FAITH AND FORTUNE: FIVE CENTURIES OF EUROPEAN MASTERWORKS
The Gallery at the Park Avenue Bank

At this late date, it should come as no surprise to anyone that there is a connection between art and mammon. But never has that connection seemed more literal than in the new Meet a Museum program at the Park Avenue Bank. If all goes as planned, a number of museums in the region, among them the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, and the museums of Cornell University and Vassar College, will all display a choice assortment of their works in the bank.

The first museum to shows its wares is the estimable Wadsworth Atheneum, from Hartford, Conn., which has sent five paintings and as many pieces of decorative art.There is something weird, but delightfully so, in finding these rare old masters in a modernist bank tucked away into a corner of Midtown. More intriguing still, these works are not prominently displayed, but are all the way in the back of the bank, where they could easily be missed.

With a little searching, you will find them, and you will be the happier for it. The works are not the best that the Atheneum has to offer, but all of them have charm. Among them are a luscious “Susanna and the Elders”, by the 18th-century Venetian master Giambattista Tiepolo; a pastoral scene by the 17th-century Dutch master Adam Pynacker; a somber still life by Gerrit Dou, that earliest pupil of Rembrandt, and a highly polished history painting by Ingres.

As for the decorative arts, there is a pair of “vases Adélaïde,” made in Sèvres in 1841 out of hard-paste porcelain and gilt bronze. Also on view is a curious 18th-century Meissen bird cage confected, once again, out of hard-paste porcelain, as well as a glazed terra cotta manger scene from 15th-century Faenza, and a silver and partial-gilt tanker from 17th-century Austria that is positively ablaze with the spirit of the baroque.

— James Gardner

Until January 5 (350 Park Ave., between 51st and 52nd streets, 212-755-4600).

TAL R: LE PEINTRE N’EST PAS LÀ
Zach Feuer Gallery

The Danish-Israeli artist Tal R’s multifaceted oeuvre is exuberant and witty, sophisticated yet brute. His influences include Euro-global pop, the Scandinavian painting movement CoBrA, and even the anti-art movement Fluxus. His work has referred to the visual culture of mysticism since it came to prominence in the 1990s. The five large oil paintings from 2006 at Zach Feuer Gallery playfully refer to academic painting. Tal R rightly claims that his artistic legacy, as a painter trained at the Danish Royal Academy, goes back to the grand academic style and teaching methods of 17th-century France. “Art School” features a childlike representation of a Beaux-Arts academy, while the pictorial universe of “Drawing Room” is ruled by lines of Renaissance perspective — albeit distorted. Perspective and composition fall through an angular fun house vortex in the painting “Le peintre n’est pas là.”

The large paintings measure about 98 inches square. Their garish color is the result of a deliberately restricted palette, consisting only of pink, yellow, green, red, brown, black, and white. In contrast to areas of plain canvas ground, the oil paint on most of the surfaces was applied in the style of extruded icing. Patterns and motifs, as well as English words written in whimsical cursive script, appear frequently. Text and texture intersect literally and figuratively.

From the American perspective, an artist who should be considered in relation to Tal R is Alfred Jensen. Jensen bridged the visionary ideals of Abstract Expressionism (which were those of his own generation) with the repetitive, serial nature of pop art coming up in the 1960s. Jensen, too, restricted his palette according to systems that he devised, and drew patterns on the canvas with extruded paint. Whereas Jensen often referred to Mayan cosmology, the mixture of mysticism and system in Tal R’s work springs largely from his Jewish heritage and European training. The comparison between Tal R’s body of work and Jensen’s legendary oeuvre is striking at this stage.

— Deborah Garwood

Until January 6 (530 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212- 989-7700).