museworthy

“Arshile Gorky – A Retrospective”
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (about 1902–1948), a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art. This exhibition, which includes about 178 works of art, surveys Gorky’s entire career from the early 1920s until his death by suicide in 1948. The retrospective includes paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings—some of which are being shown for the first time—and reveals Gorky’s development as an artist and the evolution of his singular visual vocabulary and mature painting style.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Through January 10, 2010
Museum website

“Joseph Santore – Recent Work”
Lohin Geduld Gallery
531 West 25th Street
New York
Through December 24

“The Platonic Ideal”
Forum Gallery presents The Platonic Ideal, an exhibition featuring the work of twenty-eight painters and sculptors exploring the essence of subject and form in the human figure, the imaginary landscape, and perceived objects.
Forum Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue, 5th floor
Between 57th and 58th Streets
New York
Through November 28

“About Face”
Tabla Rasa Gallery
224 48th Street, Brooklyn, New York
Through January 23rd, 2010

“Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009″
Examines the critical role the human figure has played in the Nation’s art for the past 189 years. Transcending chronological, stylistic, and generational boundaries the exhibition will present 160 works drawn from the National Academy’s important and wide ranging collection of American art, as well as an intriguing selection of works by contemporary artists who are carrying on the figurative tradition in new and adventurous ways.
National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street
Through November 15

“Augustus Saint-Gaudens”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns some forty-five sculptures by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), the American Beaux-Arts sculptor who worked in New York, Paris, and Cornish, New Hampshire. The Museum’s collection fully represents the range of his oeuvre—from early cameos to innovative painterly bas-reliefs to reductions after public monuments for East Coast cities. Through the lens of the Museum’s unparalleled holdings as well as some related loans, this exhibition offers a reappraisal of Saint-Gaudens’s groundbreaking role in the history of late nineteenth-century American sculpture and the Aesthetic Movement.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
Through November 15

“Kandinsky and Expressionist Painting before World War I”
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street
Ongoing