My wife, Karen, and I finally made it to New York City over the New Year’s weekend, and we saw several shows worth mentioning. Alas, we were way too late to see Morandi at the Met, which ended on Dec. 14, but the season’s other blockbuster, “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933,” was alive and well at the Whitney Museum, as was an extensive retrospective of the photographer William Eggleston.

I will report on those two shows in a subsequent blog entry, but would like to address two other shows we saw first, one of which ends this week, hence my haste to tell about it.
That show is a museum-quality mini-retrospective of Helen Frankenthaler, the great abstract expressionist, color-field innovator and pioneering woman artist. The show, titled “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades,” is at Knoedler & Company and features 9 paintings from Frankenthaler’s personal collection that provide examples of her work at all stages of her career.

These are exquisite paintings, and the gallery is a gorgeous setting to see them in. I was so taken by the works, and by the privilege of seeing them together for what must be the first and last time (some will be dispersed to museum collections), that I went back for a second visit the next day.

I have always loved the way Frankenthaler revels in color and especially the way she pays attention to the edges between and around her fields of color; all these paintings provided great moments to enjoy. The best of them, which also happens to be the biggest and the one emphasized in publicity, is a meditation on the many shades of green, aptly titled “A Green Thought in a Green Shade.” I could stare at it forever. Sadly, the show ends Saturday.

Our second viewing experience was in great contrast to the Knoedler, both conceptually and contextually, but it was just as good. Vic Muniz, a much-celebrated Brazilian-born photographer, culled the archives of the Museum of Modern Art for his “Rebus,” the latest in the museum’s “Artist’s Choice” series.
A snaking installation of 82 items from the collections of several departments, including painting, sculpture, photography and design, “Rebus” promises to be a puzzle with a solution — and it makes good on that promise by entertaining, enlightening and enthralling its viewers.

While the Frankenthaler show was lush and meditative, the Muniz installation is raucously humorous, yet deeply intellectual. It also speaks directly to you, allowing you to take it in and draw your own conclusions without feeling preached at. I saw a huge range of people enjoying the show, including little kids, and I have to guess there was a more relaxed atmosphere there than in the timed-entry jam-packed Van Gogh exhibition elsewhere in the same museum.
“Rebus” runs well into February — so there’s plenty of time to catch it. I strongly urge you to try to do that if you’re in the city.

That’s it for now — keep an eye out for my next post, in which I compare and contrast Calder and Eggleston (the audiences, not the artists), name drop a celebrity or two, and tease you with intimations of exotic and delicious meals discovered in likely and unlikely places.