To understand “Ale-ugh-ories,” Nicole Eisenman’s winning exhibition at the New Museum, it helps to be versed in the history of The Thing. I refer to the Marvel comic-book hero, the one whose skin is composed from orange rocks and whose elephantine muscles make him a forerunner of the steroid-assisted baseball players of the ‘90s.

Nicole Eisenman: From Success To Obscurity

(The New Museum/The New Museum)

 The Thing, as it turns out, is the protagonist of Eisenman’s frankly emotional painting,“From Success to Obscurity” (2004). She depicts him as a solitary figure, standing against a pale green ground and reading a letter that begins, “Dear Obscurity.” He looks vulnerable, his blue eyes registering fear.

Clearly, the news contained in the letter is not auspicious. Perhaps he has lost a job in the superhero kingdom and is facing the common woes of unemployment. Or perhaps he is intended as a symbol of of the artistic life, which unfolds in a marketplace that creates art stars and drops them in short order.

Nicole Eisenman: Coping

(The New Museum/The New Museum)

At any rate, Eisenman is an abundantly gifted painter whose surfaces reward careful looking. She paints The Thing as if his body were a beautiful patchwork quilt. In the place of his usual orange-rock skin, she has turned each stone in his armor into its own abstract painting, a mini-Albers, with concentric squares of color. A preponderance of blues, turquoises and ochres evoke Cezanne’s views of the south of France.

Now 51 and based in Brooklyn, Ms. Eisenman is one of our leading figurative painters. She belongs to a generation of mix masters who cull their sources from cartoons and Renaissance paintings alike and act as if the line separating high art from popular culture no longer exists.

Nicole Eisenman: Tea Party

(The New Museum/The New Museum)

The New Museum show is Eisenman’s first retrospective in New York and favors her political allegories. The large-scale painting “Coping” (2008) shows a quaint, Brueghel-like village whose streets are overflowing with a mysterious sludge-like substance, perhaps the result of a nuclear accident.

In “Tea Party,” three right-wingers and Uncle Sam are up to no good in an underground bunker, whose ceiling-high metal shelves form a geometric grid. You can say that a Mondrian is hovering in the background. But whatever abstractions it evokes are quashed by some nine cans of Bumble Bee tuna sitting on the shelf. They are rendered so clearly they amount to comical touch, a nod to the American love of product placement. 

“Ale-ugh-ories” remains on view at the New Museum through June 26, 2016.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was born in Hungary and died in Chicago, in 1946, was a multi-media artist before the term existed. Critics disagree over whether he did his best work as a) a painter who adopted the abstract style of the Russian Constructivists; b) a photographer who favored the photogram, a camera-less way of recording light and shadow on photo-sensitized paper; or c) a professor who taught design at the Bauhaus and exhorted his students to wed art to industry and inaugurate a brave new world.

“Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,” a fascinating and all-important retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Sept. 7, 2016), gives us yet another reason to admire him. Moholy was a proto-post-modernist who dissolved lines — especially those between high art and commercial culture — decades before boundary-blurring became the mandatory mission of contemporary art. It’s telling that the show concludes with some very nifty see-through oil paintings done on Plexiglas, an inspired meeting between high art and cheap plastic. 

László Moholy-Nagy. Photogram, 1926. Gelatin silver photogram, 23.8 x 17.8 cm

(Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Guggenheim)

A charismatic thinker and teacher, Moholy was basically self-taught. His original name was Laszlo Weisz, and he grew up in a Jewish family in the rural south of Hungary. He initially aspired to be a poet, but turned to art after he enlisted in World War I and suffered an injury.

If there is a theme uniting his work across different media, surely it is this: He wanted to capture the interplay of light and shadow, whether through photography (a word that means “writing in light”) or oddball contraptions. The Guggenheim show gives pride of place to his quirky masterpiece of 1930,  “Light Prop for an Electric Stage,” a clunky metal-and-glass machine that he carried with him as he moved from Berlin to London to Chicago. Its moving parts were designed to cast colored shadows (not unlike a disco ball) and it is usually described as the first-ever example of kinetic sculpture. 

László Moholy-Nagy. B-10 Space Modulator, 1942. Oil and incised lines on Plexiglas, in original frame.

(Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Guggenheim)

Moholy’s precocious interest in the mechanized production of art came three decades before Warhol printed his endlessly repeating Marilyns and proclaimed with his trademark irony, “I think everyone should be a machine.”

Unlike Warhol, Moholy viewed machines as a force for social uplift. As he once wrote, “Everyone is equal before the machine.  I can use it; so can you.” But so can people whose aims are not so noble. In the end, his life attests to the failure of art to effect social change, and I think of him as modernism’s most beautiful loser.

Stuart Davis, who was born in in 1892, the son of two artists, was an appealing figure. In the 1920s, when New York was still regarded as a cultural backwater compared to Paris, he set about to improve the situation – to Americanize modernism and to modernize America.

 [Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

He actually succeeded, to judge from “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” a sparkling retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the first gallery of the show, his “Edison Mazda” (1924), with its 75-watt, blue-hued light bulb, injects a comic note of consumerism into the tradition of the Cubist still life. New kitchen appliances, which drove the advertising industry in the 1920s, materialize here as well. Paintings such as the amusing “Super Table” – a futuristic oven, bar and table combined in one – have a cartoony bounce that can put you in mind of both Wilma Flintstone and Philip Guston’s figurative paintings from the ‘60s.

"Edison Mazda" by Stuart Davis now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

(Charlie Herman/WNYC/Whitney Museum of American Art)

 The key word here is forerunner. Davis glamorized everyday objects long before Warhol apotheosized Campbell’s soup cans. And Davis’s graphic clarity, his legibility, his screaming juxtapositions of undiluted primary colors, look forward to Roy Lichtenstein’s crisp universe.

The Whitney show emphasizes Davis’s later work – that is to say, the paintings of his artistic maturity in the 1940s and 1950s, when his forms became flatter and bolder and almost totally abstract, like the collaged paper scraps in a Matisse cut-out. In the early ‘50s, he lifted the word “Champion” from a matchbox ad for spark plugs and splashed it across a series of canvases circa 1950, a witty tribute to the stature of American art after World War II.

Still, at the risk of heresy, I prefer the earlier work, the pre-abstract works, when his lines were wobbly rather than ruler-straight and his colors came in candied pinks and blues. I love his streetscapes from Paris in 1928, impossibly charming scenes that render building facades as slabs of pastel color while leaving room for such quirky details as a curling wrought-irony balcony, or a blue seltzer bottle resting on a ledge.

"Place Pasdeloup" by Stuart Davis from 1928 now on view at the Whitney Museum.

(Estate of Stuart Davis/Whitney Museum of American Art)

All in all, his work is singularly accessible and wholesome. You can say it took the sex out of Cubism. In the place of sensuality, it offered a shout-out to the so-called American spirit, with all that implies about optimism and energy. His work seems free of angst or introspection, which is perhaps why it feels less urgent than that of Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and his other colleagues in the first wave of American modernism.

The International Center of Photography, which is known affectionately among New Yorkers as the ICP, has just acquired a new home on the Bowery. The good news is that it has organized an exhibition called “Weegee’s Bowery,” in honor of the newspaper photographer who trained his lens on bums and drunkards in the years following the Great Depression.

The bad news is that the show has been shipped to Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, along with the rest of the ICP’s extensive permanent holdings.

[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s review of the show with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson.]

'All Night Mission, Bowery" by Weegee from 1940.

(Weegee/International Center of Photography)

These days, the Bowery less resembles Skid Row than Gallery Row, and it is good to have yet another museum (in addition to the New Museum) anchoring that eastern outpost of the art scene. But the ICP’s new home – which occupies the ground floor and basement at 250 Bowery – is not the most inviting space. For starters, there is the problem of the inaugural show. In the place of Weegee, the museum has installed “Public, Private, Secret,” a straining-to-be-cool, theory-laden jumble that tries to explain the not small subject of the digitally-determined present.

It brings together 150 works by 50 artists (and non-artists) that range from accomplished images by “older” artists (Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Vik Muniz, Sophie Calle, Martha Rosler); to art videos of varying quality; to seven square screens dispersed throughout the exhibition and programmed to flash live images from the Internet relating to specific themes, such as “Hotness” and “Celebrity.”

Clearly, we are seeing the 2.0 version of the ICP, which seems eager to break from its low-tech past. The museum was founded in 1974 by Cornell Capa, a Hungarian émigré who viewed photography as an instrument of social justice. He tended to favor images driven by documentarian impulses, including those of his brilliant older brother, the war photographer Robert Capa.

Since then, photography has changed dramatically, and snapping pictures has replaced baseball as America’s favorite pastime. The omnipresence of smartphones has given rise to at least two major schools of photography, leading at one extreme to the froth and narcissism of the selfie and, at the other, to photography-as-surveillance.

A video still from "Trust" by Jill Magid, now on view as a part of the ICP's show "Public, Private, Secret."

(Jill Magid/International Center of Photography)

The surveillance-themed part of the ICP show is probably the most coherent. It includes an unsettling photograph of Jackie Kennedy shown from the back, her hair windswept as she runs through Central Park to escape Ron Galella’s ever-prying paparazzo lens. The notion of the camera as an invasive instrument acquires an edge of political menace in the work of several younger artists, mostly notably Zach Blas, whose fascinating video, “Facial Weaponization Suite,” explains how facial recognition apps can violate your civil rights. The piece comes with a hot-pink blob of plastic molded from the features of dozens of people – a one-size-fits-all mask intended to thwart attempts at racial or sexual profiling.

Unfortunately, the show’s design is busy and confusing. Rare photographs are made to mingle with cheapo reproductions, posters and back issues of magazines, all of it set in a hall of mirrors. Many of the photographs are hung on mirrored walls, so you can watch yourself watching and thereby explore the theme of voyeurism. Or rather, feel like you’re cramped in a Macy’s dressing room. In the end, the stronger art in the show gets lost amid the chaos of the installation, and we emerge from the museum feeling no more enlightened than we do after…just another afternoon in front of the screen.

Outside the International Center of Photography's (ICP) new Bowery location. Its inaugural exhibition titled -- "Public, Private, Secret" -- opened June 23, 2016.

(Saul Metnick/International Center of Photography)

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story listed the location incorrectly. It is 250 Bowery.

“Diane Arbus: in the beginning,” the darkly mesmerizing show currently on view at the Met Breuer outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together a selection of so-called early photographs. Most of them have not been publicly exhibited before and, taken as a whole, they seem likely to confirm and even enhance Arbus’s reputation as one of America’s most original and audacious artists. Her career was distressingly short. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48. This month marks an unhappy anniversary.

Arbus’s death cast a shadow across her work and gave rise to her public image as the Sylvia Plath of photography, a depressed, sometimes desperate female artist adrift in a callous world. But the Met shows gives us a different Arbus, a geniusy, all-seeing photographer who knew exactly what she was doing and determined to challenge the conformist tenor of the 1950s. The exhibition starts in 1956 – the Eisenhower era, the heyday of Normal, when Americans believed they were supposed to aspire to the same, one-size-fits-all set of ideals.

Even in her earliest photographs, Arbus was fascinated by what we now call the world of extreme difference. She celebrated difference before we had a humane vocabulary for it, before the architects of political correctness taught us to bestow respect on people of all backgrounds and races and genders. Today, we no longer refer to midgets and transsexuals as freaks or weirdos, as was the custom in Arbus’s time. Rather, we speak of people affected by a spectrum of physical or psychological difference.

Starting in 1956, when she abandoned a decade-long career in advertising, Arbus trained her lens on dwarfs and giants and transgender men and female strippers in tacky nightclubs. My favorite photograph here shows a sullen schoolgirl standing on the curb on a winter day, awaiting a bus, her pointy hood saddling her with a foolish profile she never requested. Although Arbus supposedly found her subjects on the streets of New York, I wouldn’t call her a street photographer. She wasn’t interested in capturing the proverbial fleeting moment. Rather, she captures the moments that never end, the imperfect bodies that we are born into and which hold us captive, for better and worse, until death do us part.

'Girl with a pointy hood and white schoolbag at the curb, N.Y.C. 1957.'

(Estate of Diane Arbus/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The show’s installation is frustratingly eccentric. Each of the 100-odd photographs is hung on its own freestanding wall, and the walls fill the second floor of the Met Breuer like so many trees in a labyrinthine forest. Chronology – the attempt to track an artist’s development – is tossed to the winds.

The installation of "Diane Arbus: in the beginning" at the Met Breuer.

(Deborah Solomon/WNYC)

Nonetheless, nothing can dilute the primal power of Arbus’s work – which, by the way, seems less driven by impulsive emotion than a conscious love of the constructed rewards of symmetry and full-frontal geometry.

Consider, for instance, “Lady on a bus, N.Y.C.,” from 1957, in which a middle-aged matron bundled in a fur coat stares out from one of the back rows of a city bus, oblivious to the young male passenger seated behind her. Above their heads, a partially visible advertisement offers a picture of happy motherhood – as if to contrast the idealized past with the harsh present. You can safely assume that nothing in an Arbus photograph is there by accident.

'Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y.' from 1960.

(Estate of Diane Arbus/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

If you have never been to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, this is the time to ride the D train up to the Grand Concourse and look around.

The museum’s current exhibition, “Art AIDS America,” is a must-see event for anyone who cares about contemporary art. A big, bold, courageous group show, it offers the first comprehensive look at AIDS-related visual art, and the quality of the work is consistently high. Many of the artists are well-known. They range from sculptors (Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer) to photographers (Duane Michals, Annie Leibovitz, the inevitable Mapplethorpe) to the post-Pop painter Deborah Kass, whose entry is titled, pointedly, “STILL HERE.”

The AIDS crisis first entered public consciousness in the spring and summer of 1981, when the media began reporting on an outbreak of Kaposi sarcoma among otherwise healthy young men. The first artist to make a work that acknowledged AIDS — according to the exhibition — was Izhar Patkin, an Israeli-born New Yorker better-known for his decorative efforts. His “Unveiling of Modern Chastity” (1981) is a tall, mustardy-yellow painting whose surface appears to be flecked with sores. It is, technically, an abstract painting, but it brilliantly expands the borders of abstract painting to encompass the subject of HIV.

Itzhar Patkin 'Unveiling of a Modern Chastity,' (1981).

(Deborah Solomon / WNYC/Private collection)

In doing so, it captures the central drama of this show: How do you convey the sorrows of AIDS? How do retrofit Pop art and Minimalism and the lofty forms of abstract art to accommodate the heartbreak of a generation? The sculptor Robert Gober offers a sparely elegiac answer in his “Drains,” (1990), a 4-inch-wide pewter ring that resembles a bathtub drain; it evokes both the daily ritual of washing and the tragedy of lives that were washed away.

This is a deeply moving and sobering exhibition, not least because many of its participants died prematurely. (Keith Haring, incredibly, was only 31.) I was struck by the profusion of imagery that harked back to the Middle Ages, when the spread of the plague gave rise to morbid references in painting— pocked faces and body limbs, skulls and skeletons.

Put another way, the show is important art-historically, allowing us to see how the AIDS crisis exposed the limits of formalism and demanded a new visual language to express the experience of living and dying. To be sure, earlier artists had endured their own torments, and much has been written about the angst-ridden paintings of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists who flourished in New York in the 1950s. But their paintings dealt in cosmic angst, in a one-size-fits-all sense of existential-style despair.

Here, in the Bronx Museum’s brave show, we see angst tied to a specific time and place, to a specific illness, and to a specific group of people who endured discrimination as a result. We see, in other words, the beginnings of the revolution that brought identity politics to the fore of contemporary art, and finally ended the century-long, modernist belief that one’s life is too small a subject for art.

'Trojan Boxes' (1991) by Adam Rolston, riff on Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes.

(Deborah Solomon / WNYC/Private collection)

If you’ve never heard of Carmen Herrera, a Cuban-born, New York painter who happens to be 101-years-old, you can be forgiven. Virtually no one has seen her work in depth. She did not sell her first painting until she was almost 90, and there is a certain temptation to sentimentalize her as an old-lady painter. But don’t confuse her with famous late-bloomers like Grandma Moses, who is known for her nostalgic scenes of farm life. Herrera, by contrast, got off to a precocious start and favors hard-edged abstraction, as all the world will soon know. “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” which opens today at the Whitney Museum, is a triumph of revisionist art history.

Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera immigrated to New York around 1954, in the years before Castro came to power. By no means a loner, she studied at the Art Students League and, together with her schoolteacher-husband, befriended some of the most advanced artists in the city, Barnett Newman included. But when she tried to interest art dealers in her work, Herrera had no luck. She was female and Latina, and so doubly suspect in an era enamored of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and macho Abstract Expressionism theatrics.  

Amarillo "Dos" (1971) by Carmen Herrera now on view at the Whitney Museum.

(Maria Graciela and Luis Alfonso Oberto Collection © Carmen Herrera/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Despite the rejections, Herrera continued to paint and go her own way. Her work looks handsome-to-dazzling on the museum’s (skylighted) 8^th floor. A central gallery that re-unites nine of her “Blanco y Verde” is the highpoint. The “Blanco y Verde” paintings create surprising drama out of elementary forms: namely, all-white grounds pierced by elongated green triangles. Some of the triangles are so thin they seem to be on the verge of disappearing; others are knife-sharp and slice tautly through space. In the end, I don’t think Herrera is as original as Ellsworth Kelly, who took his forms from nature and reduced them to slabs of pure color, but her work is never less than intelligent and eye-catching. It touchingly suggests that life is a puzzle in which none of the pieces quite fit.  

*    *   *

A more playful challenge to the accepted story of art opened this week at the Jewish Museum. “Take Me (I’m Yours)” is an amusing, idea-permeated group show consisting of 42 sculptures and installations by as many artists – all of the pieces double as giveaways. The show violates every rule of museum etiquette by inviting you to not only touch the art, but to put it in your pocket and take it home with you. The presiding spirit here is Felix Gonzalez-Torres (another Cuban-American, coincidentally), whose mounds of individually-wrapped hard candies inaugurated the tradition of please-touch-the-art art around 1990. In addition to his bonbons, you can come away from the current show with all kinds of art swag: campaign-style buttons inscribed with cryptic messages, temporary tattoos, a Yoko Ono “air capsule,” a Miss America-style banner updated by Andrea Bowers to convey p.c. uplift (“Families Do Not Have Borders,” for instance). I took home, among other things, a small sculpture by Uri Aran, a life-size plaster cast of a takeout coffee lid. It looks a little diminished on my fireplace mantel, and most of the other stuff lost its allure once it got home, proving perhaps, that there’s nothing like an art museum setting to lend objects gravitas.

“Untitled” (USA Today) created in 1990 by Felix Gonzales-Torres consists of candies individually wrapped in red, silver, and blue cellophane.

(The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the Dannheisser Foundation, 1996 © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York/Jewish Museum)

Which political message speaks to you? "Political Ribbons" by Andrea Bowers now for the taking at the Jewish Museum.

(Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York /Jewish Museum)

The Agnes Martin retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is one of the two or three best museum shows in New York this season. It makes you aware, among other things, of a clumsy art-historical mix-up. Martin, one of the great mystics of American art, has had the misfortune of being grouped with the Minimalists. Granted, her work had much in common with theirs. She favored pared-down geometric forms and the color white. But while the Minimalists claimed that “you see what you see,” as Frank Stella put it in 1964, Martin treated visual incident as a point of departure into a higher meditative state.

In this regard, she was close to the Abstract Expressionists of the ‘50s, or rather to the Judeo-spiritual wing of that movement. Some of the earlier paintings in the Guggenheim show, such as “This Rain” (1958), look like bleached-out versions of Rothko’s floating rectangles. “Heather,” with its white stripe pulsing upwards between two yellow blocks, is reminiscent of a Barnett Newman “zip” painting. As the show progresses up the Guggenheim’s ramps and Martin comes into her own, her paintings seem to generate a sense of radiance with increasingly less infrastructure. Her striped paintings from the ‘70s, with their super-pale bands of pink, yellow and blue, are the highpoint of the show. They’re like images espied out of the corner of your eye – there, but just barely. They give you nature not in its sensual fullness but stripped of everything except for the subtlest shifts in atmosphere and light.

As a personality, Martin was a prickly original. Born in 1912, and raised in western Canada, she came to art late. She was in her mid-forties by the time she got around to exhibiting her work at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in New York. A decade later, in 1967, she abruptly left the city and lit out for New Mexico, where she remained until her death at the age of 92. Compared to Georgia O’Keeffe, her fellow desert dweller, Martin had no flair for self-promotion. While O’Keeffe painted scenes of red hills and skulls, and posed for her celebrated photographer-husband, Alfred Stieglitz, Martin (who never married) wasn’t trying to become an American legend. And while O’Keeffe’s paintings always look striking on posters, Martin’s paintings lose everything in reproduction. The only way to see them is in person. Go. Look. They offer a welcome encounter with quietude in a season of incessant political noise.

Agnes Martin's "Untitled #15" now on display at Guggenheim Museum.

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © 2015 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Guggenheim)

“Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York,” a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, is an ambitious undertaking. It seeks to celebrate the achievements of gay artists in New York in the 20^th century – a subject so large as to be roughly tantamount to trying to chronicle the history of, say, blondes. In the interest of coherence, the show focuses on the work of 10 artists and performers and the social circles in which they moved. Some of the choices seem inevitable (Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe), while others will no doubt compel you to decry the omissions (What? No Merce Cunningham?) and wonder why the bisexual composer Leonard Bernstein is given pride of place.

The show opens in the early 20^th century with a little-known artist, Richard Bruce Nugent, a Harlem Renaissance writer and artist who turned out stylized, Deco-ish drawings of nude figures. It’s an interesting bit of New York history and, at its best, the show feels like the gay Baedeker to our city. The highpoint, I think, belongs to the fashion photographer George Platt Lynes, who furnishes moving portraits of various greats, including the painter Marsden Hartley and the British novelists Somerset Maugham and E.M. Forster, a wispy figure posing with his tautly muscled policeman-boyfriend. Another strong moment: the corner occupied by the late Greer Lankton, a transgender artist whose hand sewn dolls imbue the staid tradition of sewing with a satiric edge.

The show’s flaws are considerable. For starters, lesbians are consistently portrayed as minor talents. Unfortunately, a starring role is conferred on Mercedes de Acosta, a playwright and poet today remembered for romancing Greta Garbo and other actresses. Why exalt a lightweight when women of colossal accomplishment – the poets Marianne Moore and Djuna Barnes, or the photographer Berenice Abbott, among others – could have been there instead? One flight up, in the post 1960’s half of the exhibition, too much wall space is devoted to Harmony Hammond, a Chicago-born artist and activist who appropriates braided rugs as a symbol of female empowerment and wields them in paintings and drawings like a blunt instrument.      

To assess a work of art on the basis of its quotient of gay subject matter is to risk ignoring its aesthetic quality, and “Gay Gotham” tends to favor work that embodies homoeroticism in the most literal sense. On a purple-painted wall chronicling the 1950s, Larry Rivers’ comically humongous full-length portrait of his lover Frank O’Hara – naked except for his cowboy boots – is paired, rather jarringly, with a small, sensitive, pastel-hued portrait of the writer James Baldwin, by Beauford Delaney. Judging from this exhibition, you would never know that gay artists also paint landscapes and still lifes [sic], or that gay and lesbian artists (e.g., Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin) can be leading abstract painters. This is a show about diversity that lacks diversity.

Max Beckmann was, by any measure, the greatest German artist of the 20th century. Yet he has never had the allure of his European compatriots Picasso and Matisse, perhaps because he was never a crusading modernist. In the heyday of abstract painting, he clung to the hidebound tradition of figure painting. And while other painters banished story-telling from their canvases in the interest of radical reduction, Beckman went the opposite way, loading up his pictures with burlesque dancers and medieval kings, with banjo-players and sword-wielding soldiers, mingling the sights of the present with characters out of the Bible or mythology and striving for high drama.

“Max Beckmann in New York,’” the beautiful show that curator Sabine Rewald has assembled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a partial retrospective, which might sound like a contradiction of terms. It brings together two distinct bodies of work – the paintings that Beckmann did during his brief, late-life stay in New York City, and earlier paintings that happen to be owned by New York private collectors or institutions. This is a risky approach, since its organizing principle owes less to the merits of individual paintings than to the randomness of their owners’ addresses. But somehow it works, perhaps because Beckmann is so inherently compelling. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, which classified all modern art as criminally degenerate, he and his wife arrived in the States in 1947. They eventually settled in an apartment at 38 West 69th Street, off Central Park West. In 1950, at age 66, he suffered a heart attack while walking to the Met. The circumstances of his death have been cited as the inspiration for the current show.

You can also see the show as a form of curatorial atonement. In 1971, Henry Geldzahler, the museum’s brilliant curator of contemporary art, made the astonishingly poor decision to de-accession three of the Beckmanns in the Met’s collection. He was trying to raise money to buy a David Smith sculpture. Fair enough. But among the sacrifices was Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait with Cigarette,” an intense, magnetic painting that wound up in Germany, but is back in New York for the current show. It’s a knock-out, an unfiltered portrait of a middle-aged man with a boulder of head, heavy black outlines everywhere, his green scarf and blue jacket as radiant as shards of color in a stained-glass window.

It’s unsettling to think about the vicissitudes of taste. Beckmann was deemed irrelevant to the history of art as recently as 1971. In fact, it wasn’t until a new generation of Neo-Expressionists (Georg Baselitz and company) emerged in the 1980s that Beckmann was rehabilitated as a master. You assume his reputation is safe from hereon in. But Beckmann, who spent his life in flight from the forces of evil, knew that no one and nothing is ever permanently safe. So let’s not take this current moment of Beckmann appreciation for granted.

Painted in the last year of his life, Max Beckmann's "Beginning" reflects his childhood in Germany.

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot /Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In the 1990s, “identity art” was a maligning phrase among mainstream critics. It referred to art that emphasized racial or sexual indignity at the expense of aesthetic content. Such art sprang from “the culture of complaint,” to borrow a book title from Robert Hughes, the celebrated art critic of Time magazine. He didn’t believe that artists consumed by a sense of social grievance could do justice to the Big Issues of Art.

I thought of that book, and how wrong Hughes was, as I made my way through “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” a magnificent and surprisingly entertaining retrospective of 70-plus paintings now on view at Met Breuer annex of the Metropolitan Museum. It’s certainly one of the top two or three best museum shows in New York right now, and it abounds with pleasures. Here is an artist who can tackle the history of racial abasement while somehow making room to cleverly muse on Manet, Fragonard, Mondrian and the flying bluebirds in Hallmark greeting cards – in short, the history of art and image-making.

"School of Beauty, School of Culture" by Kerry James Marshall portrays a beauty salon not far from his home on Chicago's South Side. It also has many references to European Old Masters.

(Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

True, Marshall, an African-American painter of 61, based in Chicago, puts the theme of racial injustice at the center of his work. He speaks of his paintings as a conscious attempt to repair historical wrongs and insert black figures into the lily-white story of art. On one level, he’s a genre painter who favors glimpses of everyday life. He paints scenes in which African-American men and women might meet for a drink, go to the barber for a haircut, or attend a barbecue on July 4^th. The figures tend to have the same coal-black skin. They function more as symbols than as individuals; they’re the spawn of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and a society bent on racial profiling.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self" from 1980 by Kerry James Marshall.

(Steven and Deborah Lebowitz/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Nonetheless, the true subject of Marshall’s work is probably his love-hate relationship with the art of the past, especially American abstract art. As much as he may admire Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings or Willem de Kooning’s peachy-cream brushstrokes (look for references to them throughout the show), he is constantly asking whether an artist can be morally justified in embracing abstraction if it means ignoring social ills. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, the son of a postal worker, Marshall was still in grade school when his family moved to Los Angeles, in time to witness the Watts riots that became an international symbol of America’s racial torments.

Kerry James Marshall's "De Style" portrays a neighborhood barbershop, with a sly nod to the Dutch art movement "De Stijl" (note the Mondrian color blocks).

(Los Angeles County Museum of Ar/Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Met curator Ian Alteveer has done an inspired job with the exhibition, spreading it out over two spacious floors of the Met Breuer. It fills the third floor and fourth floor with a natural sense of proportion. You cannot ask for a more prestigious space in which to celebrate the art of this country, and the Met is to be congratulated for doing the show in an appropriately grand and “mastry” way.

Video art might seem too new to claim its own history, but Pipilotti Rist, a Zurich-based artist of 54, is one of the medium’s now-historic pioneers. In “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest,” her buoyant and lushly installed retrospective at the New Museum, the early works have the familiarity of classics. The best-known is probably “Ever Is Over All,” (1997) a four-minute production in which a young woman strolling through a city in dreamy slow-motion surrenders to a fantasy of violence. She smashes the windshield of a parked car; a cop lets her off with a conspiratorial wink. The video legitimizes acts of female transgression, and it received a nifty nod this year when Beyoncé recycled the car-window scene in a music video for her song, “Hold Up.”

That Rist’s protagonist smashed a window (as opposed to, say, a plate or a coffee mug or a prized Chinese vase) seems significant. Windows afford vistas, and Rist has spent her career constructing new ones, preferably of the sort that turn your view upside down and inside out. At the New Museum, you see digitally-manipulated imagery projected on the floor, on the ceiling and into anonymous corners. Video illuminates a glowy forest of 3,000 dangling LED lights. She even projects video onto a homemade chandelier contrived from women’s underwear. Do panties constitute another kind of screen? Rist makes you ask yourself funny questions.

Pipilotti Rist, Pixelwald (Pixel Forest), 2016. 

(Courtesy of the New Museum)

Her recent works favors imagery culled from the natural world. She can seem like a forest sprite or a female Neptune, in love with the ocean and whirling currents, with intimations of the earth’s creation. She wants to immerse you in environments of her own making. This backfires in a series of works in which you are required to step up on a block and stick you head inside a wooden viewing box – it made me feel like I was enacting the torments of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But elsewhere, warm feelings ebb and flow. The highpoint of the show comes on the fourth floor, where you can recline on one of 18 beds and gaze up communally at two pond-shaped screens affixed to the ceiling. As you watch shafts of sunlight slice through the water, green fronds floating by, you are supposed to feel as if you are looking up from the bottom of Monet’s famous pond in Giverny. Rist, you might say, is the opposite of Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker whose recent show at the Whitney Museum explored the camera as a weapon of surveillance. Rist doesn’t seem to care about the darker side of technology. Rather, she creates a fantasy pastoral where there’s no Big Brother and the only ones watching you are your fellow flower children. Go, if you’re in the mood for rapture.

Pipilotti Rist, 4^th Floor To Mildness, 2016. 

(Courtesy of the New Museum)

Francis Picabia’s career has long been split into opposing halves. He was one of the founders of the Dada movement in the years following World War I, and his early paintings and drawings were dutifully experimental. A natural draftsman and quick study, he mastered the workings of Impressionism and Cubism before turning out his witty “Mechanomorphs” – paintings of fantasy machines whose pistons and cylinders can be read as male and female body parts coming together in eternal overtime.

Francis Picabia's "Udnie (Young American Girl; Dance)" now on view at MoMA.

(Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris/MoMA)

Picabia’s later work, by contrast, was once viewed as a retreat into old-hat realism. Critics wrote it off as clumsy, at best. Yet today we can say it speaks to the moment.

"Optophone [I]" by Francis Picabia

(Kravis Collection/MoMA)

 The highpoint of the massive retrospective of his work opening on Monday at the Museum of Modern Art comes in the rooms devoted to Picabia’s so-called “Transparencies,” which superimpose unrelated images on top of each other like so many see-through veils.

In a mural-size painting such as “Melibee,” of 1930, a tender-eyed Madonna lifted from a Renaissance painting gazes through a tangle of branches and asterisk-like stars, there but not there. The poetic layering can put you in mind of David Salle and other living artists who mix and match images that don’t belong together, and convey a sense of the unanchored, floating-away feeling of contemporary life.

As a personality, Picabia left much to be desired. In most accounts, he comes across as a cavalier playboy. Born into an affluent family in Paris, in 1879, he spent much of his adulthood in Cannes, assembling a sizable collection of racing cars and yachts.

During World War II, when many of his artist-friends sailed to New York and sit out the war, Picabia lingered on the French Riviera and made his peace with the Vichy regime. After it collapsed, Picabia was arrested by French officials for being a Nazi collaborator, although the charges were eventually dropped.

Is all this relevant? By now we know better than to judge an artist by his or politics or ethical failings. Yet the problem with Picabia is that his art, too, seems driven by convenience and a lack of rigor. He had no interest in form – in breaking it down and reassembling it, as Picasso did – and treated art styles as if they were so many sleek cars to be raced and discarded. To be sure, there are many beautiful paintings in the show, especially among the “Transparencies,” and I suspect that contemporary artists of all persuasions will find isolated works to admire. But, taken as a whole, Picabia is not a deep enough artist to justify a show of this size. Perhaps I am merely suffering from post-election blues, but at a time when our politics are plagued by so much dishonesty, Picabia’s slipperiness and moral ambiguity make him hard to admire.

" L’Adoration du veau (The Adoration of the Calf)" by Francis Picabia.

(Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris/MoMA)

A confession: It took me years to warm to the virtues of identity art.

In the 1990s, when identity politics began infiltrating the art world, I saw them as a distraction. It seemed odd to want to label the makers of magical art objects as female artists or black artists or artists who were gay or transgender – wasn’t art supposed to rise above such special interests and speak its secrets to all of humankind?

Yet over time, art about identity proved to be some of the strongest art of our time. Moreover, its ascendancy corrected for past exclusions and turned the art world into a far more equitable place. Just this week, wandering around New York in a state of post-election melancholy, I was heartened by the abundance of first-rate shows by women. I admired Cecily Brown’s inordinately accomplished figurative studies at the Drawing Center in SoHo, and Carol Bove’s monumental welded-steel sculptures at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. And then there is “Pretty/Dirty,” the edgy and intelligent Marilyn Minter retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.

Minter, a Shreveport-born New Yorker who is now 68, came of age in the early years of the women’s movement and is known for luridly colored paintings that poke holes into airbrushed ideals of beauty. Often she depicts facial features in breathy and discomfiting close-up. Eyes, mouths and tongues are set at unsettling angles and encrusted with all kinds of goo. If this sounds disgusting, it kind of is, but disgust is a necessary ingredient of any discussion of contemporary culture and Minter wins the prize for candor. Plus, she is saved by her essentially Rubens-esque love of depicting skin.

The Minter retrospective is one of ten shows that the Brooklyn Museum has planned for the coming year, under the rubric “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism.” It is intended as a celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the museum’s on-site Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

This is a worthy undertaking, especially since multi-culturalism has gotten a bad rap lately. In the past month, in trying to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Democrats have accused their party of pandering to long-beleaguered groups – women, immigrants, gays – at the expense of the white middle-class, which supposedly feels marginalized and under-represented. It is facile, I think, to blame multiculturalism for the failure of Democratic politics. Its gains have been inspiring, especially in the art world. Museums and galleries are far more inclusive than they were a generation ago, and no election can undo that.

Deborah Solomon, WNYC art critic and the author of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), talks about some of the art worth bundling up for this winter.

 Kerry James Marshall: Mastry - The Met Breuer (Until January 29 2017)

Kerry James Marshall. American, born Birmingham, Alabama 1955 Slow Dance

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life - Richmond Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (Until February 20, 2017)

Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1981. Lithograph, 50 x 38 in. (127 x 96.5 cm).

(Private Collection. Art © Jasper Johns and ULAE/Licensed by VAGA, New Yok, NY. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions)

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait between the Clock and the Bed, 1940-43, Oil on canvas, 58 7⁄8 x 47 1⁄2 in. (149.5 x 120.5 cm)

(Munch Museum)

 A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde - Museum of Modern Art (Until March 12, 2107)

Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine. 1878-1935). Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 1915. Oil on canvas. 22 7/8 x 19″ (58.1 x 48.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

(Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange))

Vladimir Stenberg (Russian, 1899-1982) and Georgii Stenberg (Russian, 1900-1933). Symphony of a Big City. 1928. Lithograph, 41 x 27 1/4″ (104 x 69 cm).

(The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Marshall Cogan Purchase Fund.)

 Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty - the Brooklyn Museum (Until April 2 2017)

Marilyn Minter (American, b. 1948). Pop Rocks, 2009. Enamel on metal, 108 x 180 in. (274.3 x 457.2 cm). Collection of Danielle and David Ganek

(The Brooklyn Museum ) 

 I'm Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson - The Morgan Library (January 20 -May 21, 2017)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1882). I'm Nobody! Who are you? Poem (detail), ca. late 1861

(Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

Marsden Hartley's Maine- The Met Breuer(March 15 - June 18, 2017)

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943) ; Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine ; Oil on Masonite-type hardboard ; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art /Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 Robert Rauschenberg - Museum of Modern Art (May 21 - September 17 2017)

Robert Rauschenberg. Collection. 1954/1955. Oil, newspaper, and fabric on three panels of raw canvas, each overlaid with silk in wood frame with other wood elements, overall: 6 ft. 8 in. × 8 ft. × 2

(San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. Photo: Ben Blackwell. © 2016 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)

Can we ever go back to Tenth Street? Probably not. I refer not to a specific place but to a vanished era in New York’s cultural history, a romantic time when the art scene was still centered in Greenwich Village. This was in the mid-1950s, when rent was cheap and the concept of the art market had nothing to do with American art. The main art galleries, up on Fifty-seventh Street, favored pedigreed French landscapes and portraits. Desperate to show their work, New York artists began opening galleries in nothing-special spaces along Tenth Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues. The Tanager Gallery was across the street from the Brata; the Hansa was around the corner.

Now we have an exhibition about exhibitions. “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965,” at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, offers a piquant and all-important chronicle of the years before the art world became its current investment-crazed self. Curated by Melissa Rachleff, the show is an energetic and even exuberant mix of 200 works by nearly as many artists who belonged to some 14 galleries, all but one of which were located downtown. You can go through the show seeing it as a history of a defunct gallery scene; or you can see it instead an as alternative history of the painting and sculpture of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Either way it will broaden your understanding of an era that tends to be packaged by our major museums as the story of Jackson Pollock & Company.

To be sure, Abstract Expressionism dominates here, much as it does in the official version of post-war art. The show is nothing if not inordinately smeary. Walking through the first few rooms, you’re transported to the era when brushstrokes were regarded as sacrosanct – or rather, as a token of an artist’s most authentic self. Sculpture, in the meantime, was tipping towards the found object and everyday detritus: assemblage and collage proliferated.

Some of the artists in the current show, such as Alex Katz, Louise Nevelson and James Rosenquist, went on to have large, influential careers. But others were not so fortunate. Their reputations peaked in the ‘50s and, after that, they seemed to disappear. Many of them were women artists who perhaps fell prey to an unfair system. Sari Dienes, for instance, made beautiful and original drawings from rubbings of sewer grids and manhole covers; they infuse the pristine forms of abstraction with a sooty urbanity. Jean Follett is also among the standouts in the show. It is rewarding to see her assemblages, in which light switches and metal nails and other hardware-store purchases are arranged into poetic tableaux. Jane Wilson contributes an evocative portrait of the painter Jane Freilicher.

The exhibition is spread out over two floors, and the basement is reserved for a handful of artists who exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s fabled Green Gallery – the only gallery in the show that was never downtown. It opened on Fifty-seventh Street. It received a jolt of attention last year with the publication “Eye of the Sixties,” an engrossing biography of Bellamy by Judith Stein. Clearly, we are seeing a new interest in excavating the history of New York’s historic galleries. This is a welcome development, and the catalogue for the current exhibition, published by Delmonico Books/Prestel, is first-rate. To read it is to be reminded of all that galleries have contributed to the culture of New York – and of all they stand to lose with the rise of the icky global phenomenon of art fairs.

"HPFS," (c. 1953) by Sari Dienes, part of the exhibit "Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965"

(Sari Dienes Foundation/Deborah Solomon)

When the Whitney Museum of American Art re-opened in 2015 with a humongous and fascinating survey of its permanent collection, there were, inevitably, some omissions. Where was Ross Bleckner, for starters? And where were Eric Fischl and Terry Winters? A generation earlier, each of them had been honored with a full-dress, much-ballyhooed retrospective at the Whitney. Their absence from the inaugural show at the downtown building was hard to ignore. It made you wonder whether a new generation of curators felt that the art of the ‘80s was overexposed and undeserving of a fresh look.

Thankfully not. “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s,” which opens today at the museum, is an absorbing group show that brings together about 40 paintings by as many artists. All of them made their reputations during the money-drenched, market-driven Reagan years, a time when painting, preferably of the figurative sort, returned to favor after a decade of Minimalist rule. A key concept was appropriation, a fancy word for theft. Painters ransacked old art for images and argued that originality no longer existed. The period is due for a reassessment, but this show isn’t the one to do it. “Fast Forward” is drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection and is simply too small to broaden our view of the era. Instead of rewriting history, it affectionately revisits it.

To be sure, the show does make an effort to add new names to the mix. It includes a handful of paintings acquired just last year, including Louisa Chase’s ominous landscape “Limb” (1981), a green-hued view of treetops in which dark body is visible through the foliage. Walter Robinson’s “Baron Sinister” (1986) – a scene swiped from a pulp paperback cover and rendered in acrylic on an actual floral bed sheet – has a folk-art directness, and proves that appropriation art doesn’t have to be nasty.

You don’t want to miss Fischl’s “A Visit To/A Visit From/The Island,” (1983), a horizontal diptych that brings together two wholly disparate images. On the left side, a man, a woman and a teenager who are presumably on a family vacation linger on a tropical beach, oblivious to each other and to their radiant surroundings, all blue sky and turquoise water. On the right side, beneath a cloudy sky, a group of Haitian immigrants struggle for dear life in the water. Although the painting was done more than 30 years ago, it captures with almost harrowing precision our current political situation – an America that remains deaf to the anguish of immigration. As the news out of Washington keeps worsening, it is great to have this painting on view and to recall that American art has its own history of passionate political masterpieces.

"Limb" by Luisa Chase now on view at the Whitney Museum.

(Charlie Herman/Whitney Museum of American Art)

For a few years now, the New York Public Library has been selling tote bags bearing an inscription from the artist Raymond Pettibon. “Good prose is of no harm,” it says, above an image of two clowns. The message might seem pretty lame as far as words of wisdom go. Shouldn’t “good prose” aspire to something more ambitious than the avoidance of injury? Shouldn’t it seek to illuminate or enlighten? Nonetheless, I bought the bag and use it everyday, perhaps because there is something irresistibly playful about Pettibon’s famous combinations of goofy aphorisms and cartoon-like drawing.

Pettibon, who turns 60 this year and lives in New York, is now the subject of a powerful if uneven retrospective at the New Museum. (Its title, “A Pen of All Work,” is another of his almost–aphorisms.) The show brings together some 700 works, most of them ink drawings on paper. Is he a master draftsman? He is probably more of a mad draftsman, endowing the medium with a terrific urgency. Filling three floors of the museum, the show contains more material than you can absorb on a single visit. The crowded installation seems fitting for an artist who adopts the persona of a compulsive and cranky social observer. In his early work especially, he can put you in mind of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, ranting about the follies of politics and contemporary life.

Born in 1957, the son of an English teacher, Pettibon was raised in Southern California. He always drew, and when he was in his twenties, he published his drawings in small ‘zines and on record covers. The show is heavy on his early work, which can be sophomoric. Many of his drawings poke fun at the failed idealism of the counterculture of the ‘60s. The hippies who populate his work variously drop acid, throw themselves off of buildings, or point loaded guns at the viewer. Pettibon’s artistic universe – which treats hippies, Jesus and Joseph Stalin as fellow believers in religions of sort – levels all ethical distinctions and isn’t exactly persuasive as commentary.

The show is really a two-part affair, and the later work is where he excels. In the place of sardonic one-liners, he starts to favor cryptic excerpts from literary fiction and a style that is nearly painterly. His penchant for graphic immediacy culminates in a series of very beautiful drawings – mural-sized images of crashing waves. Some are as large as seven feet square and you can make out tiny surfers in the water. With their slashing lines of black and turquoise, the wave drawings suggest that Pettibon is a closet colorist with a hankering for Matisse’s decorative blues and golds.

His best work extracts an unexpected poetry and ambiguity from straightforward words and images. Look for the small black-and-red drawing that shows a child’s tricycle isolated against a bare page. The caption says: “Who will finish his odyssey?” Maybe Pettibon will. For all his famous cynicism, he is clearly on some kind of colossal odyssey and getting better as he goes.

Raymond Pettibon's drawing of a tricycle, "No Title (Who will finish…)."

(Archive Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland/The New Museum)

Some artists are beloved for their late works, none more so than J.M.W. Turner. The British painter, who flourished in London in the first half of the 19^th century, is celebrated for the daringly blurry seascapes he painted in the 1840s, the decade before he died. Working in both oils and watercolors, he dissolved buildings, figures and other staples of the visible world in broad washes of color that were later seen to mark the advent of abstract painting. American art historians tend to treat Turner as an essential precursor of the Abstract Expressionist movement that ascended in New York a century after his death. They draw a direct line from Turner’s seascapes to Mark Rothko’s floating rectangles of orange and red.

Yet “Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages of Time,” a small, fascinating exhibition of 35 works currently at the Frick Collection, gives us a new view of the artist. It ignores the late works in favor of his relatively uncelebrated middle years. The Frick happens to own two large-scale paintings from the 1820s that offer views of bustling European ports – the port in Dieppe, and the port in Cologne. The show reunites them with the third painting in the series, an unfinished view of Brest on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. Taken together, the port scenes are a model of European romanticism, with sweeping views of the sky and tiny human figures that tend to get lost in the scenery.

But if you step up close, you can make out hundreds of figures engaged in their daily routines. There are women with wicker baskets and clay jugs and vendors selling fish. In “Harbor of Dieppe,” the busy townspeople on the right side of the canvas contrast with a ghostly absence on the left side. A ball of white-to-yellow light hovers in the sky and is reflected in the water, which is the color of melted butter. You can feel Turner breaking from the naturalistic world into the lit realm of his imagination. You can almost see, in the sky and sea, two “great balls of fire,” as Jerry Lee Lewis sang in an altogether different context.

The show, coincidentally, arrives at a time when Turner’s life story has been gaining attention outside of the academy. As a personality, he was nothing if not eccentric. The son of a barber, he lived with his father for most of his life and had no patience for social niceties. A new biography of him by the British writer Franny Moyle emphasizes his working-class origins and fascinating ascent to the apex of the British art world. The book confirms the unsettling view of the artist that emerged from Mike Leigh’s vivid 2014 film, “Mr. Turner,” which acquaints you with a world-class sourpuss, a fat, frowning man in a black top hat, growling at everyone around him.

His dyspeptic personality contrasts with the spirit of his work, which finds beauty in nature and especially in sunlight. There are watercolors in this show that are breathtaking. The Frick, by the way, is prohibited from lending the works in its collection to other museums. Upon his death, the works that Turner still owned were bequeathed to the people of England, and fortunately the people of England can lend to the Frick.

J.M.W. Turner, The Harbor of Brest: The Quayside and Château, ca. 1826–28, oil on canvas.

(Courtesy of the Tate, London )

Alexei Jawlensky was one of the pioneers of modern art, but he remains less known than many of his artist-friends. He died in Germany, in 1941, and he is just now having his first full-dress retrospective at an American museum. The Neue Galerie has gathered some 75 of his paintings into a stirring and illuminating survey that will not travel to any other museum.

Russian by birth, Jawlensky left his homeland in 1896 and settled in Munich, which rivaled Paris as a center of avant-garde art. His companion was Marianne von Werefkin, an accomplished painter who was a few years old than him. Together in Munich, they became close to their fellow Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, and his German lover Gabriele Munter. Double-dating doesn’t get any cooler than that, and the foursome practically invented Expressionism. Judging from the current show, Jawlensky got off to a brilliant start, painting portraits and landscapes that have a raw power. He simplified his lines and went for flat planes of high-key, Matisse-like colors. “Dark Blue Turban,” of 1910, is among the standouts, a portrait of a woman in a red ruffled blouse, set against a sizzling pink ground.  It hasn’t dated at all and compels our attention despite the awkwardly disconnected left forearm.

The odd thing about Jawlensky is that his best paintings look like Matisse’s or Kandinsky’s or even Munter’s. When he finally broke free of his artistic influences and found his own voice, his art was less interesting.  After the adventure of his wonderful portraits, he began painting heads, faces devoid of distinctive features or any noticeable personality. The show culminates with his so-called “Abstract Heads” — a group of paintings from the 1920s that feature the same mask-like visage. They can put you in mind of Modigliani’s elongated faces, but their colors are their own, a complement of pinks and lavenders brushed on like so much makeup. The painting “Abstract Head: Inner Vision – Rosy Light” seems especially heavy on the blush. For all the candied colors, Jawlensky liked to emphasize his spiritual aspirations. His last works, the small-scale “Meditations,” were undertaken when his hands were aching with arthritis. They distill the vectors of the human face into stark Christian crosses.

It is hard to know why Jawlensky was so obsessed with painting heads. Perhaps he was channeling the Russian icons of his childhood, those age-old faces of saints and martyrs, aglow in red and gold hues. In his statements about his art, he insisted that he was looking for the face of God, and it is true that circles (i.e. head shapes) have a perfection that can suggest the heavens. A psychological reading of his work might suggest that Jawlensky was looking for the face of his absent mother – a face to mirror his own and to assure him of his basic worth.

The catalogue for the show is unusually readable. We learn from it that John Cage, of all people – the experimental composer and painter manqué – was among Jawlensky’s collectors. In 1935, during his student days in California, Cage purchased one of the “Meditations” for the grand price of $25, with a down payment of $1. It’s one of many fascinating details to be gleaned from the show, which is probably stronger on historical anecdote than it is on painterly power.

Alexei Jawlensky "Abstract Head:Late Summer (Crescent Moon). Oil on board.

(Courtesy of the Milton Wichner Collection )