PHILIP GUSTON: DRAWINGS
McKee Gallery

Philip Guston’s 30 works in ink, charcoal, and pencil currently at McKee are a treat. Averaging a little less than 2 feet across, these never-before exhibited drawings — they were only recently released by his estate — are smaller than the artist’s typical late paintings, and, executed in black media or graphite, they necessarily lack his pungent color. They amply demonstrate, however, his freewheeling energy and compelling sense of design. Covering the years from the heyday of Abstract Expressionism until his death in 1980, the chronological installation shows the artist building upon, and in some ways surpassing, the explorations of his 1950s abstractions.

-John Goodrich (November 30)

Until December 22 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-688-5951).

SPANISH PAINTING FROM EL GRECO TO PICASSO: TIME, TRUTH, AND HISTORY
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

“Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso” is one of those rare, exhilarating shows that lets painting speak of and for itself. Curated by Carmen Giménez and Francisco Calvo Serraller, the show is about Spanish painting between the 16th and the 20th centuries. It allows us to see El Greco next to Velázquez next to Picasso next to Goya, and gets at the heart of why painters paint.

The show reminds us that the roots of surrealism and Cubism are in the fractured, compartmentalized spaces of El Greco’s fervent mysticism; that Goya’s and Picasso’s shared love of the bullfight — of the blood in the sand — speaks as much to the devout Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation as it does to the artists’ love of ancient, sacrificial rites and myths; that early Cubism’s monochrome tonalities, though inspired by gray Parisian light, have their spiritual grounding in the browns and grays of Zurbarán, and that Velázquez’s profound naturalism is steeped in a culture in which religious belief and hard fact came head to head.

-Lance Esplund (November 16)

Until March 28 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).

ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCH: PHOTOGRAPHS
Zabriskie Gallery

Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) was one of the most important German photographers of the middle decades of the 20th century. His continued importance is apparent from even a cursory look at A the work at Zabriskie. In one photograph are about a dozen substantial cylinders a few stories high with considerably taller stacks on top, and the stacks surmounted with a shape that resembles the lamps in Riverside Park. The cylinders and stacks stand at attention with their connecting pipes and valves and control mechanisms, at once impressive in the replication of an identical shape that diminishes in size as it recedes in the distance, but also somewhat foreboding. What is it that perks, and bubbles, and fizzes in these tanks? What comes out the faucet at the end?

It is the time and place that give these pictures an ominous cast: Otherwise they are quite beautiful in the clarity of their intention and the precision of their execution.

-William Meyers (November 16)

Until December 9 (41 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-752-1223).