Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.
Museums
★ American Folk Art Museum: ‘Jubilation | Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined’ (through Sept. 2) Having escaped the ugly, West 53rd Street tomb of a building it inhabited from 2001 to 2011, the American Folk Art Museum has reoccupied its old space on Lincoln Square. This wonderful show of about 100 works from the permanent collection samples all the varieties of artistic expression under the museum’s purview, from portraits and quilts by anonymous craftspeople to otherworldly fantasies envisioned by so-called Outsiders like Henry Darger and Martin Ramírez. The revival of this irreplaceable institution is cause of rejoicing. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue, at 66th Street, (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)
Asia Society and Museum: ‘Sarah Sze: Infinite Line’ (through March 25) Promising a new angle on Sarah Sze’s mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations, this midcareer solo reveals that Ms. Sze, who is Chinese-American, has been profoundly influenced by many forms of Asian art. It also includes some of her rarely exhibited drawings and encourages you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings in space. Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle caps and other throwaway objects that she fashions, with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling landscapes and galactic spirals. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 517-2742, asiasociety.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
★ The Cloisters: ‘The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen From the Isle of Lewis’ (through April 22) In 1831, a farmer on the Isle of Lewis, the largest island of the Outer Hebrides, discovered a lost cache of medieval chess pieces. Today, thanks to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in which Harry and Ron play with magically animated replicas of them, the Lewis Chessmen are world famous. On tour from the British Museum, these adorable, bug-eyed little kings, queens, bishops, knights and warders, each beautifully carved from walrus ivory, are wonderful to examine up close. You don’t have to be a chess player or a Harry Potter fan to love them. 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights, (212) 923-3700, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Frick Collection: ‘A Passion for Drawings: Charles Ryskamp’s Bequest to the Frick Collection’ (through April 8) Modern museums have their origins in the German wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities: collections of objects assembled by European aristocrats. The cabinet at the Frick doesn’t hold the same range of marvels, but the current show of 10 drawings donated by Charles Ryskamp, a former Frick director, functions almost like a wunderkammer. There is a botanical watercolor by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who worked for Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution and Empress Josephine afterward; a watercolor by Eugène Delacroix from his first journey to North Africa; a William Blake drawing created during a séance; and George Stubbs’s portrait of Warren Hastings, first governor-general of India under British colonial rule, as Hastings was being prosecuted for corruption. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Martha Schwendener)
★ Frick Collection: ‘Renoir, Impressionism and Full-Length Painting’ (through May 13) Impressionism, like fashion, is dedicated to the fleeting sensation: this moment’s light, this season’s dress. Yet the works in this exhibition, which transforms the Frick’s mohair-upholstered East Gallery into a runway for Renoir’s soigné Parisians, don’t at first register as Impressionist. With their traditional portrait format and imposing scale, they seem at odds with the modest plein-air paintings that define the movement. Central among them is the Frick’s own Renoir, “La Promenade” (1875-6), in which a stylish young woman guides two equally well-dressed little girls along a public garden path. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Rosenberg)
Frick Collection: ‘White Gold: Highlights From the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain’ (through April 29) Porcelain lovers will not want to miss this show of domestic ware made in Germany in the early 1700s, but the big news is the new wing, the Portico Gallery, that it inaugurates. The Frick has transformed an outdoor colonnade into an indoor exhibition space. Floor-to-ceiling windows enclose a long, narrow space that feels bigger and airier than its actual 850 square feet. In the small rotunda at one end, a life-size, nude Diana by Jean-Antoine Houdon looks out over the traffic on Fifth Avenue with divine indifference. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Johnson)
★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘John Chamberlain: Choices’ (through May 13) The postwar sculptor John Chamberlain, who died in December, manipulated crushed car parts into abstract clusters that are both gorgeous and terrifying. As installed on the Guggenheim Museum’s curved ramps for this full-dress retrospective, they look, inevitably, like mangled wrecks on a speedway. Yet the show goes to great lengths to extricate Mr. Chamberlain from what he called “the car-crash syndrome.” It includes work made from foam, aluminum foil, paper and plexiglass, and it emphasizes the collage process behind the metal sculptures rather than the material that went into them. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Rosenberg)
International Center of Photography: ‘The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet’ (through May 6) Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed not as political activists, but as political heroes who fell into history by accident. The story began on July 11, 1958, when a Virginia county sheriff and two deputies entered the Lovings’ bedroom at 2 a.m. and arrested them, saying they had violated the Racial Integrity Act. Mr. Villet’s images represent the heyday of social documentary, but also the midcentury photo-essay format. Ms. Loving later became a conscious activist when, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, she made a statement supporting the right to marry, whether “black or white, young or old, gay or straight.” 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Schwendener)
★ International Center of Photography: ‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business’ (through Sept. 2) From the home of Weegee’s voluminous archive, the latest exhibition about this great documentary photographer (1899-1968) revisits his frenetic, formative first decade of work, starting in 1935, when his often sensational images of murder and mayhem appeared in New York’s daily newspapers. His penchant for self-promotion; the work of his competitors and peers; the evolution of tabloid journalism; and the great city that was both his subject and his audience are emphasized, with fresh curatorial precision and deftly used touch screens. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Roberta Smith)
★ Jewish Museum: ‘The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951’ (through March 25) One of many artistic casualties of the McCarthy-era blacklists was the Photo League, a New York school and salon for amateur and professional photographers. Its members — among them Weegee, Lisette Model and Aaron Siskind — are now reunited in this stirring show, which traces the group’s history through some 145 vintage photographs. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)’ (through April 15) Serene on the surface but less so underneath, the museum’s first full-dress retrospective of a 20th-century Chinese painter is as much about history as art history. It focuses on an artist, teacher and art historian who helped preserve the ancient tradition of ink painting and then struggled to make it relevant under the Communists, bending it toward propaganda, introducing a new degree of realism and making frequent use of the color red. While fascinating, the show leaves you wondering what he might have accomplished under less encumbered circumstances. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (through May 20) This lovely small show, focused on self-portrait paintings and prints, proposes that Rembrandt was a greater influence on Degas than has generally been recognized. Degas as a young man studied Rembrandt prints, copied at least one and made others imitating Rembrandt-type effects. But a group of four captivating self-portraits at the heart of the show — two by each artist painted at age 23 — suggests that the men were temperamentally about as alike as a cat and a dog. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini’ (through March 18) This magisterial, intensely thought-provoking show presents about 160 works by the most celebrated masters of 15th-century Italian painting and sculpture. It was a time when ancient Greek and Roman precedents inspired artists to create extraordinarily lively images of people in two and three dimensions. The dialogue between painting and sculpture is especially intriguing. Desiderio da Settignano’s marble bust of a lovely young woman with a strikingly expressive, coquettish expression creates an illusion of fleeting real life that painters could only envy. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video’ (through Aug. 26) This exhibition of 17 contemporary works inspired by museums doesn’t mention Theodor Adorno by name, but it nods toward his ideas in a wall text, which jokes that artists often see museums as “mausoleums, places where art goes to die.” Andrea Fraser’s video “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989) leans toward the anti-museum view, while a 16mm film by Nashashibi/Skaer, the duo of British artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, made by gliding through the Met in the dark with a camera and a flash strobe, treats the museum like a darkened crypt. Lutz Bacher’s video offers another museum tour, while the museum appears in poetically distorted form in photographs by John Pilson, Tim Davis and Lothar Baumgarten. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Schwendener)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Storytelling in Japanese Art’ (through May 6) An uncannily contemporary sense of fluidity, action and emotion courses throughout this captivating exhibition, which traces the Japanese penchant for narrative through hand scrolls, hanging scrolls and books, on to the expanded field of folding screens. The sublime 13th-century ”Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine” alone is a must-see: its five hand scrolls constitute one of the Met’s greatest paintings and have never before been shown together. Return visits are merited. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ MoMA PS1: ‘Henry Taylor’ (through April 9) Mr. Taylor, who lives in Los Angeles, paints fast, loose and sensuously on canvases great and small. Portraiture is his work’s center of gravity, African-American life his subject. With exuberant generosity, he portrays friends, relatives, acquaintances from the art world and off the street and heroes of sports and politics. Along the way, he takes in downbeat cityscapes patrolled by cop cars and envisions allegories of spiritual trauma in the Land of the Free. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org. (Johnson)
★ Morgan Library Museum: ‘Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings From the Clement C. Moore Collection’ (through April 29) You won’t see much of Rembrandt in this exhibition of about 90 works on paper, which includes just four drawings attributed to that master. What the show lacks in star power, though, it makes up for with a keen, all-encompassing look at life in the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age (which corresponds, roughly, to the 17th century). Seascapes assert naval dominance; genre scenes show bustling markets and tipsy taverngoers; botanical illustrations tell cautionary tales about economic speculation. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Morgan Library Museum: ‘Dan Flavin: Drawing’ (through July 1) The artist Dan Flavin (1933-96) is so closely identified with his signature medium, the fluorescent light sculpture, that a show of his drawings is bound to surprise. And it’s particularly exciting to find that Flavin was not only a devoted draftsman but also a freewheeling polymath on paper. The Morgan’s show includes drawings from Flavin’s personal collection, which encompasses Hokusai, Mondrian and the Hudson River School and will completely change the way you see his art. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, Ext. 560, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)
★ El Museo del Barrio: ‘Testimonios: 100 Years of Popular Expression’ (through May 6) The city’s premier museum of Latin culture explores its holdings in urban folk art, so-called handicraft and other forms of vernacular expression and comes up with visual gold. Among the kaleidoscopic displays are Puerto Rican santos and the winsome cellophane animals, birds and insects of Gregorio Marzán (1906-97). Splendid textiles include Haitian voodoo banners; densely appliquéd molas and the patchwork scenes called arpilleras, with which Chilean women kept hope alive for disappeared relatives during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. An intoxicating, if sometimes bittersweet, vitality is revealed. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence’ (through March 26) This timely and resonant survey familiarizes American audiences with the spare, selfless achievement of this pioneering Croatian artist, born in Zagreb in 1949. Conceptual in style, photo- and performance-based in approach, political in motivation, ardently and precisely feminist, her work makes use of materials at hand — personal photographs, women’s magazines, state-sponsored television, even government surveillance — to dissect different forms of power and illuminate the plight of the powerless, while also presaging familiar developments in appropriation art and relational aesthetics to a startling degree. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Print/Out’ and ‘Printin” ’ (through May 14) “Print/Out” presents printed works by 40 artists and artist groups from the museum’s permanent collection. Produced over the past two decades, most involve public modes of address borrowed from the worlds of advertizing and design and concepts promoting critical suspicion of mainstream media, culture and society. “Printin’,” a related print-focused exhibition, is full of surprises addressing multiple aspects of human experience. With fearless eclecticism, it ranges from a Krazy Kat cartoon by George Herriman to Puritan stocks cut from cardboard by Cady Noland. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art’ (through May 14) This show reunites five of the eight free-standing frescoes that Rivera made for a 1931-2 exhibition at MoMA. Some of these paintings seem ripped from current headlines. In “The Uprising,” protesting laborers are brutally suppressed by uniformed soldiers; the stratified New York cityscape of “Frozen Assets” tops a bank vault with a crowded homeless shelter. Timely as they are, they lack the multitudinous energy and narrative sweep of Rivera’s permanently sited murals. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Cindy Sherman’ (through June 11) Aided by ever-shifting arrays of costumes, wigs, makeup, props, masks and prosthetic body parts, the leading light of postmodern photo-based art spent nearly four decades turning photography against itself, laying waste to a lexicon of mostly female stereotypes and exposing both the tyranny and the inner lives of the images of women that bombard and shape us all at every turn. This retrospective could have been larger, more clearly organized and less familiar, but its strengths, like the achievement it honors, are undeniable. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Cecil Beaton: The New York Years’ (through April 22) A British dandy in the Wildean mold, Beaton photographed fashion for Vogue and Vanity Fair; made photographic portraits of rich, famous and glamorous people; drew and painted cartoons, caricatures, fashion illustrations and theatrical sets with a deft hand; published six volumes of his diaries; and won two Oscars for his costume and set designs, for the Hollywood movies “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady.” He spent much time in New York, and this entertaining exhibition surveys what he did here during his five-decade career. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Johnson)
Neue Galerie: ‘The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections From the 3rd Century B.C. to the 20th Century/Germany, Austria and France’ (through April 2) Since it opened 10 years ago, the Neue Galerie has stayed true to its narrowly focused mission: to showcase German and Austrian art and design of the early 20th century. But its anniversary exhibition of the collection of the co-founder Ronald S. Lauder covers much more territory. In the dark-wood-paneled gallery on the second floor, for instance, six paintings by Cézanne preside over an imposing installation of arms and armor and 15th- and 16th-century German and Netherlandish portraiture. And a third-floor gallery of Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi amounts to a mini-Museum of Modern Art improbably wedged into a Carrère-and-Hastings town house. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Rosenberg)
New Museum: ‘The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial’ (through April 22) The second edition of this survey of young talent, organized by Eungie Joo, is more international than the last one, with artists from Asia and South America and collectives from Africa and the Middle East. Much of the work is made up of small, light formal gestures, unemphatic in tone and socially engaged, though in an unperturbed way that accommodates friendliness and wit. There is also a schedule of performances on- and off-site. An Israeli collective, Public Movement, will stage topical debates around town. Yet another collective, House of Natural Fiber, from Indonesia, plans to demonstrate technology for producing alcoholic beverages and electronic music simultaneously. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)
Noguchi Museum: ‘Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City’ (through April 22) Several artists suggest their visions for the future of Long Island City, ranging from site-specific to silly. Natalie Jeremijenko’s “feral robots” sniff out pollutants in contaminated soil, and she suggests hula hoops filled with wildflower seeds. Rirkrit Tiravanija proposes growing “drivable” grass along a section of Broadway, and Mary Miss focuses on four giant smokestacks that tower over the area and imagines them as an eco-feedback center registering environmental changes visible to the community. 9-01 33rd Road, at Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 204-7088, noguchi.org. (Schwendener)
★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘The Bearden Project’ (through March 11) Of the many New York City events celebrating the Romare Bearden centennial year, the Studio Museum has come up with the best in this sparkling cross-generational shout-out to the artist. In addition to a small handful of superb works by Bearden himself, the show is made up of tributes by a hundred contemporary artists, old and young, who together extend Bearden’s cosmopolitan, griot-to-the-global-village spirit into the future. 144 West 125th Street, Harlem, (212) 864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Uptown
‘Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones’ (through April 15) This wide-ranging survey was assembled by one of the leading milliners in Britain and draws heavily on the incomparable collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It includes fascinating historical material; a survey of 20th- and 21st-century headgear at its most creative (and often most frivolous); and rather too many efforts by the show’s organizer. But what’s good is great: for example, a platterlike feather number from 18th-century London. Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, 18 West 86th Street, (212) 501-3000, bgc.bard.edu. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
John Miller: ‘Suburban Past Time’ (through March 10) Mr. Miller’s latest installation incorporates metal filing cabinets painted in gaudy, hot-rod finishes; fake rocks and trees of the sort that disguise pool equipment; and black-and-white wallpaper printed with forgettable architecture (an apartment block in Berlin, a resort in Majorca). On Saturdays two people inhabit this sterile Anytown, not interacting much with each other or with the gallery visitors. A separate project, a series of animations, fuses loneliness and tastelessness in more provocative ways; here Mr. Miller and a collaborator — the online artist and curator Takuji Kogo — set text from personal ads to robotic-sounding digital voice recordings. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, (212) 206-7100, metropicturesgallery.com. (Rosenberg)
Elaine Reichek: ’Ariadne’s Thread’ (through March 24) Ariadne, the clever heroine of Greek myth whose ball of thread helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth, makes an ideal subject for Elaine Reichek (who has been working with thread since the 1970s and has a large-scale tapestry in the current Whitney Biennial). In this show she uses digital and hand embroidery and silk-screen process to reproduce a wide range of images and literary quotations relating to Ariadne. Keeping this exercise from becoming pedantic, Ms. Reicheck finds elements of the myth where we least expect them: in comic books and the film “The Shining,” for instance. Nicole Klagsbrun Project Space, 534 West 24th Street, (212) 243-3335, nicoleklagsbrun.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Terry Winters: ‘Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures, Notebook’ (through April 14) Terry Winters’s new, vigorously painted abstractions are ravishing. As if to defend against anti-hedonist judgment, Mr. Winters also offers a series of notebook collages combining scientific and quasi-scientific imagery in Matthew Marks’s small exhibition space at 502 West 22nd Street. They are interesting, but the paintings of flickering, warping, spiraling and tunneling diamond patterns in hot and cool colors are the real trip. Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 502 West 22nd Street, (212) 243-0200, matthewmarks.com. (Johnson)
★ Catherine Yass: ‘Lighthouse’ (through March 17) Five miles off the English coast rises from the sea the Royal Sovereign lighthouse. Its boxy white cabin seems precariously balanced on a single concrete pillar. The light tower tops out at 90 feet above sea level. This is the subject of “Lighthouse,” a spectacular, 12-minute movie by Ms. Yass, a British specialist in the sublime. We explore the edifice as if through a disembodied eye from near and far and above and below. It is a kinetically and poetically thrilling ride. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, (212) 315-0470, galerielelong.com. (Johnson)
Galleries: Other
‘Gran Fury: Ready My Lips’ (through March 17) A collective that grew out of Act Up and took its name from a New York City police car, Gran Fury existed from the end of 1989 until the mid-’90s. The political climate of that period informs the show, as well as downtown Manhattan’s landscape of graffiti, posters and stickers. “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” (1990), a series of posters displayed on buses, defied contemporary claims that AIDS could be spread by kissing, while “Read My Lips” turned George H. W. Bush’s famous campaign line into a homoerotic provocation. The haircuts and clothes in the works are dated, but the sentiments overlap powerfully with current activism and the Occupy movement. 80WSE, New York University, 80 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-5747, steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse. (Schwendener)
‘Soto: Paris and Beyond: 1950-1970’ (through March 31) Once a figure of international renown, Jesús Soto is now mostly remembered as a minor Modernist who worked in the overlap among hard-edge abstraction, kinetic art and Op Art. This show will not precipitate a run to revive his reputation, but it does open an intriguing window on the mid-20th-century philosophical landscape of Modern art. Still perceptually arresting are constructions from the ’50s, in which you view abstract compositions through similarly painted plexiglass panels. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)
Ryan Sullivan (through March 17) The abstract paintings in this stylish and over-full New York gallery debut bend over backward to avoid the conventional, supposedly old-school ploys like adroit brushwork, replacing such familiar tactics with carefully controlled processes of sprayed, poured, festering, rippled and sliding paint that bespeak randomness and chance while evoking Photo Realism, topographical maps and even trompe l’oeil. Eminently promising, they nonetheless look excessively refined and skillful, and more mannered than they should be. Maccarone, 630 Greenwich Street, West Village, (212) 431-4977, maccarone.net. (Smith)
Out of Town
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: ‘Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit’ (through April 15) Tanner (1859-1937) was the first African-American artist to achieve international fame in modern times. After permanently expatriating to France in 1891, he found success as a painter of luminous pictures of biblical subjects. In this informative survey of his career, one piece stands out: an Annunciation in which the angel Gabriel appears to Mary as a burst of yellow light. It is a painting of amazing grace. 118 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, (215) 972-7600, pafa.org. (Johnson)
Neuberger Museum of Art: ‘American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942’ (through April 29) This exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., reunites the Four Musketeers of New York painting: John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. For a time — the 1930s, give or take a few years — these artists linked arms to defend modern American art against the dreariness and insularity of the Depression. One might see this show as an expansion of the first few galleries of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent de Kooning retrospective, with their eerie still lifes and fidgety figure paintings that seemed to collapse abstraction and representation. Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y., (914) 251-6100, neuberger.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Van Gogh Up Close’ (through May 6) Nature both inspired van Gogh’s extraordinary art and calmed his perpetually jangled nerves, and this modest yet groundbreaking show of 45 often small, unfamiliar canvases — devoted almost entirely to landscapes — examines his crucial connection to its bounty. The selection cuts a narrow, well-organized path through his art, examining the terrains he painted, the often close-up viewpoints he used and the shifting topographies of his paint textures, leading us to the fullness of his achievement along a fresh and eye-opening route. Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Smith)
★ Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Zoe Strauss: Ten Years’ (through April 22) In 2001 the artist Zoe Strauss came up with an unusual idea for an exhibition. It would take place under an elevated section of Interstate 95, in her home city, Philadelphia, and would consist of photographs mounted on the columns that supported the highway. It would be a recurring event, appearing yearly over a decade, and would be free and accessible to the public. That series, “I-95,” is at the core of “Zoe Strauss: Ten Years,” an engaging, parameter-expanding exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and on billboards around the city. In it, the highway links sweeping literary ambition and local interest, lyrical and documentary photography, portraiture and the urban landscape. Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Last Chance
George Ortman: ‘Constructions: 1949-2011’ (closes on Saturday) The main reason to see this 62-year, 15-work survey of George Ortman’s work is the radiant relief painting “Tales of Love,” a lost masterpiece from 1959 whose checkered composition of red, yellow and blue with touches of white combines elements of game boards, flags and quilts. It also literalizes the innovations of Jasper Johns’s early work and points them toward proto-Minimalism, especially the early works of Donald Judd, and expands the understanding of a crucial turning point in the history of postwar American art. Algus Greenspon, 71 Morton Street, West Village, (212) 255-7872, algusgreenspon.com. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine’ (closes on Sunday) It is not nice to make fun of other people, but it is hard to resist. This fascinating and often amusing show presents about 160 drawings and prints from six centuries in which men and women appear ugly, weird, venal and foolish. The show shies away from troublemaking work by contemporary artists, but examples of exceptional draftsmanship and satiric imagination from the past abound. Watercolors by the great British cartoonists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson alone make a visit rewarding. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
