is the largest yet and the most international in its reach. It is also, hands down, the most ecology-conscious. Design as defined here isn’t about how to make the House Beautiful more beautiful, but about how to keep the globe afloat and give all its occupants access to a healthy patch of it. Reduce, reuse, recycle are the imperatives embodied in the work, which includes a hand-cranked grain thresher made from repurposed materials, a light bulb fueled by dirt, and digital images of a new all-green, no-car city to be built in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The architectural projects included are particularly impressive, and if not every idea in the show is strong, many are already generating winds of change. 2 East 91st Street , (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Holland Cotter)
Frick Collection: ‘The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya,’ through Jan. 9. This special exhibition in the Frick’s lower-level galleries includes diverting studies and sketches by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and others, followed by a scintillating room of 23 drawings by Goya. The works, among them naturalistic figure studies, anguished martyrdom scenes and mischievous grotesques, are drawn largely from New York-area institutions. 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan , (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936,’ through Jan. 9. This unusually probing, incisive and dramatic big exhibition traces the retreat to Classical themes in modern art between World War I and World War II by artists like Picasso and Léger to others, now little-known, favored by Hitler and Mussolini. With its intense fusion of art and politics, the result is totally engrossing: a survey-style piece of investigative history with a bomb ticking away inside. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street , (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Cotter)
★ International Center of Photography: ‘The Mexican Suitcase,’ through Jan. 9. In 1939, at the start of World War II, the photographer Robert Capa fled Paris. Before leaving, he packed up some 4,500 negatives and gave them to a friend to forward to him in New York. The negatives were almost all for images of the Spanish Civil War taken by Capa; David Seymour, also known as Chim; and by Gerda Taro, who had died in action two years before. The negatives, which finally arrived in New York in 2007 after a mysterious journey, are the subject of a fascinating show that rewards the close looking it requires. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street , (212) 857-0045, icp.org. (Cotter)
Jewish Museum: ‘Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,’ through Jan. 30. This smart, surprising look at the women’s art movement as it played out in painting begins with a studious but assertive self-portrait by a young Lee Krasner and ends with Nicole Eisenman’s new canvas “Seder,” a distinctly nontraditional depiction of that festival meal. In between are plenty of other works that grapple with feminism and Judaism, often simultaneously. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street , (212) 423-3200, jewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography,’ through Feb. 13. This lively little collection show gathers photographs and videos about travel of one kind or another. The trip might be Ed Ruscha’s drive down the Sunset Strip, Doug Aitken’s airplane flight, Richard Long’s walk through the British countryside or Bruce Nauman’s jerky, robotic march across the floor of his studio. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art,’ through Nov. 28. In China, birthdays are many-happy-returns-of-the-day affairs. You want to make merry, but mainly you want to live long, and the Ming and Qing dynasty objects in this show, with their symbols of immortality, reflect that sentiment. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘John Baldessari: Pure Beauty,’ through Jan. 9. With this full-dress, lucidly installed retrospective of a prime mover — and jokester — in the Conceptual Art revolution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art may finally be catching up to the 21st century. And Mr. Baldessari’s achievement expands as well, given the gallery of his little-known early Pop paintings and the often imposing large photo pieces toward the end. Saved from its own rigors by a love of color and a passion for film, or at least the film still of obscure B movies, it forms a remarkable line from the Pop 1960s to the appropriation-art ’80s. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met,’ through March 6. This Icelandic New Yorker has created a pair of fanciful, quasi-architectural constructions inspired by two of the museum’s French neo-Classical period rooms. Ms. Sigurdardottir’s versions are all-white abstractions of their models, made with exacting craft but with simplified details. One with skewed windows and doors in a descending spiral of abutted panels could be a Modernist set for “Alice in Wonderland.” At 85 percent life-size, the other, an octagonal interior viewable only through one-way mirrors, has a magical, otherworldly glow. (212) 535-7710, met.org. (Johnson)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasure: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance,’ through Jan. 17. Do not miss the first — and superb — American exhibition devoted to the Flemish artist Jan Gossart, also known as Mabuse, which contains 50 of his 63 surviving paintings and 35 drawings, as well as some 40 works by his predecessors (including Jan van Eyck), contemporaries (Albrecht Dürer) and a follower or two. You’ll see the history of Northern European art nearly turn on a dime, from Gothic (both High and Mannered) to the Italian Renaissance’s special blend of fleshy and mythological knowledge that Gossart extracted from the recently unearthed Greco-Roman sculptures he saw on an early, crucial visit to Rome. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Masterpieces of French Art Deco,’ continuing. The largest exhibition of works from the Met’s extensive holdings in French Art Deco fills a large gallery to overflowing with nearly 150 examples of art, furniture, wallpaper, decorative objects and the odd painting. Far more aristocratic than its American counterpart, French Deco devoted exquisite craftsmanship, opulent materials and historicizing design to the creation of one-of-a-kind luxury items. The desks and cabinets of the incomparable Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann quietly dominate, along with vases by Jacques Dunand and silver by Jean Puiforcat. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania,’ through Jan. 23. This fascinating survey of aural sculpture covers the waterfront from a 19th-century Hawaiian ukulele to a tree-size slit-gong from Papua New Guinea. An Indonesian zither, with a delicate, balloonlike resonator of bent palm leaves, looks ethereal enough to drift away on a breeze and was used to accompany fatalistic songs that depict life as baffling and brief. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,’ through Jan. 2. The Yuan dynasty was established in the 13th century by Mongol invaders in China. No clear profile of their rule coheres in this big, understated show, but there are many fascinating objects to ponder. A much clearer picture of China’s cultural response to the Mongol presence can be found in a concurrent Met exhibition (through Jan. 9), “The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change,” drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Tibetan Arms and Armor From the Permanent Collection,’ through fall 2011. The paradox of militant Buddhism inspired the Met’s fascinating 2006 exhibition “Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet.” Later Donald LaRocca, the museum’s arms and armor curator, created this follow-up installation of 35 objects from the Met’s collection (including five acquired in 2007). This time the focus is on defense rather than offense; examples of horse and body armor, dating from the 15th through the 20th centuries, outnumber swords, guns and spears. Most of these objects have seen more ceremonial than military action. All of them equate supreme craftsmanship with defense of the body and Buddhist principles. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Young Archer,’ continuing. This life-size marble carving, of a naked boy drawing an arrow from his lion’s paw quiver, might be the earliest known sculpture by Michelangelo. Scholars disagree. On a 10-year loan from France, the legless, armless boy with a yearning expression is in the Met’s bright and airy Vélez Blanco Patio, where viewers may decide for themselves if it is the real thing. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,’ through Jan. 2. This brilliant show zeroes in on the large finished drawings that brought Lichtenstein’s bold Pop Art style to full flower. It counters the notion of his anonymous touch by stressing an egalitarian mix of commercial and fine art techniques (and displaying his drawing tools). The works are free of virtuosic refinement but full of striking contrasts — the chiseled density of graphite versus the porosity of soft-edged Benday dots and frottage, for example. Formal and physical resonance keeps pace with the pop-cultural kind, which is no mean feat. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street , (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: Ideas Not Theories,’ through Feb. 28. This exhibition, one of two smaller shows inspired by the Modern’s Abstract Expressionist extravaganza, delves into the movement’s legendary intellectual forum, the Club, with a cornucopia of prints, drawings, small paintings and oddities like a rug by John Ferren and a mosaic by Jeanne Reynal, the early abstract films of Len Lye and architectural projects by R. Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer. The prevalence of lively contextualizing material and sense of MoMA’s incalculably rich holdings impress, although the very premise reinforces the members-only ambience of the larger show. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: Rock Paper Scissors,’ through Feb. 28. The second accompaniment to MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist show examines the objects of 10 sculptors supplemented by prints and other works on, or of, paper. Forgotten names include David Hare, Dorothy Dehner and Seymour Lipton. Other artists are in the main (David Smith, Louise Nevelson) or should have been (Louise Bourgeois, Isamu Noguchi). A prevailing period look suggests that much of the material is of historical interest. But don’t miss Stanley William Hayter’s 1940 plaster “Hand Sculpture,” whose squeezed undulations presage the directness of drip painting. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture,’ through April 25. More generous retrenchment than expansive revision, this landmark show culls some 100 paintings, and related sculptures, prints, drawings and photographs, from the unrivaled permanent collection. Yes, a shortage of works by lesser-known artists makes it all a little too MoMA-as-usual, despite the presence of works unseen for decades. But there is something for everyone — whether the eerily abstract photographs of Aaron Siskind, the immersive gallery of Mark Rothko’s radiant canvases or the no-holds-barred ambition of Jackson Pollock, at full tilt in the show’s astounding first gallery. The total illuminates, thrills and provides much useful grist — both artistic and museological — for the art-world mill. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen,’ through March 14. Sometimes a kitchen is just a kitchen, but not often. This elaborate show, which draws from every department in the museum and includes some 300 design objects, examines the kitchen’s complex role in everyday life (and lifestyle), product development, advertising, sexual stereotyping, at least two war efforts, contemporary art and, throughout, in the evolution of design itself. The centerpiece is a rare, nearly complete example of the cockpitlike, mass-produced Frankfurt Kitchen from 1926-27, an exemplar of the modern spirit that still looks invitingly usable. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘New Photography 2010: Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho,’ through Jan. 10. The four artists in this stimulating 25th-anniversary edition of the New Photography series move freely among art photography, film and editorial work. Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho appropriate images from movies and magazines, with varying degrees of distance and criticism. The installation combines photography, 16-millimeter film and sculpture, often seamlessly. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,’ through March 21. MoMA’s photography collection is sufficiently strong in work by women that this show comes close to meeting the promise of its title. The span of 200 works by 120 artists starts around 1850 and comes up to the present, and it is packed with fantastic things. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Project 93: Dinh Q. Le,’ through Jan. 24. The centerpiece of this moving solo show is a video about the war in Vietnam composed of documentary footage, Hollywood action film clips and contemporary interviews. In the interviews older people recall the terror created by helicopters sweeping down from the sky, but two younger men speak of their recent efforts to build helicopters that, while based on wartime models, are meant for use in farming. The small exhibition, by an artist born in Vietnam, is a swords-into-ploughshares show, with one handmade helicopter, constructed from scraps but neat as a pin, in the gallery. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Notorious & Notable: 20th-Century Women of Style,’ through Jan. 2. This sweeping, three-dimensional best-dressed list pays homage to fashionable women from the wives of robber barons to modern business executives. Their outfits, from the museum’s costume and textile collection, are arranged by color on either side of a long aisle. There’s jewelry, too, coaxed from private collections with the help of the National Jewelry Institute. Everything looks spectacular, though the show isn’t quite as plugged in to contemporary ideas of celebrity as its title would suggest. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street , (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Rosenberg)
Neue Galerie: ‘Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736-1783: From Neoclassicism to Expressionism,’ through Jan. 10. In the annals of creativity and craziness, Messerschmidt holds a secure place with his series of metal and alabaster heads, some of them self-portraits, depicting extremes of human emotion, from hilarity to terror. Several examples of these “character heads” have been assembled for this small but potent retrospective, which also includes the artist’s commissioned portraits of Central European aristocrats and Enlightenment-era intellectuals. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street , (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Cotter)
New Museum: ‘Free,’ through Jan. 23. This group show exploring the Internet as a public art space includes plenty of engaging off-line works: sculptures that use objects found on eBay, or collages of Web-based imagery, for instance. But the art doesn’t always rise to the level of the dialogue, which is heavily influenced by Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” and the artist Seth Price’s essay “Dispersion.” 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
New Museum: ‘The Last Newspaper,’ through Jan. 9. Despite its dramatic title, this visually austere show is far less about the death of print journalism than about how that medium has been recycled and repurposed in contemporary art going back 40 years. As if a vote of confidence in print’s future, two newspapers are being produced in the galleries during the run of the exhibition. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Onassis Cultural Center: ‘Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece,’ through Jan. 3. This touring exhibition, organized by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, offers an unusually down-to-earth look at some major figures from myths and epics. It features about 90 objects from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods (the sixth through the first centuries B.C.), many of which come from major museums across North America and Europe. 645 Fifth Avenue, near 52nd Street , (212) 486-4448, onassisusa.org. (Rosenberg)
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: ‘A Song for the Horse Nation,’ through July 7. Including saddles, riding blankets, clothing, beaded bags and much more, this exhibition brings to light a fascinating and ultimately sad chapter in American history: the hundred-year period during which horses were central to the lives of the Plains Indians. A highly efficient form of transportation, horses enabled Navajo, Crow, Comanche, Pawnee and others to expand their territories and flourish more than they otherwise would have. It also enabled them to make war more effectively, though ultimately not effectively enough. George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan , (212) 514-3700, americanindian.si.edu. (Johnson)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Collecting Biennials,’ through Nov. 28. This permanent-collection show has works by artists who were in past Whitney Annuals and Biennials. It caps an extravaganza of new art with a humbling and diverting mix of classics, oldies and one-hit wonders. Figurative paintings from the 1950s Annuals are paired with contemporaneous Abstract Expressionism, and some big names from the 1980s (Schnabel, Condo) look refreshed. Most eye-opening is the sense that some of the most influential artists (Warhol, Hammons) barely register on the Biennial scorecard. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time,’ through April 10. Mixing and matching 32 of Hopper’s paintings and works on paper with the efforts of nearly 30 artists and photographers whose lives overlapped with his, this is more of a hanging from the permanent collection than it is an exhibition. Friends and mentors like John Sloan, Guy Pène du Bois and Charles Burchfield are emphasized, and some must-see Hoppers from nearby museums beef things up. The ensemble may not get to the heart of Hopper’s sublimely unreal realism, but it outlines the profound, still under-appreciated vastness of his seemingly single-minded art. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective,’ through Jan. 9. Paul Thek, the subject of this ragged, moving and much-anticipated retrospective, was a star in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s but had slipped through the cracks of art history by the 1980s, when he died of AIDS in his native New York City. Now his reputation is high among young artists internationally, and the Whitney has made a valiant effort to restore to view a sense of his varied, provoking, poetic and largely ephemeral work. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Lee Friedlander: America by Car,’ through Nov. 28. The black-and-white, square-format photographs in this exhibition were taken from the interior of standard rental cars on road trips over the past 15 years. In these pictures — nearly 200 in all, in Mr. Friedlander’s characteristically dense installation at the Whitney — our vast, diverse country is buffered by molded plastic dashboards and miniaturized in side-view mirrors. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)
Galleries: Uptown
Jeff Koons: ‘Made in Heaven Paintings,’ through Jan. 21. Whether taken as bad art, nonart or a crucial nadir in the career of an often brilliant mega-artist, painting is too strong a word for these inkjet monstrosities on canvas from 1990-91. Depicting Mr. Koons ghoulishly miming various sex acts with his then-wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller, a k a Cicciolina, they are thoroughly repellent as both art objects and images — all the more for being confined to the small boudoirlike spaces of a swank town house gallery. Yet Mr. Koons clearly had to do them and has been the better, more accessible artist for them. Self-debasement works in mysterious ways. Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 East 77th Street , (212) 452-4646, luxembourgdayan.com. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
C. K. Wilde: ‘Tender,’ through Nov. 13. The gimmick of making collages from paper currency is for the most part transcended here, with works involving the often radiant, maniacally engraved legal tender of some 40 countries, not all of which still exist. Appropriately, the imagery often touches on economics, history and politics. High points include two beautiful redos from Goya’s “Disasters of War.” The collages pay tribute to the amazing color and fastidious craftsmanship typically expended on the printing of money, while repurposing them to brilliant effect. Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 533 West 23rd Street , (212) 675-7490, pavelzoubok.com. (Smith)
Galleries: SoHo
★ Gerhard Richter: ‘Lines Which Do Not Exist,’ through Nov. 18. This small, beautifully proportioned five-decade survey of drawings by Mr. Richter is, without even trying to be, an event; it’s his first career overview in the United States since his much-praised “40 Years of Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. The show presents seldom-exhibited work, most of it abstract, in a medium that would seem a natural adjunct to Mr. Richter’s paintings and that contributes to his reputation for enigmatic virtuosity. Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo , (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Other
James Franco: ‘The Dangerous Book Four Boys,’ through Dec. 1. The determined multitasking of this famous actor has raised skeptical and envious eyebrows, but his first New York exhibition has its moments. The sculpture, installation pieces and drawings rely on received ideas, and the single-action short videos don’t get much beyond Process Art 101, despite the technical finesse. But when he works at an arty tangent to conventional film narratives, as in “Bill and Tenn” and “Masculinity & Me” especially, a genuinely personal sense of style, texture and emotional tone emerges. Clocktower Gallery, Art International Radio, 108 Leonard Street, 13th floor, Lower Manhattan , (212) 233-1096, artonair.org. (Smith)
‘Künstlerplakate: Artists’ Posters from East Germany, 1967-1990,’ through Dec. 4. Before the Berlin Wall fell, Socialist Realism was the officially preferred style in art on the east side. But as this show of 120 posters promoting art exhibitions, print fairs and related events demonstrates, East German artists often worked in more personal styles, expressing dissent in subtle ways. Focusing mainly on the 1980s, when government censorship was loosening, the silk screens, lithographs and etchings in the show tend toward neo-Expressionist style and symbolically obscure imagery. Though not terrifically arousing visually, for students of prelapsarian East Germany it offers a gold mine of historical information. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East , (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)
Out of Town
★ African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers: ‘Permanent Collection, Part I,’ through Jan. 31. If you’re looking for some visual magic — a Yoruba dance mask with a mini-zoo on top; a brocaded body wrap from Ivory Coast that seems to float on air; a 10-foot-high figure of the 1960s Malian soccer hero Salif Keita — this small, unorthodox museum in a stained-glass-windowed hall beside a church, on the residential campus of a Roman Catholic missionary order in a leafy New Jersey suburb, is for you. 23 Bliss Avenue, Tenafly, N.J. , (201) 894-8611, smafathers.org/museum. (Cotter)
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: ‘Rackstraw Downes: Under the West Side Highway,’ through Jan. 2. This exhibition focuses on the creation of one work by a painter of exceptionally vivid, anti-picturesque scenes in and around New York City. Mr. Downes executed the work, a three-panel, panoramic view from under the West Side Highway at 145th Street, on the spot over a 15-month period ending in 2009. Dozens of drawings and diary entries in notebooks shed light on this painter’s process. 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn. , (203) 438-4519, aldrichart.org. (Johnson)
★ Anacostia Community Museum: ‘Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner, Connecting Communities Through Language,’ through March 27. Housed in a converted movie theater in a predominantly African-American neighborhood that is a cab ride’s distance from the National Mall, the Anacostia Community Museum is one of Washington’s cultural secrets. Its current exhibition on the scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972), who documented surviving traces of African languages and customs in modern African-American culture, is both an archival homage and a well-paced drama of ideas. Smithsonian Institution, 1901 Fort Place SE, Washington , (202) 633-4820, anacostia.si.edu. (Cotter)
★ ‘Gods of Angkor: Bronzes From the National Museum of Cambodia,’ through Jan. 23. The 36 metal sculptures in this show are all from the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, where the Sackler recently helped establish a metals conservation laboratory. Some of the Hindu and Buddhist sculptures in this compact have been beneficiaries of restorative treatment; all are resplendent examples of one of the great art traditions of Asia. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1050 Independence Avenue SW, Washington , (202) 633-1000, asia.si.edu. (Cotter)
Hessel Museum of Art: ‘At Home/Not at Home: Works From the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg,’ through Dec. 19. The handmade art object — and generally art as something to be lived with every day — finds a strong advocate in this exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and derivatives or hybrids, mostly from the last decade. David Hammons, Mary Heilmann, Cindy Sherman, Richard Tuttle, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martin Creed and Philippe Parreno serve as eminences grises to fivescore younger artists of wildly divergent sensibilities. Matthew Higgs, director of the Manhattan alternate space White Columns, chose the works and expertly corralled them in related clusters, where they talk vociferously among themselves. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. , (845) 758-7598, bard.edu. (Smith)
★ High Museum of Art: ‘Dalí: The Late Work,’ through Jan. 9. The belief that late Dalí is bad Dalí, and most Dalí is late, is once more disproved — this time by a sprawling show that will not travel. It affirms that Salvador Dalí was some kind of genius with supernal depictive skills and a desperate need to be current, which made him a precursor of Pop, Performance and Pictures art. His self-degrading hucksterism is evident here, along with his willingness to try anything, be it jewelry or holograms. But he is at his feverish best in his paintings, which encompass his faith in God and science, his rivalry with Abstract Expressionism and his determination to modernize Renaissance space. The show is well worth the trip to Atlanta. 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E., Atlanta , (404) 733-4444, high.org. (Smith)
Last Chance
Liz Cohen: ‘Trabantimino’; closes on Thursday. What do you get when you cross a Trabant, the “people’s car” of East Germany, with an all-American Chevrolet El Camino? The “Trabantimino,” a clunkily seductive lowrider conceived and engineered by the Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. It comes from a long line of cars as sculpture, one that includes Richard Prince’s muscle-car hoods, Gabriel Orozco’s narrowed Citroën DS and Damián Ortega’s deconstructed Volkswagen Beetle. But where others might have been content to delegate the manual labor, Ms. Cohen did most of it herself — and satirized macho garage culture along the way, posing as a car-show model in a related series of photographs. Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, at Stanton Street, Lower East Side , (212) 979-0001, salon94.com. (Rosenberg)
Guillermo Kuitca: ‘Paintings 2008-2010 and Le Sacre 1992’; closes on Saturday. New paintings and an installation of hand-painted, child-size mattresses from the early ’90s, in a freight-size elevator designed to serve as a moving gallery, inaugurate Sperone Westwater’s new eight-story edifice designed by Foster + Partners. The building is weirdly narrow — a sliver — and Mr. Kuitca’s paintings, which sample conventions of Cubism, cartography and architectural planning, with coils of thorny vines adding an allegory of tragedy to comment on the trials of modernity, are pretentious and dull. Let’s hope future exhibitions liven up the place. Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery , (212) 999-7337, speronewestwater.com. (Johnson)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered’; closes on Sunday. Extravagant tableware was de rigueur for aristocratic dining in 18th-century Europe, and the silver plates, tureens, wine coolers and candelabra in this exhibition are part of an ensemble made for a daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. If you consider elaborate craftsmanship the measure of beauty, what’s here is pretty breathtaking. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, 1860’; closes on Sunday. This exhibition commemorates a visit 150 years ago by more than 70 samurai, the first known group to leave Japan after the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country in 1630 (in response to Spanish and Portuguese attempts to convert the Japanese to Catholicism). Small cartes de viste and stereograph photographs show the samurai — among the first Japanese ever photographed — stern in their robes, exhibiting Bushido, the strict code of behavior to which the military elite was bound. The jarring collision of cultures is seen in a Japanese woodcut of a hot-air balloon with two American flags poking out of its basket, next to a haiku in Japanese calligraphy. The show offers a lot to think about in terms of photography and its role in early publicity and celebrity culture as well as a fascinating look at how societies responded to 19th-century stirrings of globalization. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street , (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Martha Schwendener)
