Taking the Long View
Brice Marden gets MoMA’s full-on éminence grise treatment.
• Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, MoMA; October 29 through January 15.
You Don’t Know Paree
Cafés, flaneurs, artists in garrets: “Americans in Paris” shows us why that romantic image refuses to fade away.
• Americans in Paris, 1860–1900, Metropolitan Museum of Art; October 24 through January 28.
Season of Change
Chelsea—now with a shiny new Frank Gehry tower—heads into a white-hot fall.
An Inconvenient Half-Truth
In Mary Mattingly’s photo series “Second Nature,” the Earth has been submerged, and the remaining humans eke out isolated, nomadic existences.
• Ecotopia, International Center of Photography; September 14 through January 7.
The Reign From Spain
The Whitney recalls a moment when there was Picasso and then everyone else.
• Picasso and American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art; September 28 through January 28.
The Best of the Rest
Young Bob Dylan, New Orleans photography, old-school dandies, and more.
The Best of the Rest
Young Bob Dylan, New Orleans photography, old-school dandies, and more.
“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now”
With a title drawn from Blondie, this survey highlights young Asian-American artists—among them Patty Chang, Glenn Kaino, and Laurel Nakadate—for whom pop culture is inseparable from the immigrant experience.
• Asia Society; September 7 through December 10.
“A Rakish History of Men’s Wear”
Sartorial expressions of masculinity through the ages, from the ostentatious (the stylings of the eighteenth-century dandy) to the restrained (“business casual”).
• New York Public Library; September 8 through April 7.
“Black Style Now”
Trendsetting threads by Diddy, Tracy Reese, Russell Simmons, and other African-American icons of contemporary fashion arrive just in time for Fashion Week, with special attention to the hip-hop branding phenomenon.
• Museum of the City of New York; September 9 through February 19.
Mark Grotjahn
A cycle of large-scale drawings and related sculptures by this young L.A. abstract artist, known for his perspectival paintings with multiple vanishing points.
• The Whitney Museum of American Art; September 15 through January 7.
“Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910”
Pairing early films from the Library of Congress with art by Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, and other American masters, this clever exhibition shows how moving images filtered into traditional painting at the turn of the century.
• Grey Art Gallery at NYU; September 13 through December 9.
“Masters of American Comics”
Comic books and strips from Charles M. Schulz to Chris Ware, in a lively two-venue show. The catalogue includes essays from Jonathan Safran Foer (on Art Spiegelman, who dropped out of the show) and Dave Eggers (on Ware), among other literary fans of the genre.
• Jewish Museum and Newark Museum; September 15 through January 2.
“New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori”
The Met marks the anniversary of Katrina with twenty riveting, large-scale color photographs of the damage by an artist who lived in New Orleans as a teenager. Going beyond familiar aerial shots, Polidori captures the mess, one rotting, caved-in roof at a time.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art; September 19 through December 10.
“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–1966”
The newly renovated Morgan continues its makeover with a celebration of Dylan’s formative years, organized by Seattle’s Experience Music Project. Instruments, letters, rare performance footage, and more follow the bard’s path from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the infamous plug-in at Newport.
• Morgan Library and Museum; September 29 through January 6.
“A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr.”
Portraits of the Puritan elite by a deaf artist working in rural New England at the turn of the nineteenth century, known for his skillful and sensitive depiction of the hands of his sitters.
• American Folk Art Museum; October 4 through January 7.
“AKA Nikki S. Lee”
The premiere of photographer Lee’s first film, a feature-length, documentary-style look at the life of a young artist. Like the photographs in which Lee transforms herself into a member of various social tribes, it’s “a mix of reality and unreality, acting and non-acting.”
• Museum of Modern Art; October 5 and 6.
“El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History”
Spanish paintings dating from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, by Dalí, Goya, Velázquez, and other masters, in a rotunda-filling survey that aims to emphasize national culture over chronology.
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; November 17 through spring.
“Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005”
More than 200 personal and professional photographs by the woman behind some of the most iconic images from Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, encompassing portraits of public figures, war reportage, advertising campaigns, and intimate shots of family and friends. The show is accompanied by a book of the same title.
• Brooklyn Museum; October 20 through January 21.
“Defamation of Character”
Art with post-punk attitude, from Warhol’s urine-soaked “oxidation paintings” to confrontational Brit Art by the likes of the Chapman Brothers, curated by Neville Wakefield.
• P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center; October 22 through January 8.
“Africa Comics”
The first serious show of African comic art in the United States, organized with help from the Italian nonprofit group Africa e Mediterraneo.
• Studio Museum in Harlem; November 15 through March 18.
“Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005”
A full-scale museum retrospective of the figurative sculptor and printmaker, who explores myth, religion, and mortality with surgeonlike sensitivity to the human form.
• Whitney Museum of American Art; November 16 through February 11. Back to Art Preview