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, which closes this weekend, 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).

DIANE ARBUS-HELEN LEVITT: A Conversation
Laurence Miller Gallery

Helen Levitt is a peripatetic humanist. Diane Arbus has an edge. The point of Ms. Levitt’s “New York City (leaning couple)” (c. 1940) is the happenstance that both figures are canted to the left at the same angle. This workingclass couple sit in chairs they have brought to the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, both looking with the same expression at something outside the frame. The picture is affectionately humorous. By contrast, the point of Arbus’s “The King and Queen of a Senior Citizen’s Dance, N.Y.C.” (1970) is how pathetic this middleclass pair are in their bogus royalty. They sit on ersatz thrones wearing costume-store robes and tinsel crowns while the harsh light exposes their affectless faces. There is psychology here and also sociology, and a powerful imputation that their highnesses are existentially damned.

William Meyers (February 1)

Until March 10 (20 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-397-3930).

RICHARD RENALDI: The Plains
Yossi Milo Gallery

Richard Renaldi’s photographs celebrate the spare beauty of open space. His new show contains 18 large-scale color images, all set in the small towns and empty pastures of the American Great Plains.

Most of these photographs are portraits, with the subject centered in iconic fashion before either a vertical backdrop — a truck, a wall — or a horizontal plane that fades into soft focus as it stretches into the distance.

Images such as “Craig, Laughlin, Nevada” (2004), which shows a relaxed cowboy on a dusty field, or “Buba, Havre, Montana” (2006), a precociously world-weary preteen on a wide street, communicate sociological details about an area of the country that, spiritually at least, is about as far as you can travel in America from a Chelsea gallery.

David Grosz (February 8)

Until March 3 (525 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-414-0370).

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

“Private Treasures,” comprising 93 works on paper from an anonymous collection of roughly 110 drawings, many of which have not been exhibited publicly, is organized by Rhonda 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).