Museum and Gallery Listings

ART

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.

Museums

ASIA SOCIETY: ‘ZHANG HUAN: ALTERED STATES,' through Jan. 20. The Chinese artist Zhang Huan, the subject of this small, midcareer survey, is best known for the early, often poetic, sometimes sensationally masochistic performance work he did in the 1990s, which can only be seen in videos and photographs now. The objects in this show, which include giant fragments of Buddhist sculptures made from copper sheets and incense ash, are products of his new workshop-style studio in Shanghai. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 288-6400, asiasociety.org. (Holland Cotter)

★ BROOKLYN MUSEUM: ‘INFINITE ISLAND: CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN ART,' through Jan. 27. This large show, with 45 artists and a collective of designers, photographers and architects from the Dominican Republic adding to the count, fills two floors of temporary exhibition space, and care has been given to the selection. Several of the most substantial pieces were commissioned for the occasion. Organized by Tumelo Moshaka, associate curator of exhibitions at Brooklyn, it's an in-house job, a labor of love, though an uneven one. Too much work treads ground already covered by other art over the years. But what's good is really good, and the very existence of a show about identity politics, out of mainstream fashion in 2007, is cause for serious reflection. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: ‘RICHARD PRINCE: SPIRITUAL AMERICA,' through Jan. 9. This retrospective of one of contemporary art's inveterate bad boys looks more beautiful in the museum's rotunda than it probably should. Covering nearly 30 years, it includes photographs of photographs; joke paintings; car hoods; and parodies of de Kooning's "Women" paintings that have undergone a sex change. It shows a body of work in which the supposed end-game of appropriation has fueled a constantly changing and developing aesthetic that exposes and wryly celebrates the dark and tawdry side of this country's inner life. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Roberta Smith)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ‘GERDA TARO' AND ‘THIS IS WAR! ROBERT CAPA AT WORK,' through Jan. 6. There are a number of narratives running through these shows, from the story of two young people who fled Nazi Germany to the rediscovery of Taro's career and the development of Capa as "the greatest war photographer in the world" (in the view of Picture Post magazine). Accompanied by a book written by Richard Whelan, the show delves into questions about Capa's famous photograph "Death of a Loyalist Militiaman" and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction in war photography. The show also examines how technological developments in warfare, photography and magazine printing led to a new era of photojournalism during the 1930s and '40s. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at West 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Martha Schwendener)

THE JEWISH MUSEUM: ‘CAMILLE PISSARRO: IMPRESSIONS OF CITY AND COUNTRY,' through Feb. 3. This exhibition contains few out-and-out masterpieces, but it does give us a rare look at the radical philosophies behind paintings that to a modern eye appear harmlessly bourgeois. For Pissarro, an anarchist and a Jew (albeit a secular one) in 19th-century France, Impressionism was about much more than the fleeting effects of light. It was about labor, the elimination of hierarchies and an idealized balance between urban and rural life. Pissarro emerges from this exhibition as an artist who never quite resolved the conflict between labor and sensation, but whose subtly anti-authoritarian stance propelled painting into the next century. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, jewishmuseum.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: ‘ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND OTHER MODERN WORKS: THE MURIEL KALLIS STEINBERG NEWMAN COLLECTION,' through Feb. 3. One of the Met's most significant gifts of midcentury art, promised in 1980 and finalized last year, is taut and rich, reflective of a passionately discerning eye. Nearly everything is a standout, not just the rare de Kooning and the substantial Pollock, or works by Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Claes Oldenburg and Jules Olitski. Max Ernst's portrait of Gala Eluard; sculptures by Giacometti and Jacques Lipchitz; paintings by Alfred Leslie and Mark Tobey; and a collage by Anne Ryan radiate an almost brazen self-sufficiency. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

THE MET: ‘THE AGE OF REMBRANDT: DUTCH PAINTING IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,' through Jan. 6. The Met has long advertised itself as a grand art multiplex, a cluster of several separate world-class museums under a single roof. And we get a demonstration in this display of its entire 17th-century Dutch painting collection: 228 pictures, of which roughly a third are usually on view at any time, and some never. In addition to the Rembrandts, there are five Vermeers, nearly a dozen Frans Halses, and the list goes on in an inventory of breathtaking scope and depth. How to package it? The Met has come up with a theme, and a perfect one for our time: money. The work has been sorted not by artists' names or dates, but by the names and dates of the collectors who bought and gave the paintings to the museum. This is the history of the Dutch Golden Age according to the American Gilded Age. (See above.) (Cotter)

★ THE MET: ‘BRIDGING EAST AND WEST: THE CHINESE DIASPORA AND LIN YUTANG,' through Feb. 10. Focused on a single modern family art collection, this show weaves like a DNA strand through the Met's Chinese painting galleries. The 40 examples of painting and calligraphy belonged to the writer and scholar Lin Yutang (1895-1976) and his descendants, who have divided their time between China and the West. Accumulated over years, the collection has the casual logic of a household photo album, with evidence of shared habits, tastes and temperaments, and of personal interchange between generations. (See above.) (Cotter)

THE MET: ‘COAXING THE SPIRITS TO DANCE,' through Dec. 2. How the Papuans practiced their beliefs on the remote Pacific island of New Guinea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they still had little contact with the West, is the complex and fascinating story told in this exhibition of some 60 objects and 30 rare photographs of the works on site or in actual use. The carved and painted "spirit boards" made throughout the gulf region, on the south coast of present-day Papua New Guinea, are probably the most easily recognized of the area's traditional artworks. Their central designs, passed down from fathers to sons and through marriages, typically represent a bush or river spirit, with a heavily stylized face and perhaps a small body, surrounded by various totemic symbols. More daring in concept are the masks used in ritual dances. Papuan art may not be as varied or exciting as that of many African or Amerind peoples, but it records a vibrant community. (See above.) (Grace Glueck)

THE MET: ‘DEPTH OF FIELD,' through March 23. The Met's recently acquired large-scale photographs finally have some room to breathe in the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, a high-ceilinged, gray-carpeted sanctuary on the second floor. Curators at MoMA need not worry: The inaugural installation (a sampler rather than a thematic slice) is dominated by white, mostly male Europeans and heavily weighted with references to history and landscape painting. Despite its limitations, "Depth of Field" is not a bad debut. We can also expect more from future installations, which will explore themes like "photography about photography." (See above.) (Rosenberg)

★ THE MET: ‘ETERNAL ANCESTORS: THE ART OF THE CENTRAL AFRICAN RELIQUARY,' through March 2. Sure to be one of the sleepers of the fall art season, this beautiful show has a universal theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in charismatic materials and images, counseling and chiding us every step of the way. European, Asian and African reliquaries sit side by side in the first gallery; then some of the world's greatest Fang and Kota sculptures take over and sweep through to the end. (See above.) (Holland Cotter)

THE MET: ‘EXCELLENCE AND ELEGANCE: DECORATIVE ARTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY QING COURT,' through Nov. 25. The consummate ambition that Chinese artists brought to diminutive scale is a striking feature of this small show of art from the Qing dynasty, China's last imperial line. The Qing were both conservatively antiquarian and expansively cosmopolitan, and those trends can be seen in the European-inflected versions of ancient Chinese forms in this show. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

* THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: ‘INCISIVE IMAGES: IVORY AND BOXWOOD CARVINGS,' through Nov. 25. This extraordinary show, drawn almost entirely from the Met's vaults, presents an array of nearly 100 carved figures, crucifixes, reliefs, containers, hand-held weapons and the occasional piece of furniture. It is an engrossing hive of religious fervor, Classical erudition (and occasional naughtiness), style shifts and multicultural crosscurrents. And among the many feats of drop-dead artistic skill are several of traffic-stopping caliber. Don't miss it. (See above.) (Smith)