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OCTOBER

Kind eyes: El Greco's Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino, the portrait of a friend.   (Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Religious Experience
The Met salutes El Greco, master of mysticism—and intensely soulful portraiture.

One of art’s greatest visionaries, El Greco (1541–1614) infused the human body with spiritual fire. His figures flicker and twist upward; their otherworldly sheen recalls the luminous intensity of the saint. Such an artist might seem foreign to our secular contemporary world, but in fact, El Greco is a discovery of modern taste. For centuries, his religious paintings were considered overwrought. It took eyes accustomed to Picasso and Pollock to appreciate his extravagant originality.

The exhibition coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art will include about 80 pictures, with an emphasis on the artist’s later, more mystical creations. Even the astonishing nine-foot-tall The Adoration of the Shepherds, which El Greco made for his own tomb, will be coming to New York. But the show also includes a full accounting of the master’s other work. A well-traveled and cultivated man, fluent in the varied ideas of his time, El Greco began as a Byzantine icon painter in Crete and studied Italian art in Venice and Rome before finally settling in Toledo, Spain.

In addition to making religious art, El Greco painted some of the greatest portraits of the era—unsparing and psychologically acute, but not unkind. The subject of the magnificent Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino, for example, was an ardent admirer of the artist who dedicated four poems to him. El Greco could see the flesh as well as the soul.—M.S.

• Details: El Greco, at the Met (October 7–January 11).

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Americana Idol
Pop star James Rosenquist gets his first big retrospective in 30 years.

James Rosenquist twirls the Pop kaleidoscope. He values the passing pow! of a good commercial. He likes candied colors. He understands the way we glimpse pieces of imagery when we flip through a magazine or travel along a strip of gas stations and fast-food joints. Born in North Dakota, Rosenquist actually earned his living in the late fifties by painting billboards—an ideal occupation for a man who would join Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg as one of the founders of Pop art.

The retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum is the first significant survey of Rosenquist’s art in more than 30 years. It will include almost 170 works in a variety of media. Rosenquist typically juxtaposes snippets of Pop imagery, usually taken from advertisements, to create enigmatic effects and meanings. In The Promenade of Merce Cunningham, he depicted a pair of shoes with untied laces dancing on a floor of chicken chow mein. That bizarre image was itself superimposed on the fragment of a female face.

In recent years, curators and artists have repeatedly transformed the hallowed space of the Guggenheim, the Matthew Barney extravaganza being the most recent example. It will be interesting to see how Rosenquist’s art looks in Frank Lloyd Wright’s meditative spiral. The artist’s monumental F-111—the embodiment of America’s romance with top guns—should soar there. Remember the motorcycles at the Guggenheim? Well, now we’ll have fighter planes.—Mark Stevens

• Details: James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim (October 17–January 25).

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Best of The Rest

The Jewish Journey: Frédéric Brenner’s Photographic Odyssey Brooklyn Museum of Art (October 3–January 11). More than 140 photographs taken by the contemporary French photographer during his travels to Jewish communities around the world (like Buenos Aires’s Barrio Freud) over the past 25 years.

Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 The New York Public Library (October 3–January 31). Rare illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, engravings, watercolors, and maps tracing Russia’s interaction with Europe, Asia, and the Americas during its imperial ascendancy.

In Conversation: A Centennial Exhibition of Photographs by Aaron Siskind Whitney Museum of American Art (October 4–February 1). Works from the Whitney’s collection, private collections, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation.

The Drawings of François Boucher The Frick Collection (October 8–December 14). The first major exhibition of the French painter and draftsman (1703–1770) in 25 years.

Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics Japan Society (October 9–January 11). Traditional and avant-garde ceramics made by the artist—and nine of his Japanese contemporaries—during his trips to Japan.

Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001 New Museum of Contemporary Art (October 10–January 25). Paintings, drawings, sculptures, and sets made by Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Donald Judd, and others for Brown’s performances.

Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Iran, 1501–1576 Asia Society (October 15–January 18). Paintings, ceramics, carpets, textiles, and metalwork produced in the early reign of the Safavid dynasty.

Treasures From the Collection Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (October 16–May 2). Seventy objects and materials from the museum’s holdings—including a first-century A.D. Roman glass bowl and a seventeenth-century Persian silk velvet panel—selected by Cooper-Hewitt director Paul Warwick Thompson.

Viennese Silver: Modern Design, 1780–1918 Neue Galerie (October 17–February 16). More than 180 extraordinary objects of daily use, many of which were created for the Hapsburg monarchy.

Petra: Lost City of Stone American Museum of Natural History (October 18–July 6). The most comprehensive exhibition ever to explore the ancient metropolis of Petra, in present-day Jordan, and its inhabitants/founders, the Nabataeans.

The Bill Blass Collection Sotheby’s (October 14–21). Over 1,000 items—including Picasso’s 1932 drawing Nu Couché (estimated at $5 million to $7 million)—from the late designer’s New York apartment and Connecticut house.