Museum of Modern Art

The enigmatic modernist, Francis Picabia, suggested that artists change styles as frequently as their shirts. He is the subject of an eclectic and intriguing retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Extracted from a recent tour io Chelsea galleries we present a selection of highlights. The artists include Benny Andrews, Alfred Leslie, Mark di Suvero and Carrie Mae Weems.

Here is a cheat sheet of ranked museum exhibitions if you plan to be in NY for the holidays

"Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Art" by author Judith E. Stein has fleshed out an essential and enigmatic chapter in contemporary art. While entirely absorbed with the artists he discovered and exhibited Bellamy had an oddly contrarian indifference to making sales. When the artists he championed soared in the red hot art market he was nowhere to be seen. Reflecting his Eurasian heritage Bellamy was more a monk with a begging bowl than an aggressive gallerist.

When Stefan and Linda Stux, with a partner, opened a gallery on Newbury Street in Boston in 1980 it was a year before they made a sale. The partner left and they continued to support the gallery while working full time jobs. His brother asked how long he intended to maintain his "museum." The answer was "forever." But now that day has come with the closing of the New York gallery after some 35 years of ups and downs. Stefan and Linda had an enormous impact during the era of Boston's cultural revolution in the 1980s.

An exhibition by Susan Schwalb features abstract, linear compositions of mixed metalpoint on colored surfaces, many of which investigate absence or the void as a constructive element The exhibition at Garvey/ Simon Gallery in New York will run from April 28 – June 4, 2016

Iconic himself, Richard Sapper, an industrial designer whose sleek, precision-engineered prototypes spawned the Alessi espresso maker, the Tizio lamp and the IBM ThinkPad, died on Dec. 31 in Milan. He set the highest standards for industrial design in the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century.

In 2013 we interviewed abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly during an exhibition of his relief series in wood at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. A graduate of the Museum School he maintained close times with the city and its museum. He passed away yesterday at his home in Spencertown, New York.

CUE Art Foundation presents a solo exhibition of new work by Athena LaTocha, which has been curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The show features a large-scale immersive installation of an ink-wash drawing by LaTocha that spans the entire length of the gallery. While the work depicts a landscape, its more abstract elements leave the viewer to decipher what they see.

Tom Krens joined the Guggenheim Foundation in 1988 when museums were attempting to transform to business models. Now, for North Adams he is developing Global Contemporary Art Museum. In a new paradigm it is being privately funded as a for profit institution. With reverse momentum he is establishing a business on the model of a fine arts museum.

Renowned as the center of Afro-Brazilian culture with a mixture of black and white races descended from Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, Salvador has a unique character shaped by exuberant colors, sounds, rhythms, and flavors. Its historic center has the largest collection of baroque buildings in the Americas.

The Lumbee Indian, Lloyd Oxendine, who died on August 5, held a BA in art history from Columbia where he also earned an MFA. From 1970-78 he ran a New York gallery dedicated to Native American Art. In 1972 he wrote what proved to be most of an issue of Art in American surveying 23 artists. For many years he was a brilliant and outspoken activist.

The blockbuster summer exhibition, through September 13, is testing the limits of the recently renovated and expanded Clark Art Institute to handle maximum visitation even mid week. Only a few of the 50 works in the exhibition Van Gogh and Nature will be readily familiar to visitors. Many of the works on view, gathered from major collections, rarely travel to special exhibitions such as this. The curators have provided an intimate view of his daily practice and meticulous study of nature.

Michael Graves shook up the architectural world by taking the unadorned boxes of modern architecture and often theatrically enhancing them with color, pattern, and ornamentation. His work for Humana, Disney and others was considered kitsch by some but revolutionary by others. Though his building style faded, his often whimsical and sometimes iconic home products for first Alessi and then Target and other retailers may be his greatest continuing legacy.

As winter slowly makes way to spring it is time again to make travel plans. Consider a visit to Northern California as a viable option.Here are some recent and upcoming developments in San Francisco’s arts and culture scene.

For the past decade Edmund Barry Gaither has been primarily focused on developing a mixed use parcel in Roxbury which will include a new home for the National Center for African American Artists. That has entailed suspending his projects as an adjunct curator to the Museum of Fine ares and maintaining NCAAA as a skeletal operation in a 19th century former mansion in Roxbury. Despite many setbacks he hopes to get the museum up and running in the next couple of years. This is the second and final part of a dialogue with Gaither..

When Thomas Messer served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston there was a plan to merge it as a department of the Museum of Fine Arts. This was confirmed when I asked him about it during an unrelated press conference. Belinda Rathbone also found related documents in the MFA archives when researching her book The Boston Raphael. Related to his time at the ICA these are excerpts from an extensive interview with Messer in the public domain at the Archives of American Art.

George McNeil emerged as one of the First Generation Abstract Expressionist and New York School painters during the late thirties. He was shown in the New York Worlds Fair in 1939, and in 1935 he was a member of the W.P.A. and served on the Federal Art project with artists such as Willem de Kooning and James Brooks.

The merry Dada prankster Marcel Duchamp changed the definitions of art with his Found Objects, Ready Mades and Assisted Readymades. The Robert Gober show at MoMA requires a new category, Made Readymades.

During the busy holiday season The Museum of Modern Art is featuring the blockbuster exhibition of the artist’s triumphant and inventive last works Henri Matisse: The Cutouts. The exhibition drew some 500,000 visitors last summer to London’s Tate Modern.

Jay Milder came of age during the Second Generation of the New York School as one of the seminal Figurative Expressionist painters and one of the SoHo loft pioneers. Today Milder's influence on painting is widespread and he has been cited as influence of both Neo-Expressionism in the United States and the graffiti art movement in Brazil.

Judith Bookbinder's 2005 publication Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism is the definitive study of this important but neglected movement. Her study is meticulously researched and documented. This is the catalogue for the exhibition that the Museum of Fine Arts has failed to deliver. Significantly most of the Boston Expressionists were Jews struggling with Biblical constraints against the graven image.

From 1974 to 1994 the German/ American artist Otto Piene was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. With a farm in Groton he continued to commute to his studio in Dusseldorf. He died this week, at 85, while working on a major museum exhibition and sky art event in Berlin. While celebrated internationally, there will be an exhibition of Group ZERO this seaon at the Guggenheim, he was snubbed by the Boston art world and media.

The Austrian artist Franz West (16 February 1947- 25 July 2012). is being featured this summer in the Northern Berkshires. There is a display of several large scale, puffy, pink phallic sculptures at Mass MoCA and a tandem exhibition of works on paper and smaller scale sculptures at Williams College Museum of Art. The artist was widely included in global biennials and museum exhibitions including a retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We consider West in the milieu of post war artists in Vienna including its outrageous Actionists.

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was one of the most important Post War German artists. He is the subject of a dense, sprawling and and messy retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through August 3. It would be a folly and conceit to attempt to review such diverse and eclectic, mind boggling work. For that we refer you to mainstream critics all of whom fail, to varying degrees, to nail down the work of one of the most fascinating and daunting artists of our time.