METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—What would happen if a work by Degas, say, wandered into “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900,” an enjoyable show of questing Yankees abroad? Pictures by the expatriates Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent—and by Homer and Eakins, whose independence makes their inclusion dubious—would defer but survive; the rest might suggest a fox-invaded henhouse. Unlike Parisians, Americans then could never forget about Paris. On the outside looking in, they tipped French fashions sideways into genteel formulae, notably that of the oxymoron “American Impressionism.” Instances of confident audacity, such as Cassatt’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair” (1878), startle. Through Jan. 28.   “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde.” The Parisian gallerist Vollard (1866-1939) was an early champion of Matisse, Bonnard, van Gogh, and many others; this unusually canted show comprises samples of the work that they made with his encouragement and patronage. The two giants of the show’s title are represented with canvases from solo shows that Vollard mounted in 1895 and 1901, respectively. Through Jan. 7.   “New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori.” Through Dec. 10.   “Sean Scully: Wall of Light.” Through Jan. 15. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Manet and the Execution of Maximilian.” Through Jan. 29.   “Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings.” Through Jan. 15.   “Eija-Liisa Ahtila: The Wind.” The Finnish artist presents a video installation in which a woman’s apartment is disrupted by gales. Through Jan. 29.   “Projects 83: Monika Sosnowska.” Through Nov. 27. (Open Wednesdays through Mondays, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York.” Two bodies of work by the Italian artist (1899-1968) best known for his slashed canvases. Through Jan. 21. (Open Saturdays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Fridays, 10 to 8.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
Madison Ave. at 75th St. (800-944-8639)—“Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World.” Through Jan. 21.   “Picasso and American Art.” Through Jan. 28.   Mark Grotjahn’s large-scale works in pencil toy with geometry and multiple vanishing points; he ventures into color with a pair of drawings in saturated reds and yellows that anchor the room. Through Jan. 7.  Works by Edward Hopper fill the fifth floor, including “Nighthawks,” on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. Through Dec. 3. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART
200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.” Through Jan. 21.   “Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford.” Through Jan. 28.   “Ron Mueck.” Through Feb. 4. (Open Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 to 5, and Saturdays and Sundays, 11 to 6.)

FRICK COLLECTION
1 E. 70th St. (212-288-0700)—“Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting.” Through Dec. 31.   “Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804): A New Testament.” Through Jan. 7. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

JEWISH MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—The rise of comic illustration in the twentieth century is tracked in a wonderful pair of shows, “Masters of American Comics” and “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.” The first features luminaries like Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, and Chris Ware at the Jewish Museum, and George Herriman and Charles M. Schulz at the Newark Museum. (The creator of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, withdrew after previous showings in Los Angeles and Milwaukee, in part because the older artists in the exhibition were to be shown in a venue across the Hudson, and in part because of the ethnic emphasis of the Jewish Museum’s shows.) “Masters” offers a survey of the genre, with its roots in European avant-garde art and Hollywood movies, while “Superheroes” provides a seminar on the proliferation of characters with special powers during the era of Fascism and the Second World War, including A-list heroes like Superman, Batman, and Captain America, as well as lesser-knowns like Hawkman, the Flame, the Viking Prince, and the Human Torch. Both through Jan. 28. (Open Sundays through Wednesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 9, and Fridays, 11 to 3.)

MORGAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. (212-685-0008)— “Fragonard and the French Tradition” includes only drawings, and without the cotton-candy tints of his paintings teasing the eye it’s easier to imagine the rococo master (1732-1806) living through the French Revolution. The show celebrates the centennial of Fragonard’s death with an exploration of his revival of the red-chalk technique, linking his works on paper to those of artists he was influenced by, or influenced—including François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, and Hubert Robert. Despite the sober palette, coquettish maidens and leafy parklands still abound. Through Jan. 7. (Open Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10:30 to 5, Fridays, 10:30 to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 6.)

NEWARK MUSEUM
49 Washington St., Newark, N.J. (973-596-6550)—“Masters of American Comics,” half of a two-part survey of comic art in the twentieth century. (See the Jewish Museum.) Through Jan. 28. (Open Wednesdays through Fridays, 12 to 5, and weekends, 10 to 5.)

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
22-25 Jackson Ave., at 46th Ave., Long Island City (718-784-2084)—Watching paint dry is actually kind of interesting. At least it is in Burt Barr’s hypnotically looped videos, in which two glistening brushstrokes—one red, one blue, both blown up to billboard size—congeal in real time. Two more of the artist’s recent videos present alternative summer idylls. In one, a self-portrait meditation shows Barr sitting in a sunny back yard while raindrops seem to dimple a liquid camera lens (actually a mirror set up under a sprinkler). In the other, a pair of turtles copulate with agonizingly slow intensity. Through Jan. 8.   “John Latham: Time Base and the Universe.” Through Jan. 8.   “Katrín Sigurdardóttir: High Plane Five.” Through May 7. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6.)

Galleries are usually open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from around 10 or 11 to between 5 and 6; please call the gallery for exact hours.

FRANZ ROH
The small photographs and collages that this critic, historian, and theorist of the German avant-garde made in the nineteen-thirties are fascinatingly uneven. Flashes of exhilarating experimentation, many involving the female nude, eclipse the more pedestrian pictures, but seventy-one pieces stretch Roh’s genius a bit thin. Still, he made hauntingly effective use of the negative print for both nudes and landscapes, and his surrealist impulses found their freest rein in collages that combined photos and etchings in dreamlike collisions of mechanical objects and disembodied limbs. Though Max Ernst and Man Ray had more polish, Roh still manages to get under the skin and fester. Through Dec. 22. (Ubu, 416 E. 59th St. 212-753-4444.)

“CITIES IN TRANSITION”
The savvy organizers of this public-art project commissioned new work from Chuck Close, Mitch Epstein, and Dayanita Singh, who were asked to reflect on urban flux in New York, Boston, and Hartford, respectively. Handsomely reproduced and installed around Madison Square Park on artfully suspended billboards, the photographs make few concessions to their context, and many of the smartest ones communicate only obliquely, even with a helpful sign nearby. Only Close, who shows five daguerreotype-based head shots of recent immigrants to New York, really engages the public nature of his art and makes strong, straightforward images that speak to us without captions. Through Nov. 13. (Madison Square Park, Fifth Ave. at 23rd St.)

Short List

WALKER EVANS: UBS, 1285 Sixth Ave., at 51st St. 212-713-2885. Through Nov. 17. F. C. GUNDLACH: Cook, 1063 Madison Ave., at 80th St. 212-737-3550. Through Dec. 21. NORBERT SCHWONTKOWSKI: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Ave., at 78th St. 212-744-7400. Through Nov. 22. LISA YUSKA-VAGE: Zwirner & Wirth, 32 E. 69th St. 212-517-8677. Through Nov. 18.

NICK CAVE
Cave’s body-warping costumes (the artist is not related to the singer) suggest a dreamworld version of the Museum of Natural History. Ethnographic, zoölogical, ceremonial, and carnivalesque elements mingle in head-to-toe outfits; a donkey’s face with a sequinned tongue tops one ensemble, another misshapes a leg with lumpy knitted protuberances, and a shaggy yeti’s suit is constructed from hundreds of neatly trimmed twigs. The flawlessly crafted outfits would obliterate any wearer’s identity, drowning it in a sea of natural and cultural references. Through Nov. 11. (Shainman, 513 W. 20th St. 212-645-1701.)

ROBERT COLESCOTT
These five large paintings, made between 1991 and 1997, are awash in rainbow colors and unsavory scenes. Colescott’s funny, harsh pictures get at everything that is most disappointing about America—the taste for violence, the unresolved history of racism, overabundance and waste—but, disturbingly, still entertain. Through Nov. 11. (Kravets Wehby, 521 W. 21st St. 212-352-2238.)

BRYAN HUNT
A trio of tall, narrow sculptures study the way water flows, and eddies, and thickens around an obstacle or a curve. The large-scale pieces are called “Flumes,” and, like Hunt’s “Airships” series, they toy with volume and weight, the way basic elements—water, air—take up space and can be contained (or not). Unlike the airships, these pieces deal in gravity, harkening back to works based on waterfalls that he made in the seventies. A series of drawings are even knottier; reduced to two dimensions, his studies of flow and ebb have surprising formal similarities to the twisty shapes of old trees. Through Nov. 11. (Danese, 535 W. 24th St. 212-223-2227.)

LEORA LAOR
For her second New York show, this Israeli photographer refines a technique she used in her first, surreptitiously recording people in public and allowing her distance from the action to create a soft, grainy haze over the resulting image. Because several of her subjects are actors onstage or dancers in rehearsal, Laor’s artifice is far more apparent this time around. But reducing her cast of characters, often to a solitary figure, helps focus and intensify the drama, and keeps it from dissipating at this larger scale. In a world resigned to isolation, Laor seizes upon the few moments when two people touch, but she doesn’t pretend that they’re a sign of hope. Through Nov. 22. (Meislin, 526 W. 26th St. 212-627-2552.)

KALUP LINZY
This is Linzy’s first solo outing, but he is already known, thanks to a few group-show cameos, for low-tech videos that mix melodrama, minstrelsy, sexual politics, and wicked humor, in more or less equal doses. This duet of videos from the ongoing “Conversations wit de Churen” series finds the artist donning a ridiculous blond wig and assuming the role of Katonya, an aspiring artist who “conversates” with friends, lovers, employers, and God—then emotes with soap-opera abandon while Minnie Riperton’s “Memory Lane” blares in the background. A series of gouaches by Katonya/Linzy make a bit more sense after one has witnessed the artist’s performative antics. Through Nov. 11. (Taxter & Spengemann, 504 W. 22nd St. 212-924-0212.)

MARISA MERZ
The Arte Povera artist (and the wife of Mario Merz) shows a small suite of new work, concentrating on pencil-and-gold-leaf drawings on wood panels. One piece has a small, fractured clay hand affixed to it; another is built into a larger assemblage of wood blocks and blank white paper. The recurrent motif is a wide-eyed, full-lipped, functionally noseless female entity, part Byzantine icon, part alien, who hovers on the surface of the paper enmeshed in delicate nets of graphite lines. Through Nov. 11. (Gladstone, 515 W. 24th St. 212-206-9300.)

ELIZABETH MURRAY
Manically happy but totally controlled, Murray’s recent paintings (dating from 2002 through 2006) put Pop Art quotations on shuffle, then transfer the smashed-up code back into handmade, auteurist terms. A fist, a foot, an amoebic cloud, an arrow, and a utensil like a spork zing and splat across the bright, shaped canvases. Murray’s gestural touch is even more palpable in a series of small collages in gouache, ink, and watercolor, where quick marks on cut and twisted paper bring busy energy into visible form without monumentalizing it. Through Nov. 11. (PaceWildenstein, 534 W. 25th St. 212-929-7000.)

JULIA SCHMIDT
This fresh dispatch from the Leipzig painters’ league veers from the figurative, Pop-communist propaganda formula, heading toward something more in the vein of Gerhard Richter or his most accomplished heir, Luc Tuymans. Like Tuymans, Schmidt makes paintings that are matte and muted, as if bleached by the sun. She also shares the Richter-Tuymans obsession with the relationship between photography and painting. The difference is that her subjects are bland and self-effacing rather than historically and politically freighted. Bits of fabric, corners of furniture, and the spaces in between objects serve as impetuses for paintings that are vague and dreamlike, but still steeped in the compositional formalism which distinguishes most Leipzig-based painters. Through Nov. 11. (Kaplan, 525 W. 21st St. 212-645-7335.)

FRED TOMASELLI
Tomaselli’s decorative “paintings”—découpage panels in which cutout photos, flowers, leaves, and pills are encased in layers of resin—have always shimmied between the realms of art and high-end craft. The pivotal element is the embedded drugs, which give his otherwise tame compositions a whiff of counterculture danger. (How many artists can boast that their paintings were detained by French customs agents?) A few works depicting birds perched on tree branches replicate the loveliness of Renaissance tapestries; others recall Wangechi Mutu’s photomontage distortions. But while Tomaselli’s swirling concoctions of hands, eyes, lips, and faces arranged in psychedelic vortices are impeccably crafted, they often feel like stock portraits of people on drugs—silly, dated representations in the “Reefer Madness” vein. Through Nov. 11. (James Cohan, 533 W. 26th St. 212-714-9500.)

Short List

ARTURO HERRERA: Sikkema Jenkins, 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262. Through Nov. 25. CORINNE MERCADIER: Klotz, 511 W. 25th St. 212-741-4764. Through Nov. 18. JOE SOLA: Bespoke, 547 W. 27th St. 212-695-8201. Through Nov. 14. LISA YUSKAVAGE: Zwirner, 525 W. 19th St. 212-727-2070. Through Nov. 18. “DICE THROWN (WILL NEVER ANNUL CHANCE)”: Bellwether, 134 Tenth Ave., at 19th St. 212-929-5959. Through Nov. 11.