New York Museum Shows Off the Beaten Path

NEW YORK—Since pickings can be slim in the commercial galleries around the holidays, for the next couple of weeks, we’re going to break from our usual Weekend Picks format and suggest non-gallery shows. Our aim is to diverge from the beaten path: The most contemporary recommendation is from an illustrator who died in 2003, the most interdisciplinary is a concert of medieval music at the Cloisters, and there’s even a historical design show. Here are five worthy New York contenders aside from the overrun blockbuster fare (you certainly don’t need us to point the way to those).

1. From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig, at the Jewish Museum through March 16

This is the only show we’re recommending where there’s a risk of being overrun by children, especially since the Jewish Museum put the name Shrek in the title of the show. Not unsurprisingly, Steig’s original ogre is more complex than his cutesy animated namesake, and far nearer in tone to the real interest in this exhibition: Steig’s New Yorker cartoons, drawings, and covers, which obviously were not intended for children. Steig is still the New Yorker’s most prolific illustrator, with more than 1,600 drawings and 120 covers published over a period of 73 years, and this centennial celebration serves him extremely well.

2. Apocalypse Then: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan, at the Morgan Library and Museum, ongoing

Everything about this show, other than its rather silly title, is perfect. The Morgan Library and Museum has temporarily taken apart their exquisite Las Huelgas manuscript of the Apocalypse—one of the latest known examples in the Spanish tradition of illustrated commentary on the Biblical book, it dates from 1220—in order to make a facsimile of it, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a wide selection of its individual pages before they’re put back together. The facsimile is also on display (which will presumably ease crowding) along with a whole bunch of other medieval illustrations of the Apocalypse. Mystery, horror, terror, the divine, and the visionary—all without leaving Midtown. Very highly recommended.

3. Early Gothic Hall, The Cloisters

When was the last time you took the A train up to Fort Tryon Park? We’ll bet a lot has changed since then—most recently the Early Gothic Hall, which reopened after a complete refurbishment last year. It’s crammed with treasures from across Gothic Europe, and it really is special. And if you get a clear, crisp, snow-covered day for your trip, the entire world will seem a wonderful place. Get up there at 1 or 3 on Friday and you’ll get the bonus of a performance of Medieval and Renaissance music by the band Piffaro, or go Saturday at noon and hear a gallery talk on “Angels: Medieval Messengers, Mediators, and Musicians.”

4. Piranesi as Designer, at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through January 20, 2008

Drop by the Cooper Hewitt this weekend and you’ll find yourself transported into an utterly different and unexpected world. We’d always thought of Piranesi as the virtuoso etcher of those terrifying, fantasized prisons, but revealed here is another, rather surprising side to his story—his work as a hugely successful and influential architect and designer. There are exquisite drawings and prints here, as well as some objects of jaw-dropping beauty, in particular the pier table, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. One or two of the arguments for Piranesi’s contemporary influence seem a bit far-fetched, but they don’t detract from the sophistication of the work on display.

5. Bon: The Magic Word: The Indigenous Religion of Tibet, at the Rubin Museum through April 14, 2008

The Rubin Museum is still relatively new, having opened in late 2004, but if you have a taste for the religions and art of central Asia, and particularly of the Himalayas, then you will already know its unique program. This gorgeous show is esoteric even by the Rubin’s standards: Bon is the set of religious and cultural beliefs that existed in Tibet before the arrival of Buddhism in the seventh century—and still does. It is pantheistic in character, and it’s art was, inevitably, heavily influenced by Buddhism, but this show reveals the extent of influence in the opposite direction, and documents Bon’s remarkable vitality today. Plus, the fourth and fifth floors of the Rubin will be among the most peaceful places you’ll find in Manhattan this weekend.