“Alice Neel: Late Portraits & Still Lifes,” at David Zwirner Gallery, is a rare and extraordinary grouping of 16 perfect, irreducible human beings, four bouquets of flowers, a couple of dying plants on a windowsill beside a fire escape and a wonky white chaise longue, in a total of 18 paintings dating from 1964 to 1983, the year before the artist’s death. There’s hardly a false note anywhere, and the portraits of Hugh Hurd, Lester Cole and Mary Beebe, as well as the 1980 still life Light, depicting a vase on a small table engaged in an intimate, psychosexual dance with its shadow, are all particularly strong, but the real knockouts are Neel’s portraits of family members: her son Richard, 1969; her son Hartley, 1978; and Richard’s first wife, Nancy, in a wonky chaise longue, 1980.

Nancy lies back in the white metal chair—there are no cushions—with her left arm, on the viewer’s side, stretched along the chair’s arm, and her right arm raised behind her head. She’s wearing a short, blue-and-white print dress, and her legs are pulled up and bent, so that her feet rest on the chair’s edge and her toes hang off. Neel was scrupulously accurate, but even within scrupulous accuracy there’s plenty of room, if you know where to look, for strategic exaggeration and charming personal asides: the nakedness of Nancy’s legs, very slightly broader than they need to be and partly outlined in Neel’s distinctive royal blue, contrasts forcefully with the halfway world-weariness of her eyes. But there’s nothing in the world behind her but a patch of pea green. Richard, who in 1969 was a 30-year-old law school graduate, sits in a brown armchair. He wears a three-piece suit whose yellowish-green color is matched by the shadowed side of his face, which is full of purpose, concentration and abstraction, as he gazes over his mother’s shoulder, keeping still. The floor is orange, but then so is the wall, because what reads as carpet in the foreground, under the chair’s short wooden legs, reads as something like wainscoting by the time it gets to the back. The delicate fingers of his left hand are splayed apart, and his shiny brown shoes, like quiet jokes made in passing, turn at impossible angles.

Hartley sits in a lower, rounder, more modern chair, wearing a necktie and jeans. His legs are also crossed, but where Richard’s crossed legs are an extension and support of his personality, the gorgeous royal blue color of Hartley’s jeans make his legs into an occasional abstract composition, a triangle with a flat hip at one corner, a straight calf descending from another, and four knuckles resting in the center. The Welsh have a proverb: “Truth is the best tale.”

Another way to deal with theological problems is to refuse them. At Bortolami, Jutta Koether’s “The Fifth Season,” which for a few weeks overlapped with The Seasons, her installation of four paintings at the Whitney Biennial, leaps straight over the substance of its French classical and Roman-syncretistic references into a sci-fi-inflected version of the once-and-future, actually pagan past. The rosy pink color that dominates the Bortolami show’s eight paintings—four large seasonal scenes of defiantly numinous figures, Dionysian grapes, leafy curlicues and metallic silver daubs; three other large paintings; and one modestly sized portrait of a naked cat, facing away from the viewer into a stoically indifferent opacity, its body like a chicken’s carcass, its red tail like a snake charmer’s cobra, poised to strike—brings to mind the mysterious pink lasers that transmit divine messages in Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS. And the layer of brown gravel that covers the floor, looking like a cross between the analytically ordered white gravel of a formal French garden and the dusty, fertile, animal-like nakedness of a freshly furrowed field, makes viewers self conscious with its crunching noises and is just the right conceptual foundation for tantalizing fever dreams of a Saturnine golden age too good to be true—but most of all it really makes that pink laser color pop.

Ms. Koether paints careful, often intensely jabbed, madly discontinuous marks directly onto raw canvas. (Winter is acrylic on sooty tan, with shiny puddles of resin on top, but the rest are oil on white.) Pencil lines are unconcealed, and most of the paintings have corners marked off like the photo corners in a scrapbook. In Summer, a tree of knowledge stands on the left and a race car driver on the right, either pointing upward or beckoning in; between and behind them, an iconic mountain, as perfectly triangular as Fuji, is outlined; faint lines divide the canvas into even 16ths. The rose color alters and co-opts the white canvas, creating a profoundly deceptive openness. What your mind wants to understand as an unworked background, your eye can’t help seeing as an active force, one that is not merely opaque but is the very quintessence of unanalyzable opacity.

editorial@observer.com

Alice Neel, "Self-Portrait," 1980. (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

Over the weekend, The Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee noted the increasing prevalence of museum-quality exhibitions by commercial galleries, while also exploring why museums, having “no choice,” are staging exhibitions of the work of living artists, which once was a task reserved solely to galleries.

Unhindered from the bureaucracies that burden museums, commercial galleries have more freedom, can move quickly and can even attract loans from good museums, Mr. Smee writes. The shift to "museum-quality" shows has been happening for years, of course, but it has been particularly strong this year in New York. Gagosian is currently offering up major Fontana and Picasso shows, David Zwirner is showing prime work by Alice Neel and Acquavella Galleries recently staged a huge Georges Braque show, buffeted by a trove of museum loans.

As for why museums are increasingly taking on the work of living artists, the piece has this to say:

“Why no choice? Because the public demands it: People now go to museums not just to find out what was made in the past, but what is being made now. Also, because today’s contemporary art is tomorrow’s exorbitantly expensive art of the past, and if they don’t try to get involved now, these works will never be affordable.”

'Untitled (Fold)' (2011) by Tauba Auerbach. (Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Tauba Auerbach at Paula Cooper
Opens May 5
This is unquestionably the season’s most anticipated show by a young artist. After trompe/Op painter Tauba Auerbach’s dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, left town to head L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago, while her work was on view at the last edition of the Whitney Biennial, she was courted by numerous high-profile dealers but settled on Paula Cooper. She has been weaving to make paintings recently, and focusing increasingly on color, but details remain scarce on her latest developments. “I paint and paint and then destroy nine out of ten paintings,” she recently told an interviewer when asked about her projects. “My standards are increasingly hard to meet.”

Alice Neel at David Zwirner
May 4–June 23, 2012
Alice Neel, who died in 1984 at the age of 84, remains one of America’s great but too-little-known artists, despite a recent biography by Phoebe Hoban: her brushy, piercingly perceptive portraits were outliers in an era enchanted with abstraction and Pop imagery. For its second show with Neel’s estate, Zwirner will exhibit iconic portraits—the young artist Joey Scaggs holding a leather jacket over his shoulder, energetic psychologist Sherry Speeth in a gray suit, nearly leaping out of his chair—alongside still lifes. Though less regularly exhibited than her portraits, these exacting scenes of flowers and interiors approach representation at an angle that is similarly, pleasantly askew.

Martha Rosler at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
April 20–May 26
The redoubtable, politically engaged Martha Rosler—whose complete suite of anti-Vietnam War photographs “Bringing the War Home” (1967-72) was just acquired by MoMA—will show black-and-white and color photographs, shot during a January 1981 trip she took to Cuba. These photos are being printed for the first time. Small in scale, the images show scenes of life in the communist nation—shots of storefronts, streets and murals of Fidel Castro—in the artist’s inimitable, offhand and elegant style.

Tom Thayer at Derek Eller
April 27–May 26
Over the past few years, Tom Thayer’s strangely enchanting, determinedly lo-fi animations and performances—often featuring birds and sticklike humans that he fashions from paper and tape and manipulates on strings—have slowly but surely gained attention. He’s attributed his hermetic, childlike iconography to “vivid, early memories of kindergarten and preschool in the 1970s.” A subtle, sinister undertone prevents the work from veering into preciousness. Following a star turn in this year’s Whitney Biennial, he has set a high bar for his solo debut at Eller.

Sturtevant at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
May 5–June 23
Sturtevant is the original punk. An integral member of the New York avant-garde art scene in the 1960s, she spent her time lampooning its leading men by producing identical copies of their most iconic creations: Johns targets, Warhol Marilyns, Lichtenstein damsels in distress. They’ve fetched big sums recently—a 1966 Sturtevant Lichtenstein made $711,000, an artist record, back in November at Phillips New York. GBE will show her nine-screen, narrative-free Elastic Tango video, which features jars of mayonnaise, Beavis and Butthead and other delights, and was a hit last summer at the Venice Biennale.

‘Spirit Level’ at Gladstone
March 24–April 21
Named for a collection of poetry by Irish bard Seamus Heaney, this show is curated by Gladstone artist Ugo Rondinone and features more than 100 pieces by 18 artists, including Amy Granat, Klara Lidén (whose Christmas tree-filled show at Reena Spaulings was one of the winter’s highlights, and whose solo show opens at the New Museum in May), Ann Craven, Joe Bradley, and Martin Boyce. Also here is work by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the Austrian performance artist long rumored to have died by cutting off his penis during an “action” performance. This should be one of the year’s most ambitious group show undertakings.

Xylor Jane at Canada
May 3–June 3
If one were to mix Sol LeWitt’s repetitive geometry with the mathematical fixations and jarring palettes of Alfred Jensen, and then pour on a bit of gently simmering anarchy, the result may approximate Xylor Jane’s paintings. She takes simple patterns and follows them obsessively to their conclusions: dots and numbers filling every inch of a canvas, though never quite cleanly, as in a LeWitt. Their accomplishment is defined by hard-wrought completion, not flawless execution. The work—to say nothing of the paintings’ pulsing color—is its own reward.

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures
April 26–June 9
For her latest show at Metro Pictures, which first exhibited her work back in 1980, Cindy Sherman will present new photographs that she made using attire mined from Chanel’s voluminous archive. As her blockbuster MoMA retrospective proved, Ms. Sherman has managed a nearly flawless career, achieving a relentless method of reinvention with an economy of means: she poses as every character in her photographs. The artist has adopted digital manipulation in recent years, subtly altering her
appearance and toying with her backgrounds (including landscapes she shot while traveling, in some of these pieces), so this latest body of work may surprise.

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Ramiken Crucible
April 1–May 13
Elaine Cameron-Weir’s first show at Ramiken, last year, featured a Persian rug dyed with rich indigo; a long, thin slice of wood covered with tobacco; and a wall-hung piece with wire mesh affixed with wax, the perfume Guerlain L’heure Bleue and pyralene, among other exotic materials. Trafficking in a romantic, elegiac strain of postminimalism, she makes art whose ephemeral components—and smells—conjure memories at the same time that they threaten to disappear.

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts
March 31–April 29
Japanese-American artist Yuji Agematsu will have his first-ever solo show at the increasingly potent Greenpoint outfit Real Fine Arts, exhibiting pieces of detritus he has collected while wandering the city for the past three decades. The battered, castoff works constitute a personal, chance-inflected history of his flânerie, and an alternative map of New York.

arusseth@observer.com