Summer Art

Every summer the New York art scene shuts tight, like an irritated clam. The artists vanish to East Hampton, Brooklyn or Bogota; many of the commercial galleries, both uptown along the axes of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, and downtown in SoHo, do not reopen until September. All the same, there is as much going on in Manhattan this summer as in many other U.S. cities at the height of their art season.

One exhibition not to be missed is Red Grooms' walk-through, gloriously zany sideshow at the Marlborough Gallery (40 W. 57th St.) titled Ruckus Manhattan (TIME, Jan. 19), a coarsely affectionate tribute to this battered queen of American cities, in spirit somewhere between Lenny Bruce and Rube Goldberg. Farther down the block at the Allan Frumkin Gallery (50 W. 57th St.), a group of artists, among them Ceramist Robert Arneson and Painter Peter Saul, are poking none-too-gentle fun at the patriotic excesses of the Bicentennial. The Brewster Gallery (1018 Madison Ave.) has a solid group of more than 50 Georges Braque etchings, aquatints and lithographs, and for fans of the Italian maestro Giorgio de Chirico, there is a large survey of his late work, 1936-1975, depressing in its self-parody, hung in the august showrooms of Wildenstein & Co. (19 E. 64th St.).

Group shows range from the very far-out (drawings by Robert Barry and Germany's Hanne Darboven, among others, at Leo Castelli, 4 E. 77th St.) through "classical" modernism (Jules Olitski and other color-field artists at Knoedler Contemporary Art (19 E. 70th St.) to a diverting collection of views of New York by American artists (John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Guy Pene du Bois at the Hammer Galleries, 51 E. 57th St.).

The glory of New York is its museums. Highlights: the Metropolitan's special shows--Chinese landscape paintings, Goyas on loan from the Prado, the great Norbert Schimmel collection of ancient art. The Museum of Modern Art displays ideal taxis, the Whitney offers "200 Years of American Sculpture" and the Guggenheim Museum has its whole collection of early 20th century European paintings from 1880-1945 on view. And where else, in the same day, can one look at the only complete manuscript of a Mozart opera in this country (Der Schauspieldirektor, at the Pierpont Morgan Library), a brilliantly nostalgic collection of Victorian photographs of the Indian rajah (at Asia House Gallery) and a full-dress retrospective of French Surrealist Andre Masson (at the Museum of Modern Art)? Only, this July, in New York.

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