Installation view. (Courtesy Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

If you’re turned off by the bombast of infinitely escalating auction prices and big-tent contemporary fairs, take refuge in the elegant first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Organized by Orange County Museum of Art guest curator Philipp Kaiser, and in New York by Jewish Museum Assistant curator Joanna Montoya, the show is the gloomy B-side to the relentless pop staccato of blockbuster contemporary art. Yet artists today owe much to this cult figure.

“I can’t stand to look at anything that my hand does,” Goldstein once griped. For his 1975 MFA graduation show as part of the first class at Cal Arts, he buried himself alive. His work would follow this trajectory towards total disappearance. Appropriation wasn’t just a slick move with him, as it is for Richard Prince. Goldstein was the lonely poet of appropriation art. To make a movie, he isolated the lion from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film promo and projected it on a wall, where it roars endlessly. His records are stock film sound pressed to red and white vinyl: “The Lost Ocean Liner,” “The Burning Forest,” “Three Felled Trees,” read some sad titles in the series Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects, 1976.

Still from Jack Goldstein, 'Shane,' 1975. (Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and the Estate of Jack Goldstein. © Estate of Jack Goldstein)

Born in Montreal and raised in Los Angeles, Goldstein in 1977 was part of the watershed “Pictures” show at Artist’s Space. He became famous within the art world in his lifetime, and was always ambitious, but his greatest legacy is conveying the sense of isolation inherent in appropriation. The title of the show cites Goldstein’s quip to the effect that there must be 10,000 Jack Goldsteins in the phone book.

In the 1980s he made paintings: sleek, monumental, boxy things with appropriated pictures of air raid scenes from World War II, or of lightning storms and nature photographs. The images were airbrushed on by studio assistants, and they gleam with the smooth finish of car paint. These paintings are spectacular objects, some of the prettiest of the “Pictures”-generation work. They are as cinematic as yet-to-be Katy Perry video mood boards, yet they remain stark and mute.

Goldstein spent the last years of his life in Los Angeles writing aphorisms on a desktop computer and reading philosophy backwards “in order to break the narratives and mimic the lack of continuity that existed in my own life,” as he inimitably put it. Obviously he was depressed, and he was also using drugs; in 2003 he took his own life. The Jewish Museum exhibition is haunting, and its ghostly sense of absence and disappearance is made stronger by our awareness of the artist’s suicide. But he influenced the artists who would become today’s stars—Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons among them—as well as lesser-known talents like Michael Majerus. In their work, and through his own, he lives on. (Through Sept. 29, 2013)

Installation view of D.I.Y.: Hardware section. (© Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s too easy to make fun of the Met’s new “Punk: Chaos to Couture” show. There was the chipper press preview at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning bustling with well-groomed junior fashion editors in leather pants and Walter Steiger heels, the facsimile of CBGB’s bathroom circa 1975, complete with graffitied urinals and cigarette butts, and Anne Hathaway and Miley Cyrus playing platinum punk Barbies at the Costume Institute gala—mockable incongruities served up on a silver platter.

It’s not that the Met team was unaware of the disparity between the show’s subject and its venue or poorly versed on its material. Richard Hell and Johnny Rotten contributed catalog essays. Andrew Bolton, curator of the Institute, assembled its dramatic Alexander McQueen retrospective, and he argues clear-sightedly and with verve here that punk’s defining characteristic was “customization,” a precursor to contemporary Internet culture, in which consumption and creation are closely linked.

However, the work in the show only occasionally bears out this argument. It starts loudly, with the CBGB bathroom and bursts of music from the Ramones, and quickly moves to a recreation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s London boutique, Seditionaries, whose clothes smack of bondage gear, S&M, military uniforms and cozy red and black mohair sweaters. Ms. Westwood’s shirts, like Tits (1976-80), have their eponymous items printed on white cotton muslin. They are terrific, crude objects, undressing the wearer and violating the viewer simultaneously: as Dada as clothing can be. (Another shirt just reads: “Rape.”) The duo’s unconventional use of materials and repurposed shapes (parachute fabric, bondage trousers) would influence Japanese designers Junya Watanabe and Yohji Yamamoto and presage the DIY enterprises of succeeding British outsiders, like Tracey Emin and Sara Lucas’s Shop and Damien Hirst’s era-defining “Freeze” show.

Facsimile of CBGB bathroom, New York, 1975. (© Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Punk looked great: black eyeliner, spiky and ragged crew cuts, ripped T-shirts, leather jackets, leotards with no pants for women, everything with spikes, chains and zippers. Its stripped-down style facilitated activities like pogo-dancing at Slits and Sex Pistols shows and spitting beer at or kicking the shit out of rival cliques like Teddy Boys or Mods.

But while the early pieces are vintage, the Doc Martens and Converse that the mannequins wear are incongruously clean and new. Stranger still are the couture pieces that punk “inspired.” Burberry’s jacket of black leather lambskin (2013) looks expensive and crafty, not anarchist (doubly so when Sienna Miller sported it at the gala). A Rodarte red and black mohair knit dress loses the meaning of McLaren/Westwood sweaters in translation.

Down a long hall come cuts inspired by punk, many of them riffs on the safety pin: Gianni Versace’s dress from spring/summer 1994 is all crêpe de chine with gold metal safety pins down one side, the garment that made Elizabeth Hurley famous. It’s an indicator of where the show is going: not to punk, but punk-inspired couture. The walls here are a nice touch: cavernous faux-brick or latex-sheeted like the interior of a nightclub, they are painted and repainted that flat black that hides evidence of vomit, cigarette smoke and daylight.

A section on graffiti is a dud. It proposes that bricolage, graffiti and agitprop lurk in punk’s slogan-ridden scrawl on clothes, then traces this premise to meaningless patterns on expensive frocks. Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester’s paint-spattered silk dresses from 2006 are simply boring: treacly Pollocks repurposed for tea parties. Ms. Westwood’s 2006 belt and T-shirt bearing the text “I AM NOT A TERRORIST Please don’t arrest me” stand out as nearly the only highlight.

There just aren’t enough loans to wow viewers unmoved by the more intensely commercial side of fashion, though there are some bright spots, like a bunch of Comme des Garçons mannequins bundled in wool and silk satin ensembles held together by elastic bands. They are thoughtfully deconstructed, as are some Margiela adhesive-tape dresses and white plastic shopping bag bodysuits.

The couture clothing is beautifully detailed, as Gareth Pugh’s trash-bag gowns make voluminously apparent, but the energy of original punk players like Jordan, Sid Vicious, Richard Hell and Patti Smith, channeled through wall-sized videos, make names like John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang, Hedi Slimane and others look dull.

Gallery view of D.I.Y.: Graffiti & Agitprop section. (© Metropolitan Museum of Art)

This exhibition is pitched to a fashion crowd, not a general audience—a fatal flaw. Guido Palau, of the grunge bouffant, couture ponytail and dry, big, medieval braids, has done the mannequin hair treatments here; he’s famous in fashion, but his wigs make the mannequins look more like troll dolls than punks. (For punk mannequins, see Stewart Uoo’s fantastically accessorized and torched sculptures of women, replete with maggot larvae, on display now at the Whitney.) We expect something a bit extra when we see clothing in a museum—something that takes it beyond commerce to achieve a level of illumination marked by awe, historical merit and creative ingenuity. Mr. Bolton’s McQueen had this in spades, but in “Punk” it is sadly lacking. He might be a curator whose strength is monographic exhibitions—individual names and brands, not thematics, rule the day here.

(Through August 14, 2013)

'Corfu: Lights and Shadows' (1909) by Sargent. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

The Elizabeth Peyton of the Palazzo Barbaro set, the painter John Singer Sargent had a way with white. From voluminous Bedouin robes to frothing Alpine streams, the sun-bleached marble steps of Santa Maria della Salute to the spotless cashmere shawl on a bloodless Boston socialite, the painter’s whites are perhaps the most socially nuanced in the history of watercolor. A show of nearly a hundred of his expert late watercolors (and a few middling oil paintings), mostly painted between 1901 and 1912, is well worth a visit.

Sargent was an inveterate expatriate: an Italian-born American who lived in London, he learned to paint in Paris. Best known for his massive oil portraits of society women, his watercolors capture what he saw during the travels he made after he had earned his fortunes as a painter and shuttered his studios at the start of the 20th century, when he was in his 50s. “Above all things, get abroad, see the sunlight, and everything that is to be seen,” he advised his friends back in Boston. Set free in an exotic place, he found himself at home. Here he’s rediscovered amateurism—painting his travels for love, rather than painting faces for money—and it shows. (The one exception here to his focus on landscapes over portrait painting is his The Cashmere Shawl from 1911, which has some of the showy ballroom drama of his famous 1884 Portrait of Madame X at the MFA in Boston.)

A technological innovation made Sargent’s peripatetic painting practice possible: watercolor boxes and tubes made for fast work outdoors. (As can be seen in a painting Sargent made of his sister, the top flap of a watercolor tin would open to become a palette; the paper was placed on a portable tripod made from a hiking stick.) Mountain Fire (1906-7) captures wispy smoke rising off mountains. A branch heavy with red pomegranates set against dense green leaves was a souvenir of Majorca.

Women are the stars of this show: giant pale bells of fabric among the Alpine landscape, all parasols, petticoats and sweaters. They are not sexy (Sargent was a “confirmed bachelor”) but sisterly travel companions, and they are incongruously and thoroughly American as they contemplate the Bridge of Sighs, dress up as Biblical characters, or laze on the perpetual vacation their class afforded them on the Greek island of Corfu.

By using both opaque and translucent watercolors, Sargent achieved unusual effects, like pearly highlights made by dragging a loaded brush of wet paint  across his translucent painted washes—techniques we associate more with Spanish oil painting than watercolor. His surfaces are so thick they sometimes crack. Tracks of graphite and areas of wax resist lie under these layers of paint. The paintings are light things, but they push technique. The white of paper is sometimes the bare highlight left from fast painting; sometimes the white is opaque watercolor brushwork.

Sargent could capture tone and mood, but he wasn’t a brilliant colorist. Chemical analysis shows that his colors were, surprisingly, often straight from the tube. His skies: straight cobalt; his water: viridian. The exhibition shows that he read George Field’s primer Chromatography, or, Treatise on Colors and Pigments, but he was no Georges Seurat or Vincent van Gogh.

'Bedouins' (circa 1905–6) by Sargent. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

But put him in front of melon boats in Palestine and he gets the swell and movement of wind in waxed canvas sails. In White Ships (1908) the impastoed watercolor rigging is translucent above an awesome opaque anchor, and the white ships have bits of reflected pink and green on their hulls. You’ll get his American watercolor lightness: it’s the predecessor of Elizabeth Peyton’s pretty and ambivalent frosted lines. The neurasthenic Mrs. William James is a prim wash of blues and greens. He got around, too: Roman villas, Moroccan deserts and Florentine gardens. When the Brooklyn Museum bought most of these paintings in 1909, they were being sold as a group to conjure the classic grand tour.

There are a handful of oil paintings in the show, most of them with exotic subjects like turbaned men. They are overworked and unexceptional compared with Sargent’s lightness and speed in the more casual medium. Co-curators Teresa A. Carbone of the Brooklyn Museum and Erica E. Hirshler of the MFA Boston have done well to focus on the watercolors.

In the exhibition’s last room, there are almost no people. Instead Sargent paints white marble quarries, Alpine streams and the white stone walls of Venetian palaces. You can almost hear the water running under gondolas, the whispered conversation in a Bedouin tent, the rustle of skirts, the splash of fountains at the Villa Medici or the Boboli Gardens, the scrape of Bostonian boots on the floor of the Palazzo Barbaro. It’s solid second-rate painting: not the stuff of philosophy and religion, but the stuff of life. (Through July 28, 2013)

Back in 1961, such items were for sale in The Store, which is what Mr. Oldenburg called his cheap East Village studio when he kept it open to the public for a month. It was an experiment in the relationship between fiction and fact. You could trade money for art—for sale were, as he put it, “Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art.” There were plaster men’s shirts, plaster women’s underwear. There was even a sculpture representing a crude cash register. Mr. Oldenburg staged performances and drew there. It was the beginning of American Pop Art.

There’s a simmering sexuality to Mr. Oldenburg’s art. His early drawings, on display at MoMA, show men, clearly aroused, chatting with long-legged, big-assed “street chicks.” Even his crude sculptures of cardboard and casein vibrate with a tactile aesthetic located miles from the antiseptic Pop of Warhol. Mr. Oldenburg’s Pop Art is flaccid and blobby, not pretty. It’s messy stuff permeated by the street. A dozen drippy sculptures, many featuring commercial logos, are hung salon-style on one wall. His oversized floor sculptures of grotesque comestibles like giant hamburgers, slices of cake and ice cream cones were sewn by his then-wife, the artist Patty Mucha. They look dirty.

With the Mouse Museum (1972-77), the curators of the MoMA show—Achim Hochdörfer of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, along with MoMA curator Ann Temkin and assistant curator Paulina Pobocha—put on display the accumulation of found objects that Mr. Oldenburg first exhibited in Kassel in 1972. In a structure shaped like the head of a cartoon mouse, there’s an egalitarian mix of about 400 tiny found objects. There are lightbulbs and junk-store paintings—one still labeled $1.29. There are used tea bags, plastic tempura shrimp, a two-headed dildo, a giant toothbrush. There are Japanese ice cream displays, chocolate bonbons, dog chew toys, walnuts filled with wax, a plastic geranium and many more treasures, all tastefully backlit and set in glass vitrines. Accompanying the display is a soundtrack of rubber toys being washed.

Mr. Oldenburg was ever on the lookout for resonant objects: “Every sidewalk is a Ray Gun Beach,” he said of his process of collecting the hundreds of things in the shape of guns on display in the Ray Gun Wing, adjacent to the Mouse Museum. In the tradition of Kurt Schwitters, Mr. Oldenburg is an artist whose materials came more from the street than the art supply store. A wall of his great found wooden “flag” sculptures, from the 1960s, show the messy, gritty, scavenging work that’s part formal study, part documentary snapshot of New York. (Today, Yuji Agematsu continues such work with poetic collections of wispy urban detritus.)

But the significance is not just that the everyday has become art. With Mr. Oldenburg, the very framing techniques used to connote high art became mobile, detached from art objects. They fell into new, rich, nuanced contexts. This model, full of potential, made a theatrical space of the street: anyone could be an artist, any space a gallery, any bit of trash art. It is the absurdity and not the seriousness of the structure—the mimicry of the fictions of the gallery and the museum and how they play with capitalism and art—that makes these forms unique and interesting. Mr. Oldenburg’s Street and his Store, his Mouse Museum and its Ray Gun Wing play with the ways in which art is exhibited. They are the progenitors of some of the most interesting projects in New York today. (Through August 5, 2013)

Update, May 1: An earlier version of this article misidentified Mr. Oldenburg's wife.

Taking a page from Fred Wilson—and another from W. G. Sebald—Ms. Bloom has selected hundreds of objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection that speak to aspects of Jewish life—cups, ketubahs, amulets, Torah reading pointers—and framed them with quotations from figures as diverse as Leonard Cohen, Lou Andreas-Salomé (the first female psychoanalyst), Zola, Nietzsche, Woody Allen and Sigmund Freud. The installation transforms each arrangement of objects and texts into a conversation around a specific theme: luck, libraries, windows. The effect is an essayistic meditation on Jewish identity.

In one room, marriage and divorce contracts quilt a bed-like support. The marriage contracts are brightly colored and ornamented with peacocks, flowers and tigers. They come from Poland, Iran, Brooklyn, India and Shanghai, and specify the rights of the bride and groom. “The bride comes with a dowry of 2200 pizzi, 1800 in cash, 200 in household objects and jewelry, the rest unspecified,” reads one from Florence dated 1836. They stand in stark contrast to the black-and-white divorce contracts, which are ritually torn as they are filed.

In the next room are 21 lucky amulets. Some are shaped like hands, some like cats; they’re made from coral, bear’s claw, silver, gold and glass. These mysterious objects come from Israel, the Netherlands, North Africa and Italy. Some have specific purposes, like protecting newborn children or warding off the evil eye. The accompanying text meditates on the distinction between a lucky person and just plain luck.

Ms. Bloom did the installation design, framing her objects in a cool toothpaste-green and giving the museum’s Fifth Avenue rooms a Gattaca-like feel. Within it, some marvelous finds—Sigmund Freud’s Roman signet ring (a gift to his daughter) and his cigar box (a gift from a patient), a film of Schoenberg and Gershwin playing tennis in Beverly Hills—are harnessed to tell stories that ultimately say something larger about the diasporic Jewish community.

Objects are not just framed by Ms. Bloom’s installation—just as often, they are partly masked. Doorways encase 18th- and 19th-century paintings from the museum’s collection in structures that leave only cut-out rectangles for the eyes to peek out from. These shrouded portraits seem to watch you as you move from gallery to gallery.

Ms. Bloom’s quotation texts can have a slightly twee “sayings from famous Jews” feel. Its fetishization of smart-sounding things occasionally seems hackneyed, as in one piece that assembles quotations on synaesthesia from Marilyn Monroe, Mozart, Tilda Swinton, Jimi Hendrix and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She is at her best with objects: the elegant shadows of the spice bowls, the shapes of the amulets. She manages to give a voice to things like a collection of silver Torah pointers (tasseled, hollow, chained, with the gleam of a crooked finger) laid out on a piano-shaped table.

Ms. Bloom studied at CalArts and belongs to that generation of artists that includes Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, artists who are known for combining found imagery and text to make art that reflects on contemporary culture. (Indeed, the Jewish Museum is doubling up on so-called Pictures Generation artists with next month’s Jack Goldstein show, the first American retrospective of the artist.) Ms. Bloom is the historian among them. Her real strength lies in creating interventions using extant collections. If you have been to the MAK Museum in Vienna, you will remember her perfect permanent installation featuring the shadowy shapes of backlit Thonet bentwood chairs.

But it’s rare that a museum commission results in new work as nuanced and rich as this collaboration between Ms. Bloom and the Jewish Museum. Discovering Ms. Bloom’s world for the first time is like reading a book by an author with a resonant logic and sensibility. Her assembly of objects gets reabsorbed into the museum when the show is done, and this transitory quality is part of her work’s spectral allure. (Through August 4, 2013)

'Little Annie Fanny' comic. (Courtesy the Museum of
American Illustration)

A show at the Society of Illustrators traces, through comics, letters and objects culled from his estate, the eccentric career of cartoonist and editor Harvey Kurtzman and the lowbrow pleasures of his art. The Brooklyn-born former World War II recruit built an empire sending up the establishment. He worked on shoestring budgets, which he augmented with buckets of cheap bad taste. His Mad magazine, which flourished during the 1950s, was a wind-up of the American counterculture. Kurtzman later found the most Rococo expression of his splashy, cheap style in Little Annie Fanny, the lavishly illustrated comic he drew for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy.

The Mad subscriber was a marginal nerd to whom nothing was sacred. He enjoyed toilet humor but also incisive social critique, and he liked seeing Kurtzman take on mainstream political figures like Richard Nixon and satirize pop icons like the Beatles with irreverent glee. To subscribe to the magazine was to be part of what Kurtzman called the “comics underground.”

The improbably named duo of exhibition curators, Monte Beauchamp and Denis Kitchen, bring together works to please the comics nerd today, items like Mad cover No. 6 (August/September 1953), Little Annie Fanny storyboards, cartoons drawn on the back of envelopes and Kurtzman’s early work illustrating benefits for members of the upholsterers union. Most captivating of all are the corrections and inked lines painstakingly executed by hand on the magazine layouts, showing as they do how much work was done on a page for it to achieve the details of the print copy. Crowd scenes are a favorite—a sea of silly tattoos, “I like Ike” pins and billboards. Some of Kurtzman’s works require 3D goggles, others offer mail-order guns and bowie knives.

There are letters to wife Adele filled with lust and longing. There are thumb stills for Mad that show the graphic way scenes move around a frame in comics conception. Issues of Kurtzman’s lesser-known magazines Trump, Humbug and Help! are also on view and feature fumetti, found sequences of photos from the news combined with inked captions and word balloons. Later, the fleshy pinks on the pneumatic Little Annie Fanny were eye-popping enough to compete with the photographs in Playboy.

During his career, co-workers included Gloria Steinem, Kurtzman’s former assistant editor, who went on to found Ms. magazine, and Terry Gilliam, who replaced her. He worked with R. Crumb, Woody Allen and cartoonist Will Elder (a former classmate from the High School of Music and Art). Later, Playboy brought him seven million readers and unheard-of luxuries for a cartoonist—a stable salary, medical benefits and a research budget for the 15 pages he produced a year.

In Kurtzman’s work, you can see the underpinnings of some of the most resonant strands of American art. A mix of low and lower culture, an irreverent attitude and a willingness to exploit the entrepreneurial possibilities of popular media. National Lampoon, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python (John Cleese and Terry Gilliam met on assignment for Kurtzman’s Help! and called him the “Godfather” of the Flying Circus) and even the lowbrow Americana of Mike Kelley all owe something to Kurtzman’s sense of humor. We have Mad to blame for Vice magazine, but without it there would also be no John Waters or R. Crumb. Kurtzman may have scoffed at its being described this way, but his lowbrow humor has become an influential aesthetic. (Through May 11, 2013)

'Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis)'
(c. 1825-1826)
by John James Audubon. (Courtesy New York Historical Society Museum and Library)

Just as people-watching can feel like a zoological activity, it’s impossible not to extrapolate human traits from John James Audubon’s gorgeous watercolors of birds.

In this exhibition, curated by Roberta J.M. Olson, the first in a three-part series displaying the museum’s Audubon holdings, there are nesting barn swallows, an impassive barn owl holding a dead chipmunk, a red-eyed vireo craning his neck for a tiny spider. There’s a crow in a honey locust tree eating a tiny crab, cuckoos in magnolia trees, more crows in a black walnut, pretty groups of yellow-breasted chat moles, an elegant Cooper’s hawk attacking a rabbit, two peregrine falcons tearing apart wood ducks, a fish hawk clutching a shiny trout. There are a chestnut-sided warbler and red-tailed hawks. These nearly life-size depictions of birds are hung salon-style. In their flocks and clusters, they take up every inch of exhibition space. Birdsong plays in the galleries, and the audio guide features the calls associated with each species. There are some 175 different species of birds to see here—a third of what Audubon illustrated for his massive tome, The Birds of America (1827-38).

Audubon’s birds don’t just sit there. While early studies in pastel and graphite show his sensitivity to the feel of articulated feathers and the soft slump of a carcass, Audubon had a flair for drama. Although at first his specimens were depicted strung from one foot by string, his taste was for the living bird. An early pastel study of a hoopoe from 1806 shows the crested creature seemingly surprised by a tiny fly caught in its beak. He soon imagines pileated woodpeckers preening on fox grape, a viper attacking a nest of valiant brown thrashers and black vultures picking at the eyes of a dead deer. He collaborated with friends, and later his sons, on the meticulous execution of plants, flowers and insects, all of which enhanced his backdrops and made his posed creatures look increasingly lifelike.

Audubon’s Americanness was as self-invented as his artistic project. Born Jean-Jacques to a French father and a Creole mother, he was Haitian by birth, and he and his sister were raised near Nantes, in France. His father intended to make him a sailor, but Audubon was bad at math and prone to seasickness. He changed his name to the Anglicized John James in 1803 when he made a fake U.S. passport and moved to this country to escape being drafted into the Napoleonic wars. Other ironies abound: the naturalist lived most of his life in Manhattan—albeit the rural predecessor of the Upper West Side circa 1840. He made most of his renderings from dead birds pinned to wooden boards, impaled on wires against gridded backdrops to create what he called the G.I.S.S. (“General Impression of Size and Shape”). Early proofs show his meticulous corrections to the colors of the printing and watercolor processes for the production of The Birds of America, and magnifying glasses help viewers zoom in on the last pinfeather.

Audubon became a celebrity; by the 1830s, his fame was worldwide. (If his rendering of a blue-winged warbler in hibiscus has the feel of a Japanese woodcut, a work on view shows Audubon the artist-explorer himself depicted in an early 19th-century Japanese woodcut—he was big in Japan.) A carte de visite shows him with a Byronic look, not that he was modest about it—“quite a handsome figure” is how he described himself.

But at the heart of Birds of America is, as its title describes, a national spirit. In it he created one of the definitive renderings of this country. These are the birds we most associate with America: the bald eagle, the red cardinal, the robin. They are shown striving for life—reaching for a berry, clutching a rabbit—and are set among plenty, in a beautiful world in which chanterelles spring from the earth, the trees are thick with birds and there’s an abundance of nature at every turn. And yet there are ways in which Audubon’s birds appear to have been seen through a French eye. It’s not just that his great egret of 1821 wears white plumage as handsome as a couture gown, but that his project itself speaks to the French mania for classification. It’s our Comédie Humaine, capturing the variety of our patrimony and implying a profound natural harmony to our social order, with its unique combinations of large, medium and small prints and depictions of birds great and small.

Some species here are now extinct, like the four stunning ivory-billed woodpeckers (1825-6) or the seven great Carolina parakeets. It is partly thanks to Audubon that we know how they looked, nested, mated and ate. Full of faith in observation from life, this long-haired Caribbean immigrant with a forged passport, on the run from revolution and terror, looked closely at what this country had to offer and saw in it both beauty and the makings of an enterprise. (Through May 19, 2013)

It’s remarkable to see the extent to which German Expressionism and “New Objectivity,” the subjects of a fascinating show at the Neue Galerie, have influenced the art of today. In the Grosz bodybuilder, there are shades of Bjarne Melgaard’s hypermasculine homoeroticism. Otto Dix’s half-naked, tragicomic aged women prefigure John Currin.

Early-20th-century German art was particularly acidic. In visions of modern life by Max Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, people are stark and grotesque caricatures. Works by Paul Klee and Franz Marc spin fantasies of dream worlds outside of the demands of urban existence, while furniture by Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius and other Bauhaus designers suggest that those faced with the demands of modernity might need a good place to rest.

Color pops in the first room of paintings: Hermann Max Pechstein’s Young Woman with Red Fan (1910) shows a woman in a broken-doll posture with blow-up-doll proportions. A green swirl of brushwork describes the movement of her elbow as she fans her flushed face. Vasily Kandinsky’s thickly painted Murnau: Street with Women of 1908 yields the order in which his improbable colors were laid down in oil: purple beneath yellow, pink under red, and blue under green describe a street scene with psychedelic intensity. Kirchner’s tightrope walkers are post-Degas performers in pea-soup-green bodysuits sporting for pennies against a dystopic, Pepto-pink backdrop.

Much of the work in the show hovers between figuration and abstraction, but it’s a darker, dirtier abstraction than the one presented by the Museum of Modern Art’s current “Inventing Abstraction.” From non-mimetic color and its ties to suggestions of mental illness to women depicted in the monumental style of African statues (slashed brushwork and almond eyes), these works enter into the abstract as a critique of or escape from the daily demands of life in Germany at the time. The collision of Dresden’s Die Brücke group (of which Kirchner was a part) with Munich’s Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky, Klee, Marc) resulted in a strong new style. The economic pressures of a country rife with prostitution, class struggle and hyperinflation simmer under the pictures’ surfaces.

A room of drawings and colored woodcuts by Kirchner and Heckel features stylish men at cafes dressed with machine-like precision, and naked women sprawled on divans, painted in then-exotic Japanese and African styles. Marc’s Noah’s ark fantasy The First Animals (1913) shows dreamy utopias out of sync with the urban age.

A wall of nine rare Klee works include color studies and portraits, Chinese Novella (1922), On The Lawn (1922) and The Moon Was on the Wane and Showed Me the Englishman’s Grimace of a Notorious Land (1918). These have mysterious, Invisible Cities-like architecture, and one 1909 watercolor self-portrait looks as though it might have been painted underwater. All that is on view at the Neue Galerie would be condemned as “degenerate art” once the National Socialists came to power.

A room of Bauhaus furniture and paintings shows us the interiors where we might have taken a breather from the chaos of modern life. Replicas of Breuer’s Table B19 of 1927, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s ubiquitous Barcelona Chair of 1920 might be familiar sights to New Yorkers, but these are the real thing. The fabric is toothier, the nickel- and chrome-plated steel rougher-skinned. Breuer’s brilliant Berlin Theater Chairs (1930) gesture to mass audiences and mass production, but still look handmade. Marianne Brandt’s inimitable ashtrays suggest the extent to which a new world demanded that every detail be made anew: the insouciant and stylish threesome from Schad’s bedroom scene might ash a cigarette in one of these pristine and unjudging receptacles at the end of a long night. (Through April 22)

“Blues” here is defined somewhat loosely, as an expressive trope for mournful resistance. Speaking truth to power is blues. So is making art in the face of injustice. If the memory of slavery is present, so is the reality of homophobia, racism, sexism and inequality. Cultural work has a lot to do with the blues, as a form of struggle.

A memorable work is Wu Tsang’s Mishima in Mexico (2012). The 14-minute video is a remake of Yukio Mishima’s tragic novel Thirst for Love. Featuring pretty, body-oiled, kimono-clad men (the artist and a writer, Alexandro Segade) doing yoga and buying each other tube socks, the video delivers lines that alternate between gay porn clichés (“I want to date a big, hunky gay samurai”) and Alain Robbe-Grillet-appropriate witticisms (“desire is so depressing, it makes me want to kill myself”). The video shows an artist who refuses to be pinned down (one exchange goes: “It’s so gay” “maybe queer” “So Japanese” “That’s why we’re in Mexico” “Sometimes I think I’m so queer that I’m straight”). The protagonists switch roles: desirer and desired, woman and man, master and servant. It’s a must-see for anyone enamored of gay samurai tragedies, but it’s also a thoughtful meditation on the complex pinballing of art, identity and desire.

Works in the show range from 1951 to 2012, but its aesthetic sensibility would seem to derive from identity art of the 1990s. Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992-3), is a room-sized installation that imagines the anthropological appropriation of African-American culture in Germany during the ’90s. A sign reading “Funk Station” covers shelves of books and magazines including a well-thumbed copy of iconic rap magazine The Source, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and an anthology on “Black Conflict With White America.” Magnifying glasses hang over these specimens and definitions of words like “Fly” and “Hoe” are written on the walls. The work focuses on the dissemination and commodification of hip-hop, and also on its political potential.

More historical work includes Romare Bearden’s collages from the 1960s and ’70s, and Bob Thompson’s massive painted homage to 1960s jazz greats and Gauguin, Garden of Music. Senga Nengudi’s splayed nylon mesh stockings stuffed with sand seem repeats of the “Now Dig This!” exhibition, which ended February 23 at PS1, and Glenn Ligon’s paintings echo the Whitney’s own recent retrospective. Fresher is Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, in which four orange peels and three empty banana skins are sewn to look like so many baseballs and footballs. The fruit peels have browned and weathered to a leathery texture.

A room of 13 videos and projections gets at the show’s more eclectic roots: The Wire, Henry Flint, Duke Ellington, Richard Pryor, Sun Ra and Azealia Banks. It’s aesthetically cacophonous to the point of being almost overwhelming. Music is as much a presence in the show as visual art. The Whitney has programmed live performances by musicians like Lonnie Holley, Keiji Haino and Annette Peacock. These promise to be great.

Mark Morrisroe’s pretty, elegant Chromogenic prints of drag queens and outsiders are also self-portraits, like Blow Both of Us Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978. Stan Douglas’s handsomely projected video Hors-champs uses outtakes from a French jazz performance recording to meditate on the Rodney King beating (an event also captured in the space “hors-champs,” or “off camera”).

Despite its seeming lack of a clear lineage or progression, and its mix of contemporary and historical work, “Blues for Smoke” has a surprisingly clear through-line. Blues is a set of aesthetic strategies in response to tragedy and oppression. For those without power, blues is agency, and art. (Through April 28)

'Saint Apollonia' (1454-1469) by Piero Della Francesca. (Courtesy Frick Collection)

Italian painter Piero della Francesca died the year Columbus sailed for America, but he’s only now having his first solo show in the United States. The Frick Collection has four of his paintings, more than any museum outside of Europe, and guest curator Nathaniel Silver borrowed three more. Seven paintings might not sound like a lot, but however small, these are weighty works featuring toothless virgin martyrs, pageboy-bobbed angels and saints in jewel-encrusted robes—there’s a lot to see here. Depending on how you slice it, there are five saints, a Madonna and Child, and a Crucifixion; three large (four feet tall) paintings and four smaller ones (each about a foot square); six American pictures and one borrowed from Portugal; six pictures from the same altarpiece and one standalone painting. Taken together, they suggest that the artist was more than a textbook intermediary between Gothic and Renaissance painting, or even between new American money and old European culture; his works deliver us to a moment when painting was as serious as science, as mystical as religion, and above all as philosophical as any book.

Piero loved mathematics. The first art historian, Giorgio Vasari, called him “the greatest geometrician who lived in his times” and praised his knowledge of Euclid as highly as his frescoes and altarpieces. In painting, this meant he was great at fitting real-looking bodies in architectural spaces and painted interiors with an engineer’s eye to perspective. His Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels (c. 1460-70), shows the Madonna in a perfectly perspectival room. It’s classic Piero: she is massive, larger than anyone else in the scene, holding a flat pink halo of a rose in her right hand and dandling a solemn Christ child on her left knee. She is flanked by four column-straight angels, and all six figures are encased in a garlanded chamber. The colors are those of a box of Ladurée macarons: pale pink marble and flesh with green under-painting, gowns in sugary whites and frosted blues.

But these paintings also capture a certain humanity. Saint Apollonia (1454-69), sheathed in a geometric bluebell of a dress, holds up metal tongs to display a small white object: she was martyred by having her teeth pulled out. She cuts an impassive figure, but there’s something very lifelike about her wonky right eye and thin coral lips and the scraggly blond hair framing her face. The austere Saint Monica, from the same years, has cobwebby crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, but her pretty hands and chest suggest an attractive young model disguised as an old woman. The Crucifixion (also 1454-69) is a drama in miniature: three soldiers gamble for Christ’s robes at the feet of the Crucifixion. Mary faints, horses rear. Human passions mix with superhuman events.

The four smallest paintings in the show were once part of the same wooden church of Sant’Agostino altarpiece from Piero’s hometown, and they all share the same gold-leaf backgrounds. Just as the paintings were split up and sold, around 1555, their gold leaf is now patched and scaled, crinkled with age and damage, split to reveal red and oxidized passages of oil and tempera. Digital reconstructions show their original placement in the peaked altarpiece.

The large Saint Augustine (1454-69) is a tour de force, and the only work borrowed from abroad (it belongs to Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga). He is being shown for the first time in the United States. His cope is decorated in painted biblical passages, a veritable Scrovegni Chapel of a gown. Piero’s religion is not austere or ascetic: his religious men, like Augustine, are just short of garish. The crystal staff and gem-encrusted and decorative clothing would suit Liberace. In the early 20th century, Piero was often compared to Paul Cézanne for his convincing depictions of geometric forms in space. This is an apt comparison, but it doesn’t account for Piero’s opulence.

The knockout painting here is Saint John the Evangelist (1454-69). Also from the same altar as the four small paintings and Saint Augustine, Saint John is a solemn standing figure reading the allegorical book of Revelation, the saint best embodies that weird combination of human and mathematical, observed and spiritual that is Piero’s achievement. The formal geometry of the panel is broken by the saint’s long, tan toes. A white brachiate beard frames his face and a gold-leaf halo floats above his head as matter-of-factly as a quotation mark. The hems of his sumptuous but simple crimson robe are trimmed with gems, which, according to legend, sprang from the colorfully mottled ground he walked. The painting confidently unites the idiosyncrasies of age and personhood with the mystical quirks of religion and faith.

These paintings played a major role in the fantasies of American nouveau riche dynasties in acquiring the immortality they associated with European culture. Bernard Berenson made Piero famous with a book, and the dealer Joseph Duveen capitalized on that fame. In the 1930s and 1940s, Isabella Stewart Gardner and John D. Rockefeller bought Pieros for record prices of several hundred thousand dollars. After the often-vapid frenzy of the New York contemporary art fairs, it’s reassuring to see such a confident American debut of paintings that actually have something to say. (Through May 19)