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SUBJECT: SHEEP FARMING (89%); SHEEP & GOAT FARMING (89%); COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES (76%); EXCHANGE RATES (73%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (71%); RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION (65%); US DOLLAR (64%); MAMMALS (89%)
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GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Montana State University's sheep-shearing school, in Norris, Mont., helps to address a sudden shortage of talent resulting from global capitalism and a weakened American dollar. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JANIE OSBORNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

O.K., these inhabitants of the Montana State University shearing school west of Bozeman may look as gentle as -- well, as lambs. Just try working on one. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JANIE OSBORNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

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April 5, 2008 Saturday

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Paid Notice: Deaths SOLOMON, ADAM
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Classified; Pg. 18
LENGTH: 131 words
SOLOMON--Adam, was a wonderful and extraordinary human being who deserved to enjoy all that he had. To Vicki, Peter, James, Tracy and everyone who knew him, we extend our most profound sympathies. Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro

SOLOMON--Adam, suddenly on April 3, 2008. Beloved husband of Vicki Rosen Solomon. Devoted father of Peter and James, and Jessica and David Rosen. Brother of Tracy and Jake Solomon. Son of the late Constance Kaufman Solomon and Anthony M. Solomon. A true renaissance man, philenthropical entrepreneur, and unique friend to many. Services private. A future memorial service time and place to be announced. ''The Riverside'' 212-362-6600.

SOLOMON--Adam. We mourn the death of Adam Solomon, a brilliant and generous man. Matthew Greenfield and Molly Jong-Fast
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April 5, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

Seeing the Sights of Industrial China: 2 Factories, 2 Futures
BYLINE: By JOE NOCERA
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; TALKING BUSINESS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1606 words
DATELINE: SHANGHAI
''The RMB is killing me,'' groaned Jin Jue.

Mr. Jin, a hip-looking 35-year-old with spiky hair and an all-black ensemble, describes himself on his business card as the ''board chairman'' of the Shanghai Jinjue Fashion Company. It was my first full day in China, and Mr. Jin was showing me around his factory on the outskirts of town.

RMB, of course, is shorthand for renminbi, the Chinese currency, also known as the yuan, which, since the beginning of the year, has risen more than 4 percent against the declining dollar. Even as the Chinese economy has become increasingly powerful, the government has kept the yuan artificially low, much to the annoyance of the United States. Truth to tell, it is still not nearly as high as it would be if it were unmoored from government control. When the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., was in Beijing this week, he praised the recent rise of the yuan though -- as he invariably does when he's in China -- he called on Chinese officials to let their currency float freely.

This is my first trip to China and, like most Americans, I had an image of what a Chinese factory looked like. Mr. Jin's operation fit that image almost to a T. It was housed in a run-down building amid a sea of run-down buildings in the Kun Shan industrial zone, just northwest of Shanghai. Except for Mr. Jin's own office, it was really just one cavernous room, filled with rows of tables, on which stood old-fashioned sewing machines. There was a cafeteria with rickety wooden chairs and beaten-up tables where the workers ate their meals, and a sad-looking dormitory where they slept. Behind the building was a dirty-looking river. Debris littered its banks.

Mr. Jin's factory also makes the sort of thing you expect a Chinese factory to make: it churns out inexpensive clothing, aimed at the European market. Mr. Jin is the classic low-cost, tight-margin, squeeze-every-penny manufacturer, the kind of entrepreneur who has been the backbone of China's astounding economic rise -- and who has also been the primary beneficiary of the low yuan, which has spurred the market for China's cheap goods. On the day I visited, his work force was making tan jackets under the French brand Camaieu.

Except ... where were all the workers? I had expected the place to be teeming with people. Instead, only about a quarter of the room was in use; Mr. Jin later confirmed that 60 percent of his work force had either quit or been laid off. Business, clearly, was terrible, and Mr. Jin was losing money.

What the low yuan giveth, the rising yuan taketh away. As China's currency has risen, Mr. Jin's cheap clothes suddenly aren't so cheap anymore. And he had other problems as well. ''The business environment in Europe is bad,'' he said through a translator. Thanks to inflation in China -- up 8.7 percent in February alone -- his workers wanted more than the several hundred dollars or so a month he says he pays them. The tax rebates he received from the government were shrinking.

Recently, the government passed labor laws that included a series of protections for workers; that was also pushing up his costs. As a result, orders that had once come to him as a matter of course were now gravitating to Vietnam, Mexico and other countries that could undercut him on his only competitive advantage: cost. (I later heard that some Chinese garment manufacturers were putting a ''Made in Mexico'' tag on their goods and routing them through Mexico to take advantage of Nafta.)

Though he lacked a college education -- Mr. Jin had started in business right out of the army, he told me -- he had a pretty clear-eyed understanding of what was happening to him. Though factories like his had led the way in China's economic miracle, the government was not all that terribly interested anymore in having the country be the lowest-cost producer of every good imaginable. Factories that played that game sometimes produced toys that were tainted. And they didn't necessarily improve the quality of life of their workers. Ultimately, relying on cheap labor to build an economy was a sucker's game. ''If the government lets the RMB keep rising,'' Mr. Jin said, ''all these factories will go out of business.''

And so it may turn out. But though it may inflict some pain in the short term, over the long haul, it will almost surely be a good thing for the Chinese economy. And it won't be a lot of fun for the West to watch.

When you travel around China these days and listen to businessmen and analysts, there is a phrase you hear again and again. They all talk about ''moving up the value chain.'' By that they mean they want their businesses to gravitate toward more complex, higher-value goods -- the ones that bring in bigger profits, are less dependent on rock-bottom costs and are more immune to currency fluctuations.

Andrew Rothman, a China strategist with the investment firm CLSA, described it as ''a deliberate policy to push manufacturing up the value chain.''

''It is coming at the same time as rising raw material costs. What the Chinese government is saying is that, 'We don't want to be the world's workshop for junk. We want to make higher-value stuff that creates more wealth and better jobs.' ''

For instance, if you open up, say, an iPod, you'll find that many of the higher-value components are made in places outside of China--and then brought into the country to be assembled. And, of course, the biggest profit of all goes to the owner of the brand: Apple. The Chinese are no long content to simply assemble the components. They want to make them as well -- and own the brand.

In his own way, Mr. Jin understood that, too. On the flip side of his business card was the word ''Tousnosamis.'' It was, he told me, a fashion brand he had started recently; he had put out several lines of women's clothing that he was selling in the domestic market. Eventually, he said with a small, self-conscious laugh, he hoped it would become ''like Armani.'' At the least, it would allow him to be freed from the grinding pressure of being a low-cost manufacturer. ''Maybe in 10 years,'' he said. It was his dream -- and China's.

The next morning, I met someone who had already fulfilled the dream. His name is Li Xian Shou, and he is the founder and chief executive of a company called ReneSola, which makes the silicon wafers that are used in solar panels.

Mr. Li, 39, looks as uncool as Mr. Jin looks cool; his pink tie was slightly askew and the sleeves of his suit were so long they almost covered his hands. His company, however, is as cool as can be: In the fourth quarter of 2007, its revenue was up nearly 200 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006. Last year, it made $53 million, almost double its 2006 profit, and in January it raised $130 million in a stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The ReneSola factories were also on the outskirts of Shanghai, but that's where the similarities with Mr. Jin's factory ended. Mr. Li's company was expanding like crazy, taking over acre after acre of former farmland, and snapping up plants, dormitories and other facilities as fast as it could. As we toured through Mr. Li's plants, I was a little stunned to discover that some of the buildings were only six months old; the plaster was nicked and scarred, suggesting a lot of wear and tear. Like many Chinese businessmen, Mr. Li is moving so fast he doesn't have time to worry about whether the plaster on his walls is smooth.

Before giving me the tour, Mr. Li told me his story (again through a translator). A former government official, he had raised $1.5 million from four friends to start his company in 2001. (Government officials who go into business tend to have the crucial advantage of good connections.) At first, the company assembled solar panels; most of his customers were companies in Germany and Japan that made the wafers and then sold the panels once they were assembled. ''By 2003,'' he said, ''revenue was about $10 million.''

But assembling the panels was the lowest-cost, lowest-value part of the solar industry. ''It is a commodity business,'' he said. ''And it can attract a lot of competition.'' So in 2005, he decided to take the big leap. He got out of the solar panel business and into the more profitable solar wafer business.

Now instead of competing with other Chinese companies, he is competing with German and Japanese companies -- where his cost advantage is huge. His company has created a technology for using recycled wafers and other materials, which is helping him avert the shortage of polysilicon, the material from which the wafers are made. He employs 3,300 people, up from 20 in 2005, and pays his line operators upward of $500 a month. From a standing start three years ago, ReneSola is among the world's top five suppliers of solar wafers.

When I asked Mr. Li about the effect of the rising yuan, he gave me an indifferent shrug. Because his wafers are shipped to other Chinese companies -- the panel assemblers -- instead of exported, he can demand payment in yuan. His is a business that relies on complicated machinery at least as much as manual labor, so he can work toward productivity improvements. And because he is making a product with a much higher profit margin than a solar panel's, he can more easily absorb a currency hit. So far, he said, the money lost from the rise of the yuan was ''trivial.''

As we toured his plant, I couldn't help noticing that much of the machinery ReneSola uses to make wafers came from Germany. A rising yuan helps Mr. Li there, too.

As the Chinese say, Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Paulson.

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SUBJECT: CURRENCIES (90%); LABOR FORCE (89%); MANUFACTURING FACILITIES (89%); PUBLIC FINANCE AGENCIES & TREASURIES (77%); TREASURY DEPARTMENTS (75%); FASHION & APPAREL (72%)
COMPANY: FASHION CO PO (58%); CAMAIEU SA (52%); CNINSURE INC (93%)
TICKER: AMA (PAR) (52%); CISG (NASDAQ) (93%)
PERSON: HENRY PAULSON (56%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SHANGHAI, CHINA (94%); BEIJING, CHINA (79%) EAST CHINA (94%); NORTH CENTRAL CHINA (79%) CHINA (99%); UNITED STATES (92%); EUROPE (79%)
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April 4, 2008 Friday

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Museum and Gallery Listings
BYLINE: By THE NEW YORK TIMES
SECTION: Section ; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; Pg.
LENGTH: 4989 words
ART

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.

ASHLEY BICKERTON This artist's blisteringly vivid new works look as if they were collaboratively hallucinated by Joseph Conrad and Hunter S. Thompson during an all-night psychedelic drug binge.

In colorful digital photographs printed on canvas, partly overpainted and presented within wide, wooden frames elaborately decorated to resemble Indonesian tourist kitsch, Mr. Bickerton stars as a decadent Ugly American living in a South Pacific paradise. (He actually lives in Bali.) His skin is painted Blue Man Group blue, and he is accompanied by voluptuous female islanders whose partly nude bodies are painted in tropical hues. In various scenes he boozes, smokes pot and poses in a sarong in a garish family portrait with a native consort and two children. One especially lively piece, ''The Dream,'' right, has him howling in bed with a bright red demon squatting on his chest, and green snakes writhing about, each with a screaming head that's a small version of Mr. Bickerton's own.

These works meditate on a division in Western consciousness. On the one hand, they evoke the fantasy of throwing off conventional moral strictures and escaping to the margins of civilization, where pursuing one's instinctual desires to the fullest leads to artistic and erotic utopia (see: Paul Gauguin). On the other, there's anxiety that unchecked hedonism may be the road to moral insanity (see: Captain Kurtz).

That Mr. Bickerton makes this conflict personal is a big part of the attraction -- he's exploring his own Jungian shadow. Yet it feels as if there's a dimension missing. In portraying himself as a crazy, sexist, pleasure-loving creep, he might be covering up something really shameful: the intellectually astute, hard-working professionalism by which he maintains his perennially successful career in the high-end Euro-American art world. (Through May 3, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 540 West 26th Street, Chelsea, 212-255-2923, lehmannmaupin.com.) KEN JOHNSON

Museums

ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'DESIGNED FOR PLEASURE: THE WORLD OF EDO JAPAN IN PRINTS AND PAINTINGS, 1680-1860,' through May 4. Organized by the Japanese Art Society, this show anchors the ''floating world'' of ukiyo-e prints firmly in economic and social reality. It includes works by well-known artists, including Hokusai and Hiroshige, and emphasizes the entrepreneurial role of print publishers and the relationship between printmaking, painting and literature in the Edo period. Because the prints are sensitive to light, ''Designed for Pleasure'' will be shown in two installments. Of the 148 works in the exhibition, 95 are currently on view; about two-thirds of those will be rotated out on April 4. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, [phone], asiasociety.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: 'UTAGAWA: MASTERS OF THE JAPANESE PRINT, 1770-1900,' through June 15. This fascinating show tells the story of a group of artists that dominated the woodblock print business in Japan for much of the 19th century. Not everything in it is a masterpiece, but among its 95 prints are stunning portraits of actors, geishas and warriors; colorful retellings of old myths; views of contemporary urban life; and gorgeous, poetically captivating landscapes. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, [phone], brooklynmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)

COOPER-HEWITT NATIONAL DESIGN MUSEUM: 'ROCOCO: THE CONTINUING CURVE, 1730-2008,' through July 6. This enthralling show has an extraordinarily high sumptuousness quotient. It explores the 18th-century Rococo style and its legacy, with a focus on furniture, ceramic vases, jewelry, mirrors, snuff boxes and other sorts of domestic ware. It includes works from most of the countries that Rococo reached, from Germany to Guatemala; takes in 19th-century Rococo revivals; and pursues the spirit if not the actual style of Rococo into the 20th century and beyond. 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan, [phone], cooperhewitt.org. (Johnson)

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO: 'ART DOES NOT EQUAL LIFE: ACTIONS BY ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAS, 1960-2000,' through May 18. The redefinition of modernism(s) through the illumination of its Latin American manifestations has been one of the joys of the current New York art season. This revelatory addition concentrates on the Happenings, Conceptual and Performance Art and Body Art and video that thrived in Latin America despite, or in response to, dire political and economic situations. With photographic and video documentation in the majority, the toughness and scope of the material, aided by a thoughtful installation, create their own fascination. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, [phone], elmuseo.org. (Roberta Smith)

THE FRICK COLLECTION: 'PARMIGIANINO'S ''ANTEA'': A BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE,' through April 27. Exhibitions don't come any smaller than ''Parmigianino's 'Antea': A Beautiful Artifice.'' A painting, a wall text, a nugget of a scholarly catalog, and that's it. It's enough. Certain pictures, like certain performers, don't need troops of extras to make a large effect. Solo suits them. 1 East 70th Street, [phone], frick.org. (Holland Cotter)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: 'CAI GUO-QIANG: I WANT TO BELIEVE,' through May 28. This museumwide survey of a leading Chinese artist indicates considerable command of cross-cultural references and extreme appropriation, including a gang of sculptors remaking a classic Social Realist ensemble of life-size figures while you watch. Gunpowder is a favored material, violence a frequent motif. A stop-action installation of seemingly exploding cars hangs in the atrium space. Scores of arrows make pincushions of snarling tigers (stuffed), and there are carved-wood religious sculptures and an entire fishing boat. Videos documenting pyrotechnical land-art pieces go boom. The show has far more than its share of hollow spectacle. The scorched, mural-size gunpowder drawings that combine elements of performance art, Abstract Expressionism and traditional Chinese and Japanese painting are the most believable. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, [phone], guggenheim.org. (Smith)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: 'ARCHIVE FEVER: USES OF THE DOCUMENT IN CONTEMPORARY ART,' through May 4. You need no grounding in art theory to understand the messages generated by this powerful brain-pincher of a theme show. The archive of the title is less a thing or a place than a concept, an immersive environment: the sum total of documentary images, mostly photographic, circulating in the culture, on the street, in the media and finally in what is called the collective memory. From an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a black civil rights demonstrator attacked by police dogs, to a gallery wallpapered with the front pages of international newspapers reporting on the destruction of the twin towers, truth, untruth and their consequences make up the riveting story here. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, [phone], icp.org. (Cotter)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: 'THE COLLECTIONS OF BARBARA BLOOM,' through May 4. Instead of the walk-in installations for which Ms. Bloom is best known, this survey displays pieces from different phases of her career as discrete works of sculpture, assemblage, collage, photography and design. This is confusing, but attentive viewers will profit from studying her ideologically subversive, dryly humorous and formally inventive play with many different forms of representation, from faux-antique plaster self-portrait busts to a found-object sculpture in the form of a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (See above.) (Ken Johnson)

THE JEWISH MUSEUM: 'WARHOL'S JEWS: TEN PORTRAITS RECONSIDERED,' through Aug. 3. In 1980 Andy Warhol produced a series of portraits of famous Jews, including Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein and the Marx Brothers. When they appeared at the Jewish Museum that year, the critics hated them. But they were warmly received by Jewish audiences when they were exhibited in museums and Jewish institutions around the country. Viewing them in this return engagement, it is hard to imagine anyone growing very excited for or against such bland, posterlike images. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, [phone], thejewishmuseum.org. (Johnson)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'GUSTAVE COURBET,' through May 18. Starting with an amazing if claustrophobic gallery of self-portraits that emphasize Courbet's ambition, attention to the old masters and inborn truculence, this show offers a grand tour of one of 19th-century European painting's most unruly geniuses. Realism, at whose prow he is usually placed, is in many ways the least of it. Several works could easily date from the 20th century, by artists like Balthus, Picabia or Max Ernst. What Courbet made most real was the sheer, implicitly ironic uncanniness of painting itself, which he conveyed in a commanding discombobulation. Some paintings barely hold together; others collapse inward into strange, shapeless masses. No artist before Picasso put so much of himself on canvas; few since have built in so many spatial booby traps, ambiguous feelings or elements of rebellion and dissent. Some were conscious; others were left for us to discover, to feel in our bones. [phone], metmuseum.org. (Smith)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'JASPER JOHNS: GRAY,' through May 4. Since his paintings of targets and American flags took the art world by storm 50 years ago, Jasper Johns has been a cultural fact and the subject of numerous museum exhibitions. But this is one of the best. Moody, opulent and eloquent, it singles out his many paintings in gray, the color at the core of his sensibility, along with numerous sculptures, drawings and prints that are inherently gray. Together they chronicle his maturation from brilliant, methodical young artist to a deeper, more lyrical, less predictable one. And frankly, it is almost a relief to follow the incessant unfolding of this singular career without the brightly colored, better-known masterpieces. (See above.) (Smith)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'POUSSIN AND NATURE: ARCADIAN VISIONS,' through May 11. If a painter can be judged by the love he inspires, Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) was one of art history's great valentines. Corot, Delacroix, Constable and Cezanne all adored him. So did Picasso and Matisse. You can see why in this show of his post-Classical, pre-Romantic landscapes and drawings. Every age has a different style for ''serious'' in art; Poussin's was different from our own, but enthralling and moving in its moral gravity and poise. (See above.) (Cotter)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'SILVERSMITHS TO THE NATION: THOMAS FLETCHER AND SIDNEY GARDINER, 1808-1842,' through May 4. Blending neo-Classical kitsch, patriotic flair and superb craftsmanship, the Philadelphia silversmiths Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner pumped up the genre of the commemorative cup to works of awesome, small-scale monumentalism. Standing almost 30 inches from its hairy paw feet to the furrowed brow of a bellicose eagle mounted on the lid of its soup tureen bowl, an urn made in 1813 to honor Capt. Isaac Hull was at the time the heaviest, tallest and most complex work in silver ever produced in North America. It is still pretty impressive. (See above.) (Johnson)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'ART OF TIME: EUROPEAN CLOCKS AND WATCHES FROM THE COLLECTION,' through April 27. This enthralling, compact show presents about 90 European timepieces, ranging from pocket watches to grandfather clocks and dating from the 16th through the 18th centuries. There are traditional mantel clocks in wooden, peaked-roofed houses and extravagantly fanciful forms like one from 1579 that has a revolving globe engraved with star charts and figures of the zodiac held up on the wingtips of a flying horse, all beautifully fashioned in silver. (See above.) (Johnson)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'TIBETAN ARMS AND ARMOR FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION,' through fall 2009. The paradox of militant Buddhism inspired the Metropolitan's fascinating 2006 exhibition ''Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet.'' Now Donald LaRocca, the museum's arms and armor curator, has created a follow-up installation of 35 objects from the Met's collection (including 5 acquired in 2007). This time the focus is on defense rather than offense: examples of horse and body armor, dating from the 15th through the 20th centuries, outnumber swords, guns and spears. Most of these objects have seen more ceremonial than military action. All of them equate supreme craftsmanship with defense of the body and Buddhist principles. (See above.) (Rosenberg)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: 'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: IRVING PENN PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS,' through April 13. Last spring, in its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired 67 of Irving Penn's portraits of artists, writers and musicians. (Thirty-five were donated by Mr. Penn.) The entire group is temporarily on view in an exhibition that complements the library's collection of 20th-century drawings, manuscripts, books and musical scores. Organized by a guest curator, Peter Barberie, ''Close Encounters'' encompasses work from the 1940s, when Mr. Penn first started to work for Vogue, through portraits published in The New Yorker in 2006. Mr. Penn's subjects, including Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, emerged from their portrait sessions with their carefully shaped personas profoundly shaken. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, [phone], themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: 'MICHELANGELO, VASARI AND THEIR CONTEMPORARIES: DRAWINGS FROM THE UFFIZI,' through April 20. Michelangelo, with a couple of spectacular drawings, is the marquee name here, but many of the 16th-century Florentine artists he influenced fill the space, beginning with the extreme polymath Giorgio Vasari. A handful of drawings by Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino will knock your socks off, as will work by a few less familiar artists, all working to make the Medici rulers of Florence look good. (See above.) (Cotter)

MUSEUM OF ARTS & DESIGN: 'PRICKED: EXTREME EMBROIDERY,' through April 27. The second in a series of exhibitions (following last year's ''Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting''), ''Pricked'' makes another case for needlecraft without the ''craft.'' The show places widely known contemporary artists like Laura Owens and Ghada Amer alongside Elaine Reichek and others who have been working with thread and textiles since the '70s. In the best works historical and technical concerns overlap, just as they do in traditional embroidered samplers. 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, [phone], madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'COLOR CHART: REINVENTING COLOR, 1950 TO TODAY,' through May 12. Organized by Ann Temkin, a curator in the museum's department of painting and sculpture, color functions as a ready-made in ''Color Chart'' -- something to be bought or appropriated, rather than mixed on a palette. The show is a rejoinder to the notion of color as the province of formalists, and to the idea that Minimal and Conceptual art comes only in shades of black, white and gray. In the upper section of the lobby a floor created by the artist Jim Lambie surrounds concentric strips of brightly hued tape. In the galleries there are postwar classics by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Sherrie Levine. [phone], moma.org. (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'JAN DE COCK: DENKMAL 11, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 11 WEST 53 STREET, NEW YORK, 2008,' through April 14. The word denkmal translates from German as monument or memorial. In Dutch it is a mold for thought. Both definitions fit the work of Jan De Cock, a 31-year-old Belgian artist who appropriates and arranges photographs in what might be viewed as an open-ended yet ultimately conservative encyclopedia. Overflowing with references to modern art, experimental film, photography and architecture, the project pulls most of the museum into its orbit. It incorporates elements of De Stijl, Russian Constructivism and Kurt Schwitters's collage/studio Merzbau, among other things. It is also the starting point of a yearlong project called ''American Odyssey,'' for which Mr. De Cock will travel to various and document cultural landmarks around the country. (See above.) (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK: 'PICTURING NEW YORK: THE ART OF YVONNE JACQUETTE AND RUDY BURCKHARDT,' through April 13 (Burckhardt); through May 4 (Jacquette). This dual exhibition displays photographs by Burckhardt, who died at 85 in 1999, alongside paintings by Ms. Jacquette, his widow and 20 years his junior, who is still working. Burckhardt's black-and-white images approach the city from several angles, descending from rooftops to street level and even into the subways. Ms. Jacquette's works peer down into the canyons between high-rises. This pair of shows does not establish either artist as an unjustly overlooked talent, but it reveals the competing visions of the city behind a romantic and creative partnership. 1220 Fifth Avenue, at 103rd Street, [phone], mcny.org. (Rosenberg)

NEUE GALERIE: 'GUSTAV KLIMT: THE RONALD S. LAUDER AND SERGE SABARSKY COLLECTIONS,' through June 30. The first New York museum show devoted exclusively to this Viennese master is less a coherent Klimt exhibition than a Klimt-o-rama. The main draw is a veritable retrospective of the drawings, erotic and otherwise, and a smattering of paintings starring the new-in-town, gold-on-gold ''Adele Bloch-Bauer I.'' Also here: a photo mural of sections of Klimt's most famous painted mural, the ''Beethoven Frieze''; a period room; photographs and personal effects, including one of the artist's signature caftans; and piped-in music, all written in Vienna of course, and available for purchase on CD. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, [phone], neuegalerie.org. (Smith)

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES LIBRARY: 'MONUMENTAL FRANCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDOUARD BALDUS' AND SKETCHES ON GLASS: CLICHES-VERRE FROM THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,' through June 28. This pair of exhibitions focuses on the experimental period after the birth of photography (the 1850s through the 1870s). Film had not yet been invented, but glass-plate and paper negatives allowed artists to micromanage the camera's performance or to bypass it entirely. ''Monumental France: The Photographs of Edouard Baldus'' gathers 38 artisanal prints of French architectural landmarks. ''Sketches on Glass: Cliches-Verre From the New York Public Library'' presents prints made with hand-drawn glass plates on light-sensitive paper (no camera required). Together these shows reveal that artists in mid-19th-century France blurred the distinction between the photograph and the unique object. Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, [phone], nypl.org (Rosenberg)

NOGUCHI MUSEUM: 'DESIGN: ISAMU KENMOCHI AND ISAMU NOGUCHI,' through May 25. The Bamboo Basket Chair was the result of a brief collaboration in 1950 between the Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) and the Japanese industrial designer Isamu Kenmochi (1912-71). The chair was never manufactured, and the prototype was lost. The example here was recreated from photographs. Mostly, however, the chair provides an excuse to compare the design careers of Noguchi and Kenmochi and examine their roles in midcentury modern design, as well as the cultural relationship between Japan and the United States. Kenmochi's ''Japanese modern'' furniture is here, as well as a room devoted to Noguchi's most popular design achievement, the Akari light sculptures. 9-01 33rd Road, at Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens, [phone], noguchi.org. (Martha Schwendener)

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER: 'WACK! ART AND THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION,' through May 12. This big, messy, fascinating scrapbook of a show focuses on the years between the mid-1960s and the early '80s, when feminism had its most intense impact on contemporary art. Presenting works by 120 women, it is uneven in quality, but the overall effect is exciting. It takes you back to a heady time when women were throwing out old, patriarchal laws and reinventing art in all kinds of idiosyncratic and sometimes dangerously extreme terms. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, [phone], ps1.org. (Johnson)

SCANDINAVIA HOUSE: 'ARS FENNICA: FINNISH ART NOW,' through April 12. Finland has its own version of the Turner Prize in Britain: the $50,000 Ars Fennica Prize. This sleepy show presents works by 2007's four finalists. It includes gimmicky sculptures by Markus Kahre; fairy-tale-like images painted and drawn by Elina Merenmies; Anna Tuori's brushy, mock-kitsch paintings of vaguely Asian landscapes; and, by Elina Brotherus, large, bland landscape photographs and a relaxing video triptych of people skinny dipping in peaceful, outdoor waters. 58 Park Avenue between 37th and 38th streets, [phone], scandinaviahouse.org. (Johnson)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: 'WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008,' through June 1. This year's light-touch show takes lowered expectations -- lessness, ephemerality and failure, to use the words of its young curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin -- as its theme, and makes at least an appearance of trying to circumvent an object-obsessed market. With 81 artists, this is the smallest Biennial in a while, and feels that way, even as it fills three floors and more of the museum, and continues at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th Street), with a program of installation and performance art. If the overall mix feels uncharismatic, there are good artists on hand, most with work commissioned by the museum for the occasion. In an anti-triumphalist show, uncertainty, political and existential, rules. [phone], whitney.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Uptown

'FACES FROM MEDIEVAL JAPAN' Featured in religious rituals and then retired to temples where they continued to ward off evil, these rare 14th-through-17th-century carved wood masks depict demons, monkeys and, in one case, an old man in expressions that range from subtle to grotesque. They are displayed with a large Muromachi-period mandala depicting the Nachi shrine and its famous waterfall that should also not be missed. Koichi Yanagi Fine Arts, 17 East 71 Street, [phone], through April 15. (Smith)

'WINE, WORSHIP AND SACRIFICE: THE GOLDEN GRAVES OF ANCIENT VANI' In small but elegant new galleries, a study center founded in 2006 under the auspices of New York University presents its inaugural exhibition. This show offers more than 100 objects unearthed from ancient graves in Vani, a cosmopolitan city established in Colchis -- modern-day Georgia -- in the eighth century B.C. It includes beautiful, intricate gold jewelry discovered in grave sites of the rich and powerful; the life-size bronze torso of a youth made in classic Hellenistic style; and two strikingly exotic bronze lamps with functional parts in the form of elephant heads. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th Street, [phone], nyu.edu/isaw, through June 1. (Johnson)

Galleries: Chelsea

JEAN ROYeRE Organized by two Parisian galleries, Patrick Seguin and Jacques Lacoste, this exhibition provides New Yorkers with a rare in-depth look at the work of Jean Royere (1902-1981). It includes 100 objects presented in plausible if free-flowing domestic arrangements designed by India Mahdavi and demonstrates the timeless appeal of this French master's fusion of Art Deco streamlining with the organic forms of the 1950s. Royere excelled at lighting design, and when it came to seating, he made round, low and even squat look great. Some of his chairs suggest a time and place when people tended to be shorter and thinner than in the here and now. Sonnabend Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, [phone], through April 12. (Smith)

Galleries: Other

'UNDER PAIN OF DEATH' This uneven show about capital punishment has too many pieces that are only indirectly related to the theme, but it has some thought-provoking works, including ''The Last Supper,'' an Errol Morris-style documentary film by Mats Bigert and Lars Bergstrom, about preparing final meals for condemned prisoners; and an understated, oddly abstracted video by Harun Farocki in which surveillance tapes reveal murderous conditions in a maximum-security prison. Austrian Cultural Form, 11 East 52nd Street, [phone], acfny.org, through May 10. (Johnson)

Out of Town

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM : 'COLOR AS FIELD: AMERICAN PAINTING, 1950-1975,' through May 26. An overdue, if far from perfect, reconsideration of Color Field painting reintroduces the joyful pictorial derring-do of an art movement partly done in by the single-minded advocacy of its biggest fan, the great American art critic Clement Greenberg. It is wonderful to see some of the best of this work float free of the Greenbergian claims for greatness and inevitability, propelled by the fantastic soft power of brilliant color, big scale and judicious amounts of pristine raw canvas -- especially as wielded by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Perhaps humorless power-lust prevented Greenberg from seeing that if, as he said, Abstract Expressionism was Baroque, then Color Field might be Rococo: beautiful, sometimes frivolous and even comedic. Eighth Street and F Street, NW, Washington, [phone], americanart.si.edu. (Smith)

Last Chance

'DIEBENKORN IN NEW MEXICO' In graduate school in Albuquerque at the beginning of the 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn put his own spin on the drawing-painting fusion of Willem de Kooning's black-and-white paintings, interjecting an elegant, waggish sense of line borrowed from George Herriman's Krazy Kat cartoons, along with brushy, glowing layers of color. He would later go on to make grander, more complex works, but in many ways his painting was never freer, less predictable or more full of the future than in New Mexico. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, at Waverly Place, Greenwich Village, [phone], nyu.edu/greyart; closes on Saturday. (Smith)

'EARLY IMAGES OF THE FLOATING WORLD: JAPANESE PAINTINGS, PRINTS AND ILLUSTRATED BOOKS, 1660-1720' This exhibition examines the origins of ukiyo-e, or pictures of the Floating World, focusing on guidebooks to the Yoshiwara pleasure district and on shunga -- prints from erotic albums in which bare skin and rich kimono patterns contrast to sensuous effect. The colors, all applied by hand, are out of this world. Sebastian Izzard Asian Art, 17 East 76th Street, [phone]; closes on Saturday. (Smith)

HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA: 'FRANCIS AL$(YUML$)S FABIOLA' The first of three collaborations between the Dia Foundation for the Arts and the Hispanic Society of America is an astutely site-specific display of 300 Fabiola paintings collected by the artist Francis Als, who is based in Mexico. Made by devout amateurs worldwide, all are based on a lost original from 1885 and show Fabiola, the fourth-century saint, in profile, wearing a vibrant red veil. Mr. Als's 300 examples pepper dark-wood-paneled galleries with smoldering color and are consistent with the collaborative, subversive and open-ended nature of his art. North Building Galleries on Audubon Terrace, Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, Washington Heights, [phone], diaart.org; closes on Sunday. (Smith)

JIM HODGES The mercurial Mr. Hodges has produced a pair of walk-in installations that together create an impressive duality of divine light and infernal darkness. One is a circular enclosure of white canvases adorned with patterns and semi-abstract imagery made of gold leaf. The other is a small, wooden room in which a screen of radiating steel spokes frames a circular view into an impenetrable void. CRG Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, [phone], crggallery.com; closes on Wednesday. (Johnson)

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART: 'NOTATIONS/WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: TAPESTRIES' This uneven show of not-so-lively collages, sculptures and prints, and 11 large and much livelier tapestries based on the collages, confirms that the work of this South African artist is best in translation, filtered through a second process. In this case it is the craft of expert weavers; the degree to which their increase in scale, texture, intricacy and color improves on the collages is more than striking. The subject here is displacement, refugeeism and survival, conveyed by the imposing silhouettes of ''Porters'' that either carry or oddly merge with objects while seeming to move across 19th-century maps of Europe and other continents. The style is a kind of send-up of Baroque art, but the images point metaphorically and painfully toward the future. Benjamin Franklin Parkway, at 26th Street, [phone], philamuseum.org; closes on Sunday. (Smith)

MARK SCHUBERT: '55 GALLON' The trickle-down effect of Lynda Benglis's early foam pour pieces and installations -- which she cast in heavy metals several years later -- is felt in this show of painterly, improvisational, no-nonsense sculpture. On the floor two aggregates of large foam spheres in shades of black, gray and white suggest scoops of melting ice cream consuming plastic lawn furniture and other junk. Meanwhile, in ''Rapture,'' foam and paint fasten scores of misshapen beer cans directly to the wall, creating a crazy quasi-painting that puns on Lyrical Abstraction (remember that?) and has a startling dermatological aspect, like stubble. Monya Rowe Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Chelsea, [phone], monyarowegallery.com; closes on Saturday. (Smith)