“Gaea,” a Lee Krasner painting from 1966 featured in the Museum of Modern Art show “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction.” Credit 2017 the Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Our guide to new art shows — and some that will be closing soon.
‘CALDER: HYPERMOBILITY’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Oct. 23). The Whitney has the world’s largest holdings of the American sculptor who invented the mobile, but this rejuvenating presentation of works in motion is a different sort of Calder show, and never the same twice. Before he hit upon his elegantly suspended plates of cut sheet metal, Calder first created kinetic sculptures with small, hidden motors. Motorized mobiles and ones activated only by air hang together in a single, beautiful gallery, and several times a day attendants come through to make the sculptures boogie. The Calder Foundation will also be updating this witty, wily retrospective with one-day presentations of more fragile kinetic works. (Jason Farago)
212-570-3600, whitney.org
‘ETTORE SOTTSASS: DESIGN RADICAL’ at the Met Breuer (through Oct. 8). No surprise here: The first big New York survey of this many-styled Italian design guru’s 60-year career has a combative air. You may argue your way through the show, and also take issue with some of its contextual artworks — the exhibition is nearly half non-Sottsass — but it is an invigorating, illuminating experience. (Roberta Smith)
212-731-1675, metmuseum.org
‘FLORINE STETTHEIMER: PAINTING POETRY’ at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 24). This too-small retrospective nonetheless decimates modernism’s orderly hierarchies. Mixing Symbolist dreaminess with Post-Impressionist muscle, Stettheimer rendered her family and New York’s interwar avant-garde as charmed, eccentric, usually androgynous caricatures in textured expanses of brilliant color. Her singular paintings are among the most spellbinding and enduring in the history of art and the best, with Marsden Hartley’s, of early American modernism. They do quite well against the Europeans, too, thank you very much. (Smith)
212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org