FRANK STELLA: MAJOR WORK FROM THE VON KLEIST SERIES
Danese

FRANK STELLA: COLLAGES AND RELATED SCULPTURE FROM THE VON KLEIST SERIES
Jacobson Howard Gallery

Where are the art police when we need them? Frank Stella’s shows of works from his Kleist series at Danese in Chelsea and Jacobson Howard uptown are groaning to the hilt. The multipaneled frieze “Marquise von O” (2000) has had to be chopped up along three walls. The 14-foot-high “Michael Kohlhaas” no. 3 and no. 6 (both 200) are barely contained by their walls, with lighting tracks shadowed in their upper reaches. Even the working collages at the second venue, each around 5 feet tall, are shown with a couple of pieces from the sequence omitted. Perhaps in an ideal cultural dictatorship, the Matthew Marks Gallery, or Paula Cooper, would be requisitioned and their current shows moved aside. Then the full, madcap series of Stellas inspired by the wacko writings of the schizophrenic German romantic Heinrich von Kleist could be seen in all their protean, cathedralesque glory.

Then again, maybe it is germane both to Kleist and Mr. Stella’s interpretation of him that we should be offered eccentric, awkward, obviously partial views.

— David Cohen (December 7)

Both shows until December 22, Danese 535 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-223-2227);

Jacobson Howard (22 E. 72nd St. at Madison Avenue, 212-570-2362).

JOSEF HOFFMANN: INTERIORS, 1902–1913
Neue Galerie

Josef Hoffmann radically reduced the entire history of decoration to its most simple, elemental form: the square. Predating the geometric neoplastic experiments of Mondrian by more than a decade, Hoffmann’s distillation of ornament was rooted in modernism ‘s rejection of historically based styles in favor of a new style that would more adequately express the character of the modern individual. Perhaps for the first time, an object’s function was considered equal to or greater than its form. More important, objects no longer served to define the owner’s personality, but instead were meant to enhance and facilitate daily life. The best way to understand Hoffmann’s formidable ideas of spatial relationship is to experience one of his interiors first-hand, and the Neue Galerie has now installed four of them.

— Brice Brown (November 2)

Until February 26 (1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).

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, 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 their 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 within 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).

GLITTER AND DOOM: GERMAN PORTRAITS FROM THE 1920S
Metropolitan Museum of Art

For such a ferocious exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum’s dazzlingly decadent “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” gets off to an understated start. A dimmed antechamber presents a series of preliminary sketches for various works, including the cartoon for Otto Dix’s monumental triptych “Metropolis” (1927–28). The show is strong on drawings, as befits so graphically inclined a group as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists. But that’s not the reason curator Sabine Rewald’s thematically organized exhibition opens the way it does. The cartoon has a gloomy, other worldly, necrophiliac relationship to its final, painted image. It signifies that we are entering a city of ghosts.

— David Cohen (November 16)

Until February 19 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-879-5500).

HARRY CALLAHAN: NATURE
Pace/MacGill Gallery

One of the biggest photographic shows in New York City is “Harry Callahan: Nature” at the Pace/MacGill Gallery. It isn’t big because of the number of prints in the exhibition — there are only 12 black and white pictures — and it certainly isn’t big because of their size — the largest are only 8-inches-by-5-inches, and many are considerably smaller. It is big because the talent is big, the ambition is enormous, and the results fill our imaginations with wonder. There are no pictures in “Nature” that don’t have something interesting to say about their subject and about the possibilities of photography.

— William Meyers (December 2)

Until January 6 (32 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-759-7999).