ART IN NEW YORK

UPTOWN

"SOMETHING WILD"--Stone, 48 East 86th. Three avant-gardians, each doing what he knows best. Apple Grower George Wardlaw sculpts and paints apples--green, delicious, crab, rotten and otherwise; ex-Mink Farmer Joseph Kurhajec makes fetishes of ferocity from blowtorched sheepskin, muskrat pelts, ram horns and chicken feathers; Rugmaker Dorothy Grebenak hand-weaves tapestries of U.S. Treasury bills, Con Edison manhole covers, even a nubby facsimile of a Gordon's gin label. Through Dec. 31.

HAROLD STEVENSON--Feigen-Herbert, 24 East 81st. Eyebrows will go up from Manhattan to Idabel, Okla. (the artist's home town) at his billboard-size The New Adam in the buff. Also on display are 17 other samples of Stevenson's exquisite gigantism, including The Right Eye of Sal Mineo with lashes as long as shoestrings. Through Dec. 14.

JERRY OKIMOTO--Krasner, 1061 Madison Ave. at 80th. Okimoto has outmaneuvered Mondrian: his colorful plane geometry is also mobile. Sliding panels like cupboard doors permit a change of composition and color match; each painting comes with its own framed miniature showing suggested arrangements. Through Dec. 14.

BALTHUS--Thaw, 50 East 78th. Sketchily inconsequential ink illustrations for Wuthering Heights from the early 1930s, along with other drawings on view for the first time, show the director of the Villa Medici playing erotic games in line as well as color. Through Dec. 21.

PIERRE ALECHINSKY--Lefebre, 47 East 77th. Twenty-one turbulent oils and tortured ink-wash paintings by the most sharp-fanged member of the Cobra group. Haunted little faces stare from the inky spume, half-formed bird-creatures hide in the thickets of the oils. Through Dec. 7.

ENRICO DONATI--Staempfli, 47 East 77th. Slabs of textured pigment on canvas are built up out of what Donati calls "mixed media," and that can mean everything from sand to terra-cotta dust to ground marble. Twenty of his newest paintings.

Through Dec. 14.

FRITZ BULTMAN--Tibor de Nagy, 149 East 72nd. Twenty-two tentacled and leafy bronzes that sway on their bases like sturdy primordial plantlife, and 18 collages and drawings that help explain them.

Through Jan. 4.

MILTON HEBALD--Nordness, 831 Madison Ave. at 69th. Sometimes tender, sometimes turgid figurative sculpture by a classically inspired New Yorker who lives in Rome. At best, Hebald's pot-bellied centaurs, lovers lounging in urnlike bathtubs, and fountain topped by the refugees on Noah's Ark (including a brontosaur that presumably fell overboard) are full of frivolous immediacy. Through Dec. 21.

CHRISTOS CAPRALOS--Martha Jackson, 32 East 69th. First U.S. exhibition of the sophisticated mockeries in bronze of the human form by an important Greek sculptor. Bits of realistic anatomy peep through the textured surfaces. Through Dec. 14.

FEDERICO CASTELLON--Dintenfass, 18 East 67th. An admirable show of the Spanish-born American absent from the New York scene for eleven years. A recent Society of American Graphic Artists' prizewinner, Castellon did these mute, melancholy lithographs in Paris. One of his titles speaks for them all: The End of Dreams. Through Dec. 21.

POINTILLIST PAINTINGS--Hirschl & Adler, 21 East 67th. More than 60 works by 19 exponents of the neo-impressionist technique that built up form through the juxtaposition of tiny stippled dots of brightly contrasting colors. Among the masters of the school: Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Lucie Cousturier, Henri-Edmond Cross, Hippolyte Petitjean, Camille and Lucien Pissarro. Through Dec. 14.

PAINTING AND DRAWING THE NUDE, PART I: THE MALE--Banfer, 23 East 67th. Adam as depicted by 23 U.S. artists. Besides an assortment of mundane classical studies there are some forceful skinscapes: Jacob Landau's unbound Prometheus agonized by fire and trance; Paul Cadmus' eerie, restive painting, The Shower; John Fenton's intimations of mortality in Death of a Bullfighter. Through Dec. 14.

IRANIAN CERAMICS--Asia House, 112 East 64th. More than 100 pieces of Persian pottery and porcelain, dating from the 4th millennium B.C. into the 19th century A.D. Through Dec. 15.

ARTHUR JOSEPHSON--Seiferheld, 158 East 64th. Fifty drawings in silverpoint, ink, tempera and wax encaustic by a facile, delicate draftsman. Included are some out-of-this-world portraits of Moondog, the blind musician clad in army blankets, who haunts Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas. Also 16th to 19th century old master drawings. Through Dec. 31.

MIDTOWN

ROBERT BEAUCHAMP--Green, 15 West 57th. Crimson-stained harpies perform jungle witchery and nature attends the gleeful, macabre rites. The artist is the real sorcerer: his brash and bleeding colors, laid on with the free brushstroke of the German expressionists, are bewitching. Besides the oils, some drawings in pencil and crayon. Through Dec. 14.

HEDDA STERNE--Parsons, 24 West 57th.

By the former wife of Cartoonist Saul Steinberg: bands of luminous grey and beige that subtly transport the viewer to romantic visions of receding waters, misty skies and diminishing days in 14 synthetic Horizons. Through Dec. 14.

WILLIAM PALMER--Midtown, 11 East 57th. Palmer is a teacher as well as a painter, and art students have much to learn from his glowing use of underpainting and subtle glazes. The show includes 25 new landscapes. Through Dec. 21.

SALVADOR DALI--Knoedler, 14 East 57th.

The enraging, engaging Spanish surrealist with well-beeswaxed handlebars has arrived in Manhattan with ten surprises in tow. Samples: Galacidalacidesoxiribunu-cleicacid, Twist in the studio of Velasquez, and Fifty abstract pictures which as seen from two yards change into three Lenines masquerading as Chinese and as seen from six yards appear as the head of a royal tiger. Somehow, he frequently manages to top his titles. Through Dec. 26.

FRANZ KLINE--Janis, 15 East 57th. At 40, the burly painter was unknown beyond New York's 10th Street galleries, but in the decade before his death last year he earned worldwide recognition as a dynamo of abstract expressionism. Mostly on loan and rarely shown are 30 paintings, spanning his heyday, from 1952 to 1962, which provide in Kline's first New York posthumous show a survey of his black-and-white clashes as well as some uncharacteristic excursions in flamboyant color. Through Dec. 28.

CURT VALENTIN MEMORIAL--Marlborough-Gerson, 41 East 57th. After a record crowd at the opening of the world's largest commercial art gallery, the proprietors throw a mammoth show of more than 300 paintings and sculptures by artists once associated with the late New York Art Dealer Curt Valentin. Among them are Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Jacques Lipchitz, Marino Marini, Alexander Calder, Graham Sutherland, Paul Klee, and a covey of other imports ranging from Rodin to Picasso.

Through Dec. 21.

IQBAL GEOFFREY--Grand Central Moderns, 8 West 56th. New York debut of a 24-year-old Pakistani who chucked a promising career in law to paint. Geoffrey's richly textured, calligraphic "fusions" suggest affinities between Oriental technique and action painting. Through Dec. 31.

LEONID--Durlacher, 538 Madison Ave.

at 54th. Thirty recent, pretty and repetitious shorescapes gleaned from world travels through poverty-stricken countries indicate that the aging neoromantic filters what he sees. Through Dec. 21.

MUSEUMS

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK--Fifth Ave. at 103rd. John Koch's sleek snapshots of life seem to have been done on fast emulsion instead of canvas. His world, seen in 51 paintings, has an eat-off -the-floor spotlessness, his people an ad-agency folksiness. Through Jan. 1. On view at Kraushaar Galleries, 1055 Madison Ave. at 80th: 30 of Koch's pencil figure studies. Through Dec. 21.

GUGGENHEIM--Fifth Ave. at 89th. Francis Bacon's tragic views of humans great and lowly, plus his visceral Three Studies for a Crucifixion. Through Jan. 12. Also on view: 20th century drawings by such masters as Munch, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, De Kooning, Motherwell, Tobey and others. Through Jan. 5.

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY--170 Central Park West at 77th. U.S. Naturalist John James Audubon's dew-bright, exquisitely squawking original watercolors of the birds of America drawn for his famed Elephant Folio, rotated to put on view all 432 in the collection. Permanent.

MUSEUM OF PRIMITIVE ART--15 West 54th. A comprehensive show of the art of the Peruvian Inca empire includes 150 objects of gold, silver, wood, stone, textiles and feathers, among them a 7-in. silver figurine of an Incan beauty bedecked in woolen mantles and a red feather headdress. Through Feb. 2.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS--29 West 53rd. Toy Sculptor William Accorsi takes a mesh purse, a letter opener, a pair of earrings, some bits of glass and solders them into a seated king in chain mail; his motorized Tournament of Saints utilizes Erector-set parts, springs, spools, wire, scraps of wood and tin. Also on view:

ceramics. by Gertrud and Otto Natzler, and a collection of furniture, fabrics, pottery, enamels and metalware by 263 Eastern U.S. craftsmen. Through Jan. 5.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.