Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.
Museums
★ 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. (Ken Johnson)
★ 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 show, which transforms the 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 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 girls along a public garden path. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
★ 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, 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’ See photo highlight.
★ 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. (Roberta Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde’ (through June 3) Like the family it chronicles, this exhibition is fragmented and contentious with flashes of brilliance. It explores the closely intertwined collections of the siblings Leo, Gertrude and Michael Stein (and Michael’s wife, Sarah), casting these wealthy American expatriates as ahead-of-the-curve art patrons whose tastes and social networks shaped modernism as we know it. And it shows Matisse and Picasso vying for the Steins’ attention. Highlights include Matisse’s Fauvist “Woman With a Hat” and, naturally, Picasso’s proto-cubist portrait of Gertrude. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ 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, 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)
★ 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: ‘Cindy Sherman’ (through June 11) Aided by ever-shifting arrays of costumes, wigs, makeup, props 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)
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)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Whitney Biennial 2012’ (through May 27) With remarkable clarity of vision, striking spatial intelligence and a generous stylistic inclusiveness, one of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory confidently weaves together art objects and time-based art — dance, theater and performance as well as film and video — on a scale unprecedented in New York. So doing, this especially poetic incarnation also reinvents the museum’s signature show and places future biennial curators in its debt, while offering the out-of-control, money-saturated art world a bit of redemption. Visit early and often. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
Paul Graham: ‘The Present’ (through April 21) The latest series by this British photographer, “The Present,” was shot entirely in high-traffic areas of Manhattan (Penn Station, Times Square and 125th Street, among others). Its 16 diptychs and 2 triptychs have a simple premise: They show two or three views of the same intersection, taken seconds apart and from more or less the same angle. People go out of focus or disappear entirely and are replaced by new pedestrians doing pretty much the same thing. Cabs speed by, cellphone conversations end, attentions are diverted and street photography is reinvented for an age of perpetual distraction. The Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill, 545 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 989-4258, thepacegallery.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Ryan McNamara: ‘Still’ (through April 7) Friday and Saturday are the last days to join in the action-packed picture-taking fun masterminded by this resourceful performance artist, who is aided by backdrops, costumes, props, materials and whatever ideas spring to anyone’s mind. Starting next week, we will be able to see more clearly the possibly environmental artwork that Mr. McNamara hath wrought by culling images from the photo sessions and decoupaging them, downsized and tinted, to whatever strikes his fancy. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 545 West 20th Street, (212) 924-7545, now.elizabethdee.com. (Smith)
Galleries: Other
Guy Goodwin: ‘Recent Works’ (through April 8) The latest paintings by this veteran abstractionist are laugh-out-loud beautiful. They amp up his longtime interest in bold, roughly painted motifs and objectlike impact through the use of searing color and cut-out (and cut-into) laminated cardboard, with obsessive stapling doing double time as brushwork. More comedic than existential, they make a place for themselves in the tradition of raucous American abstraction that could be said begin with Stuart Davis and George Sugarman. Brennan Griffin, 55 Delancey Street, Lower East Side, (212) 227-0115, brennangriffin.com. (Smith)
Sam Moyer: ‘Slack Tide’ (through April 22) Sam Moyer’s beguiling pictures oscillate astutely between the sublime and the decorative. Mounted on panels whose dimensions range from about 5 to 10 feet, they resemble much-enlarged, black-and-white, aerial photographs of mountainous topographies, possibly on another planet. They also are like giant, dark photocopies of profusely wrinkled bed sheets. But they are entirely made by hand. Rachel Uffner Gallery, 47 Orchard Street, near Hester Street, Lower East Side, (212) 274-0064, racheluffnergallery.com. (Johnson)
Last Chance
Eric Fischl: ‘Portraits’ (closes on Saturday) As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to agitate against grotesque concentrations of wealth at the top end of the social food chain, Mr. Fischl is having this lavish, two-gallery exhibition of two decades worth of portraits of the rich, powerful and famous friends and benefactors, including Steve Martin, Eli Broad and Stephanie Seymour. What, any sentient viewer must wonder, were he and Mary Boone thinking? Mary Boone, 745 Fifth Avenue and 541 West 24 Street, (212) 752-2929, maryboonegallery.com. (Johnson)
‘Gran Fury: Ready My Lips’ (closes on Saturday) 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)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini’ (closes on Sunday) This magisterial, 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 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)
Ryan Sullivan (closes on Saturday) 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)
★ Catherine Yass: ‘Lighthouse’ (closes on Saturday) Five miles off the English coast rises from the sea the Royal Sovereign lighthouse. Its boxy white cabin seems precariously balanced on a 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, far, above and below. It is a kinetically and poetically thrilling ride. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 315-0470, galerielelong.com. (Johnson)
