Museum and Gallery Listings for June 3-9 - NYTimes.com

Museums

★ American Folk Art Museum: ‘Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum’(Through Oct. 16.) This exhibition celebrating quilts from the museum’s collection reveals the optical vitality of these eminently pictorial textiles. Ranging across a variety of patterns and techniques and nearly two centuries, the examples here effortlessly combine personal and national histories with rigorous down-home formalism, all the while making brilliant use of available, often humble, fabrics. The various geometric ins and outs, color contrasts and boldly scaled compositions confirm that quilts, like Navajo blankets, are among the earliest abstract art in post-conquest North America. 45 West 53rd Street , (212) 265-1040, folkartmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)

American Folk Art Museum: ‘Super Stars: Quilts From the American Folk Art Museum’ (Through Sept. 25.) In conjunction with the exhibition of quilts at the main museum, its branch is featuring 20 quilts in which stars figure in some way, whether as pieced-together geometric forms or as little tufts of thread that suggest a distant galaxy. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue, at 66th Street , (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Smith)

American Folk Art Museum: ‘Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Freelance Artist — Poet and Sculptor — Inovator — Arrow maker and Plant man — Bone artifacts constructor — Photographer and Architect — Philosopher’ (Through Oct. 9.) Whether photographing his wife as a sweetly chaste pinup girl; fashioning plant forms from scrounged clay or little thrones from salvaged turkey bones; or making delicate ballpoint-pen drawings or hallucinatory paintings rife with intimations of exotic undersea or sci-fi worlds, this self-taught, self-proclaimed multitasker (as made clear in the show’s subtitle) never wavered in his sense of his own greatness. Mounted 27 years after his death, his first American museum survey doesn’t quite do him justice and especially shortchanges the paintings, but it presents the fruits of his ceaseless labors with a clarity that makes them feel of a piece, and like a gift. 45 West 53rd Street , (212) 265-1040, folkartmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum: ‘Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay’ (Through June 19.) Examining the more practical side of Delaunay’s pioneering achievement, this beautiful, enlightening exhibition offers some alluring artworks, garments and accessories, especially a passel of radiant scarves. But it bets most of the house on fabric swatches — Delaunay’s textile designs — and succeeds with a display of some 90 gouache studies for textiles and their equally vibrant commercial results: more than 120 hand-printed silks, velvets and cottons laid out in large vitrines. Patterns ranging from geometric to floral variously revisit, amplify and presage much of the history of modern painting and may even deserve a place in that history. 2 East 91st Street , (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Smith)

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum: ‘Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels’ (Through July 4.) Van Cleef & Arpels, the century-old French jewelry firm, is the primary sponsor of this show and has supplied much of its mega-carat menu: some 350 lavish pieces worn by royals, screen sirens and social swans. Although extravagance doesn’t seem out of place in this former Carnegie mansion, the show often looks as if it were put together by the company’s creative directors and merchandisers. The visitors lining up around the block don’t seem to care, as long as they can linger over pieces like a maharani’s carved-emerald necklace and large sapphire-and-diamond pendant earrings worn by Elizabeth Taylor. 2 East 91st Street , (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

★ Japan Society: ‘Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art’ (Through June 12.) This piquant exhibition of dark-minded work was conceived as a sharp counterweight to the cult of cuteness that has been Japan’s dominant aesthetic for decades. No one could have known that the show’s images of material fragility and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster. But such is the case, and the mood of anxiety that pervades the work of the 16 artists is more evident than it might have been otherwise. 333 East 47th Street , (212) 832-1155, japansociety.org. (Holland Cotter)

Jewish Museum: ‘Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore’ (Through Sept. 25.) At the Jewish Museum, this exhibition samples the extraordinary trove of European art amassed by two American spinsters in the first half of the 20th century, work now owned by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although some major collection highlights are absent, the pieces here — presented in the order of acquisition — generate a compelling portrait of the Cones as collectors. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street , (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

Jewish Museum: ‘Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)’(Through July 31.) Like her fellow New Yorker magazine contributors Ed Koren and Roz Chast, Ms. Kalman offers gently humorous cartoon commentary on the trials and tribulations of modern metropolitan life. Ranging in style from faux-naïve eccentricity to suave realism, the more than two decades worth of drawings and paintings on paper in this career survey make for an entertaining if not deeply provocative experience. With a flea market-like installation of nondescript objects from her personal collection, however, she tries too hard to be amazingly original. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street , (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Andean Tunic, 400 B.C.E.-1800 C.E.’(Through Sept. 18.) This small show celebrates the festive yet functional garments woven south of the equator. To the modern eye, they’re wearable paintings; lovers of Keith Haring and Elizabeth Murray will find much to admire. So will anyone interested in the complex relationships among art, clothing, ritual and power. (212) 535-7710,metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Anthony Caro on the Roof’ (Through Oct. 30.) No one in the 1960s produced groovier abstract sculpture than the British artist Anthony Caro, five of whose heavy metal assemblages grace the Met’s Rooftop Garden. But only one of these works has that startling, newborn feeling. Sporting a brand-new coat of shiny, taxicab yellow paint, “Midday” (1960) has the look of a jaunty, industrial dinosaur. The others, dating from 1968 to 2010, show a development toward an increasingly conservative, ponderous monumentality. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York’ (Through July 4.) The heroes of this exceptionally interesting show are three craftsmen known for producing some of the most sought-after jazz guitars of the 20th century. Part I surveys a history of Italian luthiers from 17th-century Naples to Italian immigrants producing string instruments in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part II presents lovingly made archtop guitars and mandolins dating from 1923 to 2008 by inheritors of that tradition: John D’Angelico, James D’Aquisto and John Monteleone. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ (Through Aug. 7.) A triumph for this British fashion designer — who died at 40, by his own hand, last year — and for the curator Andrew Bolton of the Met’s Costume Institute, this career retrospective is ethereal and gross, graceful and manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else. The operatic spectacle is pushed along by soundtrack of wind, Handel and orgiastic moans, and has a holographic image of Kate Moss spinning like a moth in a flame at the center. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Night Vision: Photography After Dark’ (Through Sept. 18.) It wasn’t until the gelatin dry-plate process was introduced in the late 1880s that exposure time was lowered enough for photographs to be taken regularly after dark. Alfred Stieglitz was among the first to photograph New York at night. His work is shown alongside Berenice Abbott’s spectral “Nightview, New York” from 1932, taken from the window of a skyscraper; Brassaï’s nocturnal views of Paris; and Weegee’s high-contrast picture of a crime scene. Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Kohei Yoshiyuki are among the other artists included in this modest, lovely show of 40 black-and-white photographs drawn from the museum’s collection, which stops a couple of decades short of the present. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Martha Schwendener)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Poetry in Clay: Korean Buncheong Ceramics from Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art’ (Through Aug. 14.) This beautiful exhibition presents bottles, vases, bowls and dishes made by 15th- and 16th-century Korean artisans. In shades of gray, from creamy and opalescent off-whites to deep, warm blacks, the anonymous craftsmen covered vessels with loosely rendered images of flora and fauna and fine-grained patterns of dots and tiny blossoms. These infectiously lively works look as if they’d been made not centuries but only decades ago. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century’ (Through July 4.) This compact, quietly splendid exhibition explores the window as luminous light source, as semi-abstract compositional element and as the focal point for a certain poignant, implicitly Romantic yearning. The images — mostly by German, French and Scandinavian artists before 1830 — depict both domestic settings and artists’ studios and are passively subversive in their avoidance of large-scale, historic themes and formal portraiture. They show us a world on the verge of electricity, photography and industrialization, a moment of irretrievable, partly fictive calm that incites some yearning of its own. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective’(Through Aug. 28.) Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Mr. Serra, so it makes sense that his adamantine pursuit of the medium, surveyed in an installation that he largely designed himself, is not quite like anything seen at the Met before. There are moments of off-putting starkness on Mr. Serra’s side and some of the usual architectural infelicities on the Met’s, but as a demonstration of this august institution’s willingness to engage with genuinely radical, physically unsettling art of recent vintage, the show is cause for hope. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Tibetan Arms and Armor From the Permanent Collection’ (Through fall.) 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)

MoMA P.S. 1: ‘Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely’ (Through Aug. 8.) Laurel Nakadate might be on the cusp of a great new career. She is known for disconcerting, sad and sexually provocative videos that she enlisted older, worse-for-wear men to participate in, but in the past three years she has made two feature-length films. Included in this enthralling survey of her 10-year career, they focus with lingering, heart-aching care on adolescent girls, lost souls looking for love and only getting into trouble. MoMA P.S. 1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Street, Long Island City, Queens , (718) 784-2084, ps1.org. (Johnson)

Morgan Library & Museum: ‘The Age of Elegance: The Joan Taub Ades Collection’ (Through Aug. 28.) This small but engrossing exhibition presents about three dozen works dating from the mid 17th to the late 19th centuries by European artists, each in his own way a draftsman of consummate skill. Some names, like Boucher and Millais, are familiar; most will be known only to art historical specialists. Ranging from postcard to laptop size, including portraiture, still-life and mythological scenes, they exemplify the fine but now endangered art of drawing at its best. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street , (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Johnson)

Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands’ (Through Sept. 4.) Medieval illuminations — so rich in narrative, embellishment and religious expression — can display sartorial trends that can help experts date manuscripts and discern the subtleties of a figure’s status or character. There are many examples here, as well as mannequins in full-scale model attire — say, a splendid hunting ensemble of gold-embroidered blue velvet and lilac wool felt for the men, and for the women, a princessy gown of yellow silk trimmed in black crushed velvet, accessorized by a turret. This lively show will teach you to scrutinize centuries-old manuscripts as you would a style magazine. 225 Madison, at 36th Street , (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Biblical Art: ‘Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese’(Through June 12.) This fascinating exhibition presents about 60 well-chosen paintings, sculptures and objects by famous artists and unidentified artisans, all representing a major iconic image of Christendom: Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, post-Crucifixion, pre-Resurrection. Michele Giambono’s 15th-century painting pictures him in anguish with bleeding palms and blood dripping from the thorns of his crown. In a late 16th-century, classicizing painting by Paolo Veronose, he slumps in the arms of an angel like a defeated athlete. Don’t miss the small, wooden head of Jesus with a tiny, spring-loaded, pop-up Man of Sorrows. 1865 Broadway, at 61st Street , (212) 408-1500, mobia.org. (Johnson)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Access to Tools: Publications From the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974’ (Through July 26.) Brainchild of the visionary techno-hippie artist Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog did for counterculture youth in the ’60s what the Sears catalog did for children of the Great Depression and what Google does for people of the Internet age: provide a way for ordinary citizens to connect with and make use of the global economy. This modest but stirring time capsule of an exhibition presents various editions of the catalog, along with a mind-expanding array of books, magazines and ephemera that influenced or exemplified its holistic mission. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception’ (Through Aug. 1.) This possibly premature, hit-and-miss survey of the quixotic, politically aware, yet obstinately poetic art of this Belgian artist, who has lived in Mexico since 1986, whipsaws a visitor between engagement and boredom, serious consideration and dismissal. In the show, at MoMA and its P.S. 1 site in Queens (closes Sept. 12), the best works are videos, but the split exhibition is garnished, you might say, with sometimes appealing paintings and sculptures and also dulled with extensive backup materials: studies, notes, texts and newspaper clippings pertaining to most of the works on view. Too often the result confirms this museum’s blind faith in the wan, cerebral machinations of late-late-late Conceptualism. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse’(Through July 11.) MoMA’s largest ever survey of Germany’s first modern art movement is infused with an urgent, crackling energy, by turns joyful, satiric, grim and tragic. Presenting some 250 works — most of them little-seen prints — it celebrates one of the 20th century’s most brutally effective, socially responsive unions of medium and message and shakes up the (understandable) conventional wisdom that the museum is almost terminally Francophile. While lavish, the show reveals but a fraction of the museum’s 3,200 Expressionist works on paper, all of which are newly available for digital viewing atmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactives/161. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing’ (Through Sept. 19.) This show of contemporary drawings (most acquired since 2005) is anchored by a group of telegrams sent by the Japanese artist On Kawara to friends and associates; each one bears the message “I am still alive.” The artists seem to be in a permanent state of wariness and suspicion, which is sometimes the result of political instability and at other times more innate. But their efforts to process matters of life and death in short bursts of creative activity feel very of the moment. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)

Neue Galerie: ‘Vienna 1900: Style and Identity’ (Through June 27.) One of history’s more fraught fin-de-siècle efflorescences of art and thought is recounted in a shifting kaleidoscope of paintings, drawings, architectural models, posters and several species of decorative arts. Among paintings by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, there is also a re-creation of Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, an eye-popping tribute to the Vienna Secession and a crowded face-off between the designer-theoreticians Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. Over all, it resembles a tasting menu with enough rich and disparate flavors that the gaps and omissions can be overlooked. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street , (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.com. (Smith)

★ New Museum: ‘Lynda Benglis’ (Through June 19.) This startlingly excellent resurrection of the prescient Post-Minimalist renegade and her gaudy, multidexterous, often gender-bending segues among Process, Performance and Body Art is long overdue. Carefully chosen, it includes her notorious 1974 Artforum ad, but it gives pride of place to her equally flamboyant, if abstract, evocations of the body in pigmented wax, latex and polyurethane foam. Taking tips from Pollock, these works combine the dancer and the dance, unleash painting into real space and mock the less colorful efforts of her mostly masculine contemporaries. The through line: feminist intuition, formalist excess and a reckless disregard for art-world standards and practices. Bravo. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Smith)

New Museum: ‘Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Primitive’ (Through July 3.) Focusing on teenage boys in rural Thailand, the celebrated Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has produced an expansive, multiscreen video installation that is, by turns, beautiful, tedious, opaque and affectingly poetic. With the patience-testing style we’ve come to expect of avant-garde moviemaking, “Primitive” revolves around the playful construction of a time-traveling spaceship by village youths. The obliquely invoked background is a half-century of war and civil strife that has taken the lives of countless young men in Southeast Asia. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side , (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: ‘Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) of India’ (Through June 30.) The 15 brilliant contemporary quilts in this show were made by women of the Siddi ethnic group, descendants of early African migrants to South Asia, including slaves brought by Portuguese colonists in the 16th century. Strips and patches of recycled cloth — solid-colored, patterned or shot through with glittery threads — are the basic components. Together the results look like a spring garden in bloom. New York Public Library, 515 Lenox Avenue, at 135th Street, Hamilton Heights , nypl.org. (Cotter)

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: ‘Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools’ (Through Sept. 11.) This solo turn from Mr. Arcangel, the digital wunderkind, artist-musician and inveterate hacker, seems a trifle scrubbed clean, sanitized and austere. Containing work almost entirely from 2011, it tells us little of his funkier early digital efforts or artistic development. A few pieces reflect his longstanding interest in television and video games; in others he tries too hard to establish his formalist bona fides with wry riffs on abstract painting and sculpture. Mr. Arcangel seems guided by a somewhat callow faith in the avant-garde, striving to perpetuate its tradition, dating from Duchamp, of laying claim to new areas of nonart for art’s sake. Sometimes he succeeds, but not always. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)

Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection’ (Through Sept. 18.) In anticipation of its move to a new home in 2015, the Whitney is cooking up a series of six back-to-back experimental permanent collection shows at its present location. The first of them is a sampler of the earliest work in the holdings, and as a summary of the institution’s initial view of American Modernism, what a curious thing it is. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)

Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Singular Visions’ (Continuing.) With its “one artwork per room” rule, “Singular Visions” is a refreshing departure from the typical collection sampler. The show’s work includes pieces by A A Bronson, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Grosvenor, Eva Hesse, Edward Kienholz and Georgia O’Keeffe; some rooms are more intriguing than others, but on the whole the show feels like a necessary experiment. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)

Galleries: Uptown

★ Eric Fischl: ‘Early Paintings’ (Through June 18.) Mr. Fischl produced some psychologically astounding paintings in the early 1980s. Made with a loose, expressionist touch on medium-large canvases, his emotionally raw, semi-photorealist images of adolescent Oedipal confusion still project a dreamy, penetrating acidity. “Sleepwalker” (1979) pictures a skinny, naked boy standing in the shin-deep water of an aqua plastic pool hunched over and masturbating in a suburban backyard. It is a classic. Skarstedt, 20 East 79th Street , (212) 737-2060, skarstedt.com. (Johnson)

Ryoji Ikeda: ‘the transfinite,’ (Through June 11.) This huge electronic light-and-sound installation by the internationally celebrated avant-garde composer Ryoji Ikeda is spectacular, trippy and fun. Projected onto one giant wall, optically dazzling stripes on one side and fields of mathematical data on the other scroll continuously to the aggressively percussive sounds of computer-generated music. It may be more slick entertainment than high art, but for a few moments it is totally captivating. Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street , (212) 616-3930, armoryonpark.org. (Johnson)

★ ‘Kota Ancestors’ (Through June 11.) Orchestrated by the Paris dealer Bernard Dulon, this ravishing show affords a rare opportunity to study the stylistic variations and variety of Kota reliquary figures, as exemplified by 15 outstanding examples. Their large concave faces, delicately stylized features, inventive metalwork surfaces and ineffably human geometries are among the cornerstones of European Modernism, starting with Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Friedman & Vallois, 27 East 67th Street , (212) 517-3820,vallois.com. (Smith)

‘Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa’ (Through June 12.) “Nubia” takes you deep into the history of a volatile part of Africa. The show occupies just two small galleries but spans a 500-mile stretch of the Nile River Valley (now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) and more than 2,250 years (from about 3000 B.C. through 750 B.C.). Pottery, statues and funerary objects chart the dizzying power swings between Egypt and Nubia, cultures that traded goods as well as blows. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84th Street , (212) 992-7800, nyu.edu/isaw. (Rosenberg)

‘Soutine/Bacon’ (Through June 18.) This intense show pairs still lifes, landscapes and portraits by Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) and Francis Bacon (1909-92). The two shared an appetite for viscera and a zest for reinterpreting the masters, but Soutine is the stronger voice here; standouts include the Tate’s “Landscape at Céret (The Storm),” a crackling mass of thunderheads that anticipates Pollock and de Kooning, and a glistening “Still Life With Ray Fish,” made in homage to Chardin’s “Skate.” Helly Nahmad Gallery, 975 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street , (212) 879-2075, hellynahmadgallery.com. (Rosenberg)

‘John Storrs’ (Through June 30.) This exhibition, by emphasizing relatively realistic works, complements the illuminating survey of the American sculptor John Storrs (1885-1956) — best known for his Deco-ish evocations of abstracted skyscrapers — at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. The works here include figures, portrait busts and terra cotta reliefs, as well as an array of wood-cuts, drawings and a few paintings; they present a softer, more personal side of Storrs’s sensibility. Meredith Ward Fine Art, 44 East 74th Street , (212) 744-7306, meredithwardfineart.com. (Smith)

★ Andy Warhol: ‘Colored Campbell’s Soup Cans’ (Through June 11.) This might be the most beautiful Andy Warhol show you’ll ever see. In 1965, three years after creating his first paintings of Campbell’s tomato soup cans, Warhol produced a series of 20 in a ravishing range of tropical colors. This exhibition, the first ever to focus on the series, presents 12 of them, every one a delicious piece of eye candy. L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street , (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com. (Johnson)

Galleries: 57th Street

‘Decadence and Decay: Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz’ (Through June 24.) This seductively titled show of 65 works by these three Weimar-era luminaries complements the Museum of Modern Art’s current show of German Expressionist prints. Dix is the standout, with Neue Sachlichkeit portrait drawings that make figures look both vulnerable and monstrous. Also here are prints from his 1924 cycle “The War,” which can be seen at MoMA in its terrifying entirety. Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th Street, Manhattan , (212) 245-6734, gseart.com. (Rosenberg)

Galleries: Chelsea

★ John Chamberlain: ‘New Sculpture’ (Through July 8.) In some of the largest works of his career, this venerable American sculptor uses his signature materials — crushed car bodies and fenders — with tremendous compositional variety, verve and his usual unerring color sense. Variously comical, stately, architectural and gestural, these pieces erupt from the gallery’s expansive concrete floors like unusually well-shaped mesas, creating an exhilarating indoor landscape. Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street , (212) 741-1111, gagosian.com. (Smith)

John Divola: ‘Trees for the Forest’ (Through June 18.) This mini-survey of John Divola, a Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, reveals the depth and diversity of that city’s art scene. Early shots of artistic interventions in vandalized homes have an experimental, Man Ray-meets-Gordon Matta-Clark aesthetic; other works recall Bruce Nauman and Bas Jan Ader. Wallspace, 619 West 27th Street , (212) 594-9478,wallspacegallery.com. (Rosenberg)

Cao Fei: ‘Play Time’ (Through June 25.) In the last couple of years the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei has been building eerie simulacrums of modern Chinese society within virtual-reality games. But in her latest show she works in real space, with all its complexities and restrictions, and engages older forms of entertainment and fantasy. Her photographs and videos are now populated by shadow puppets, skateboarders and children’s television characters instead of avatars. In the context of China’s crackdown on cultural expression, Ms. Cao’s juvenilia seems to express a longing for some basic adult freedoms. Lombard Freid Projects, 518 West 19th Street , (212) 967-8040, lombard-freid.com. (Rosenberg)

★ Mark Grotjahn: ‘Nine Faces’ (Through June 25.) Full of thatches of thrashing, live-wire lines made with a surprisingly methodical palette-knife technique, Mr. Grotjahn’s newest paintings are harsh, elegant things that enthrall the eye and splinter the mind. Ellipses and circles tumble about among the lines, intimating fractured features and calling attention to the nominal masklike faces of early Picasso and Matisse, Jawlensky and Brancusi. Altogether, they emphasize painting as a psychic and bodily process, fueled in part by the devouring and digesting of previous art to formulate a new synthesis. Anton Kern Gallery, 532 West 20th Street , (212) 367-9663, antonkerngallery.com. (Smith)

Jene Highstein: ‘New Sculpture: Towers and Elliptical Forms’ (Through June 16.) The latest from this Post-Minimalist sculptor, long interested in tacitly organic monoliths, is a series of soaring spires and relatively earthbound orbs subtly shaped in matte sandblasted (and vaguely ceramic-like) stainless steel. Together they intimate a high desert landscape, abstracted. Danese, 535 West 24th Street , (212) 223-2227,danese.com. (Smith)

★ Jasper Johns: ‘New Sculpture and Works on Paper’ (Through July 1.) The centerpiece of this pleasantly miscellaneous show is a large cast-aluminum relief and six smaller two-sided ones in cast bronze and silver, which put grids of the numbers zero through nine through elaborate variations in texture, legibility and suggestion. Among the artist’s first cast-metal objects in some years, they exemplify his trenchant recycling of motifs and clarify his tendency to conflate aspects of printing, painting and sculpture (and collage). Their mesmerizing combination of lapidary detail and casual process reveals the intensity of Mr. Johns’s mind with unusual clarity. Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street , (212) 243-0200, matthewmarks.com. (Smith)

★ ‘Donald Judd’ (Through June 25.) Nine large silvery, seemingly identical floor boxes, all open at the top, turn out to have markedly different and expansive interiors, articulated by various vertical divisions and planes of colors. These wells of space and color exemplify Judd’s frequent use of surprise to create suspense and clarity; they also reflect his origins in painting and his lifelong admiration for the simple forms and strong colors of painters like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Josef Albers. David Zwirner, 525 and 533 West 19th Street , (212) 727-2070, davidzwirner.com. (Smith)

Louise Lawler: ‘Fitting at Metro Pictures’ (Through June 11.) These canny photographs of art in situ at museums, auction houses, galleries and collectors’ homes are similar to those in Ms. Lawler’s last couple of shows, but here she has tweaked the pictures’ dimensions to make them strictly proportional to the gallery walls. She has also printed the adjusted images on adhesive wall stickers, enhancing the illusion of a gallery-within-a-gallery. The distortions are cleverly deployed, as are changes in scale; Ms. Lawler turns Degas’s “Little Dancer” into a Goliath and makes good on the “giant-size” promise of Warhol’s Brillo-box packaging. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street , (212) 206-7100,metropicturesgallery.com. (Rosenberg)

Carter Mull: ‘The Day’s Specific Dreams’ (Through June 11.) Carter Mull’s first solo show is part newsroom, part darkroom. His subject is the life of print, from birth to its current death throes, though like most artists, he’s not an objective biographer. In his photographs and drawings, blobs of prismatic color encroach on accounts of revolution in Egypt (from the Jan. 30 and 31 issues of The New York Times) and illustrations of printing presses and writing tools from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Taxter & Spengemann, 459 West 18th Street , (212) 924-0212, taxterandspengemann.com. (Rosenberg)

★ Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: ‘L’Amour Fou’ (Through June 25.) While falling short of the exhibition of late Picasso paintings and prints that filled this space two years ago, the latest Gagosian exegesis into Picasso land is a wonderfully motley, almost scattershot affair, brilliantly installed. It presents works, in all mediums and several styles, that Picasso made during the late 1920s and ’30s, when he was under the spell of the voluptuous, Roman-nosed, level-eyed, full-limbed Marie-Thérèse Walter, arguably the love of his life. Anchored by this single if perpetually mutating subject, the art on hand confirms that when Picasso told Walter she had saved his life, he meant that she had also saved his art. Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street , (212) 741-1717, gagosian.com. (Smith)

Tobias Putrih: ‘When Language Goes on a Holiday’ (Through June 25.) The latest from this Slovenian artist is a flexible system of thin, mostly hexagonal, perforated sheets of black aluminum that can be bolted together any number of ways. Here they yield abstract sculpture, partitions (some used for displaying chair designs by the early modern Swedish designer Erik Gunnar Asplund) and furniture. A mordant yet genuine utopianism results. Meulensteen, 511 West 22nd Street , (212) 633-6999, meulensteen.com. (Smith)

★ Jo Ractliffe: ‘Terras do Fim do Mundo (The Lands of the End of the World)’(Through July 15.) At first glance, this South African photographer’s black-and-white shots of sun-baked Angolan landscapes look random and bland: rocks, dirt, scrubby trees; some handwritten signs but no people. Only when you read some of the titles — “Mass Grave at Cassinga,” “Minefield Near Mupa”— do you learn where people are, or once were, and the pictures snap into expressive focus. The Walther Collection Project Space, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 718 , (212) 352-0683, walthercollection.com. (Cotter)

★ Vladimir Tatlin: ‘Monument to the Third InternAtional’ (Through July 30.) Concocted by a founder of Russian Constructivism between 1915 and 1920, following close encounters with the Eiffel Tower and Picasso’s guitar constructions in Paris, this tilting, spiraling, viaduct-like structure is one of early Modernism’s most ambitious and best-known works of unrealized architecture, embodied by one of its biggest architectural models. Shown in the United States for the first time — the oldest (1967) remake of the original model, which disappeared around 1932 — it is dense with portents of 20th-century sculpture to come, from LeWitt’s grids to Smithson’s jetty. Tony Shafrazi, 544 West 26th Street , (212) 274-9300, tonyshafrazigallery.com. (Smith)

Richard Tuttle: ‘What’s the Wind’ (Through July 22.) Working quite a bit larger than usual, this Post-Minimalist master of seeming trifles presents a series of deftly cobbled-together thingamajigs that charm and challenge. Each presents a kind of stage-set-like open volume of sculptural events patched together from colorful, lightweight materials and objects. The result is a somewhat slovenly, art-supplies Constructivism that is characteristically light, ephemeral and full of joy. Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street , (212) 255-4044, thepacegallery.com. (Smith)

★ Gillian Wearing: ‘People’ (Through June 24.) This British artist’s first New York show in eight years more than makes up for lost time. In three very different video works, she relentlessly tests the limits of what might be called narrated portraiture, coaxing forth unstated feelings and scarring experiences or, in one instance, reviewing several decades of snapshot styles to recast a demurely resentful life story. She also eerily re-enacts three famous portraits of famous photographers using her signature custom-made rubber masks and ventures into three dimensions with two small statues that pay tribute to everyday heroes. Life daunts, but the living persist. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street , (212) 414-4144, tanyabonakdargallery.com. (Smith)

★ Stephen Westfall: ‘Seraphim: Paintings and works on paper’ (Through June 11.) While this exhibition has several abstract canvases of interest, the centerpiece is a large wall painting felicitously framed by the gallery architecture and dominated by a tipped (diamond) square, whose bold concentric bands change color at every corner. The syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is. You would think that related works by Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt would not have left Mr. Westfall much room to move, but he proves otherwise.Lennon Weinberg Inc., 514 West 25th Street , (212) 941-0012, lennonweinberg.com. (Smith)

Galleries: SoHo

★ Alvin Baltrop: ‘Photographs 1965-2003’ (Through June 18.) All but unknown in his lifetime, the photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) focused much of his energy on documenting the illicit erotic and aesthetic life on abandoned shipping piers along the West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Image by image the work is uneven, but there are wonderful things, and the cumulative impact is potent, not only as art produced by an exceptional eye but as a record of a turning-point moment in time, just before and after AIDS struck. Third Streaming, 10 Greene Street, second floor , (646) 370-3877,thirdstreaming.com. (Cotter)

★ ‘Drawing and Its Double: Selections from the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica’ (Through June 24.) The drawings in this show take an unusual form: they are the designs etched by artists, using burins and acid, on metal plates from which prints (the “double” of the title) are made. The selection begins on a grand note with a set of 10 oddly shaped copper plates made for a 16th-century print version of Michelanglo’s “Last Judgment” and concludes with expressionistic illustrations by the contemporary artist Paolo Canevari on the Ten Commandments. Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street , (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Other

★ ‘David Adamo’ (Through June 19.) This brilliant solo debut from a young New York artist now living in Berlin forms an expansive meditation on sculpture and its materials, evocations and traditional techniques, both additive and subtractive. A New England stone wall reads as a lumpy Carl Andre floor piece. An array of cedar beams evoke both Mr. Andre’s early work and Brancusi’s studio, but not too reverentially. Casualness alternates with bravura precision, like the trompe-l’oeil-painted plaster casts of partly eaten fruit that are strewn everywhere and form a dispersed vanitas. There’s more, and the cumulative effect is refreshingly open-ended. Untitled, 30 Orchard Street, Lower East Side , (212) 608-6002, nyuntitled.com. (Smith)

Elaine Cameron-Weir: ‘without true bazaars’ (Through June 18.) In this modest yet convincing debut, Minimalist simplicity, and several kinds of rectilinear form, are explored with wit, physical variety and an admirable economy of means. The works include a Persian rug dipped in indigo dye; a long, gracefully curved wood dowel covered in rolling tobacco; a scent-emitting wall piece; and best of all, “Pedestal,” a tall, narrow, stepped monolith tenderly worked in plaster that resembles an architectural model for a skyscraper. Ramiken Crucible, 389 Grand Street, Lower East Side , (917) 434-4245,ramikencrucible.com. (Smith)

★ ‘Ethiopian Magic Scrolls: Talismanic Art of Ethiopia’ (Through June 30.) In 2005, the London dealer Sam Fogg blew us away with an exhibition of Ethiopian Christian liturgical art. Now, in association with Milos Simovic of Elizabeth Street Fine Arts, he follows up with a show of 18th- and 19th-century painted and written scrolls that emerged from Ethiopian popular religion. And they are equally, if very differently, wondrous. Figures of warrior-saints and archangels rub shoulders with demons; talismanic designs mingle with New Testament quotations. They’re all tucked away like a hidden trove in the back of a shop specializing mostly in Coney Island antiques. Elizabeth Street Fine Arts, 209 Elizabeth Street, Nolita , (212) 274-9400, elizabethstreetfinearts.com. (Cotter)

‘Hilary Harnischfeger’ (Through June 19.) For her third gallery solo show in New York, this artist supplements her already robust combination of materials and mediums — which include paper, plaster, paint and minerals — with multicolored clay. This complicates things considerably in terms of surface, form and hue, yielding in particular a series of small, truculent, impacted, free-standing works that refuse easy categorization.Rachel Uffner Gallery, 47 Orchard Street, Lower East Side , (212) 274-0064,racheluffnergallery.com. (Smith)

John Storrs: ‘Machine-Age Modernist’ (Through July 9.) The Chicago-born artist John Storrs (1885-1956) compacted utopian, machine-age dreaming into Cubist-Art Deco-style sculptures resembling pieces of architectural ornament and models of skyscrapers. There is nothing quite like his dense, carefully wrought stone and metal sculptures in early American — or European, for that matter — Modernism, and this finely tuned show gives a good account of his progress from the late ’10s to the early ’30s. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East , (212) 998-6780,nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)

Public Art

Eva Rothschild: ‘Empire’ (Through Aug. 28.) At the southeast entrance to Central Park stands a colorful, tubular structure resembling a swing-set frame designed by spiders on LSD. Touching ground at 10 points on the cobbled plaza, its red, green and black striped posts rise at different angles into an airy web over 18 feet at its highest point. A playful riff on the ancient form of the triumphal arch, “Empire” will be a required photo-op for tourists and other visitors. Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, Public Art Fund , (212) 223-7800, publicartfund.org. (Cotter)

Out of Town

★ Anacostia Community Museum: ‘Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner, Connecting Communities Through Language’ (Through July 24.) 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 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)

★ Princeton University Art Museum: ‘Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage’(Through June 26.) The German artist Kurt Schwitters, who died in 1948, is one of Modernism’s true delights, though seen far less often than he deserves to be. This smallish show, his first substantial survey since the 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, is made up primarily of wonderful collages spanning his career, from garrulous early examples made from the odds and ends of urban life — tram tickets, stamps, receipts — to the light-and-shadow late ones, done when he was in wartime exile in England and living, as he loved to be, surrounded by nature. From very first to very last, he’s golden, and worth the trip to see. Princeton, N.J. , (609) 258-3788, artmuseum.princeton.edu. (Cotter)

Last Chance

Mary Frank: ‘Transformations: Wood Sculpture, 1957-1967, and Recent Photographs’ (Closes on Saturday.) This exhibition rescues from oblivion 11 gruffly carved, often erotically charged wood sculptures whose forms tend to mutate surprisingly when seen from different angles. They draw variously from Brancusi, Degas and folk art and share aspects with works made at the same time by Raoul Hague, Bill King and H. C. Westermann. Here they are accompanied by recent photographs that offer some weird, distinctly Frankian wrinkles to the set-up tendency. D.C. Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea , (212) 247-2111, dcmooregallery.com. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met’ (Closes on Sunday.) 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, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Matthew Miller: ‘the magic black of an open barn door on a really sunny summer day, when you just cannot see into it’ (Closes on Sunday.) Lots of painters emulate Renaissance old masters. Few do so to such riveting effect as this young painter. Each of the five oil-on-panel works here is a self-portrait picturing the artist with closely cropped hair against a jet-black background. He is viewed straight on or in three-quarter profile with bare neck and upper shoulders; his high forehead is deeply furrowed, his eyes heavy-lidded. He could be a spiritually anguished, Lutheran monk by Lucas Cranach.Famous Accountants, 1673 Gates Avenue, between St. Nicholas and Cypress Avenues, Bushwick, Brooklyn , (917) 309-3540, famousaccountants.wordpress.com. (Johnson)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914’ (Closes on Monday.) Five years after painting his history-altering “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and inspired by his friend Georges Braque, Picasso left the figure behind and immersed himself in an alternative reality of still lifes that collapsed space and took him to the brink of abstraction. MoMA’s subtly buzzing manifesto of a show — made up of 70 thematically related paintings, drawings and collages, along with a pair of renowned guitar sculptures — is a record of that moment, a brief revolution that generated some of the most challenging ideas in Modern art. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)

★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Glenn Ligon: America’ (Closes on Sunday.) Sometimes a career survey doubles as a scan of social history. This is true of this Glenn Ligon retrospective, a tight but ample show that refers back to America’s slave-holding past and forward to the Obama present, but focuses on the late 1980s and 1990s, a too-seldom-revisited stretch of recent art. Is shared culture — being American — in the end a stronger source of communality than race or sexual orientation? That’s an important question that Mr. Ligon’s beautifully made work asks. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)