PRIVATE TREASURES: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings
The Morgan Library & Museum

“Private Treasures,” comprising some 93 works on paper from an anonymous collection of roughly 110 drawings, many of which have not been exhibited publicly, is organized by Rhoda Eitel-Porter and Jennifer Tonkovich at the Morgan, and Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it will travel from New York. Arranged chronologically, the exhibit spans the early 16th through the early 20th centuries. Accompanied by a wonderful catalog, the show includes works by Italian, French, Netherlandish, British, and German artists, and amounts to one of those glorious exhibitions that — no offense to its organizers — basically curates itself.

– Lance Esplund (January 18)

Until April 8 (225 Madison Ave., between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).

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, otherworldly, 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).

JACOB HASHIMOTO
Mary Boone Gallery

Using paper, bamboo, acrylic, nylon, and cotton, Jacob Hashimoto’s new work evokes nature’s most delicate forms: butterfly wings, flower petals, blades of grass, and ripples of a cloud. The show’s largest work is an installation called “Nuvole” (2006), Italian for “clouds.” Hundreds of circular kites, dangling one per string from the ceiling, coalesce into a dense, softly rolling white mass that cascades through a side gallery from an upper corner on one wall to a lower corner on the opposite side of the room. As the viewer moves through the space, the kites rustle in response. In this way, Mr. Hashimoto transfers some of the powerful immateriality of his art to his viewer. He allows you to be the wind.

David Grosz (January 11)

Until February 10 (745 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-752-2929).

NEW YORK AT NIGHT
Museum of Modern Art

“New York at Night” provides a good introduction to MoMA’s legendary photography collection. The nocturnal focus reminds us of how captivated photographers have been by that whole other city life that emerges when the sun goes down in New York. One image bears the title “New York at Night,” the classic 1930s aerial shot by Berenice Abbott showing Midtown skyscrapers, with their stepped silhouettes, glowing from their electric lights within, while the streets appear as rivers of fire. Though the picture comes from the middle of the Depression, it conveys, as perhaps no other image does, how before the 20th century the world had never known a place that consumed its night in such spectacular wattage as New York.

– Francis Morrone (January 4)

Until March 5 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).