Here’s an old Henny Youngman joke: a guy goes to his psychiatrist, shrink says “you’re crazy.” The guy says he wants a second opinion, shrink says “you’re ugly too.” Well, there may be a lot of crazy in New York these days, but there is definitely not a lot of ugly, there’s a lot of very, very pretty. Abstract painting, and very pure abstract painting dealing with questions of color, composition and balance, is really staking a claim right now in the city. Students of abstraction can revel in examples of all periods of the genre – from the great-grand-daddy Kandinsky to 60s painting legend Kenneth Noland, and more contemporary practitioners who got their start in the late 60s and 70s: Ronnie Landfield and Sean Scully.

I’ve always felt that abstract painting was actually pretty brainy. Whether or not you decide to think about something, you usually have to think while you look at it, it’s very meditative at the least, unless you’re one of those drooling morons that says something like “my kid could do that” when you look at Autumn Rhythms, or play that variant of the cloud game: “it looks like…” Many of the other exhibitions in New York are pretty thought provoking as well – Susan Silas’ “Helmbrechts Walk” is nostalgic for tragedy, and Apex Art has somehow crossed a genuine love of New York City with highly conceptual art, kind of like creating a trigonometric algorithm proving the Yankees are the best team in baseball. Speaking of drooling morons – you guys please leave Damien Hirst alone. If you don’t get the shark, go buy a Thomas Kinkade print.

Susan Silas
Helmbrechts Walk
Through June 30
This exhibition of photographs traces the 225 mile-long forced march of 500 Jewish women at the end of WWII. The photographs are very succinct in their bleakness. Sometimes the paths and roadways are lovely and green, other times barren without much to offer the eye, but the knowledge that these vistas were not viewed freely questions the very nature of beauty – can a verdant landscape provide any salvation for the slave heading towards possible annihilation?

Kenneth Noland
Leslie Feeley Fine Art
Through November 28
Kenneth Noland is one of those artists that reminds us why abstract art exists. He wiggles into your brain and awakens some territory that maybe you only consciously remember from a psych 101 textbook – “cognition of abstract forms” or something like that. His circles, angles and lines are not referential, but they prefigure the basic forms that populate existence. Symbols? maybe, but they don’t need to be, they lack all pretense.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity
Through January 25
MoMA
I interviewed a noted Bauhaus expert, Magdalena Droste, on my amazing internet radio show on Art International Radio; she wrote the Taschen book on the Bauhaus. She complained that people get all excited about the Marcel Brauer chairs and the Moholy-Nagy photographs, but few care that the first semi-mass produced products of the Bauhaus were ceramic bowls and jugs – very un-glamorous. Well, they start this exhibition off with the ceramics – it’s that kind of exhibition. What’s the word, exhausting? No, exhaustive, that’s it! I jest. It’s a gezumpkunstwerk of an exhibit, convincing proving why this art/craft/architecture school which existed for a mere 14 years was the greatest influence on design and architecture in the 20th century.

Paul McCarthy: White Snow
through Dec. 24
Hauser & Wirth
This show closes on December 24. I guess if you’re not a gentile it’s ok to stop by on the last day, but if you are, it could spoil a Christmas. Paul McCarthy is a genius, but much of his genius lies in the very darkest depths of the human psyche – in a place where few are courageous enough to admit they go, unless they suffer from Tourette’s syndrome, and are drunk. The exhibition has detailed and beautifully crafted drawings, and also McCarthy’s overwhelming, giant drawings, encrusted with clippings from porn magazines and such. There is a small erotic sculpture in the Egyptian wing of the Brooklyn Museum cheerfully nicknamed “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Same idea.

Ronnie Landfield: 40th Anniversary Exhibition
through November 28
Stephen Haller Gallery
Ronnie Landfield is one of the leading proponents of a group of painters who came at the nexus of many paths in abstraction – he and his contemporaries, painters such as Peter Young, Ron Davis and Dan Christensen, combined much of the spirituality of the Abstract Expressionists, but also began playing with ideas such as repetition and pattern that would become hallmarks of minimalism a few years later. Larry Aldrich, in a catalog for an exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, coined the term “Lyrical Abstraction,” and it stuck, though it’s a bit simplistic. Landfield’s broad strokes and splashes of color, sometimes combined with solid bands and enigmatic stains, play with the idea of landscape, but like Noland’s canvasses, they don’t require an explanation – it’s almost a reversal of an aesthetic question, do we find comfort in the play of sky and horizon, or do the landscapes of reality nourish some inner, abstract longing for visual balance?

Tracey Emin: Only God Knows I’m Good
Through December 19
Lehmann Maupin
In a series of monoprints, embroideries and objets, Tracey Emin, in her inimitable style, exposes her vulnerability to the viewer. As always, we’re a bit taken aback and embarrassed by her openness, not sure if we should apologize or keep our mouth shut. The embroideries in particular, with their open promiscuity and text, are very feminist in medium, but it is a femininity that both embraces the movement of the 70′s, but refuses to be militant. In the end Emin seems more sad than bitter.

Sean Scully
Through Dec 12
Galerie LeLong
I once visited Sean Scully’s studio in lower Manhattan. He was a big Irish guy with some pretty scary workout equipment in his living room. When we asked him if he wanted to come have dinner with us, he said he couldn’t because he was dining with Mary Boone. The whole experience was very impressive – just thought I’d share that with you. Sean Scully translates some very specific emotions into paint/color. While the rough edges that separate the colors are carefully formulated and balanced, and very painterly, the straight severe boundaries that Scully creates by joining separate canvasses together irreparably divide the paintings, referencing borders that can never be crossed.

Avant-Guide to NYC
Apex Art
Through Dec 19
The Situationists used to enjoy wandering around a city, equipped with a map of a different city, say Amsterdam with a Paris-par-arrondisement. Apparently these expeditions usually ended in a drinking establishment of some sort. This exhibition, curated By Sandra Skurvida, harnesses that wild yet confusing aspect of conceptual art. A whole bunch of artists were asked to transform their memory of a specific location in New York into a conceptual piece. Including work by: Julieta Aranda, caraballo-farman, Kabir Carter, Dexter Sinister, Eckhard Etzold, Andrea Geyer, Pablo Helguera, Nancy Hwang, Pia Lindman, Anna Lundh, Nina Katchadourian, Carlos Motta, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Hatuey Ramos-Fermin, Katya Sander, Ward Shelley, Xaviera Simmons, and Alex Villar.

Katarina Ziemke
Through Dec. 9
Galerie Zurcher
Ziemke has found a very seductive niche in her painting. In the glossy yet hazy no-man’s land between David Levinthal and photorealistic painting lie her Meissen figurine re-formulations of historical photographs. It’s a neat little package delving into the ideas behind how we view and commemorate historical events. Is there such a thing as too-sentimental, or not kitsch enough? Plus the idea is just kind of cool, taking a real photograph and transforming all the figures, and sometimes the landscapes as well, into bright shiny porcelain figures. The big question is, as with all great early work, what comes next? Great exhibition essay by Christian Weikop.

Kandinsky
Through January 13
Guggenheim
Kandinsky’s paintings are fresh and transcendent, but what always strikes me when I think about them is the transformation his work underwent, from the Blau Reiter to his later paintings. Rather than an arrival at a solution, it seems more like a transition to a different plane of existence – there is a parity between realism and abstraction in Kandinsky that posits both as equals.