See This Art: Jerry Saltz’s Walking Tours of New York Galleries and Museums

Margaret Lee, closer to right than wrong/closer to wrong than right (2014)

Jack Hanley Gallery, 327 Broome Street

Lee—who is also a partner in another great gallery, 47 Canal—is a hell of a complicated and funny photographer. Adept at camouflage painting, sculpture, and photography, here she turns art into a pup. While you’re there, ask Hanley how he almost got me arrested once.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Untitled (2013)

White Columns, 320 West 13th Street

How fantastic is it that one of New York’s vanguard spaces regularly features the work of fabulous so-called outsiders, like the ceramic face thingies that I so want by the incredible octogenarian Magdalena Suarez Frimkess.

Ferran Adrià, Plating Diagram (2000–4)

The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street

Adrià, often called the greatest chef alive, is also a good artist. His diagrams and drawings look a lot like whatever it was that I tasted when I was ravished once in his restaurant El Bulli. Delectable.

Katherine Bernhardt, Hamburgers, French Fries, and Basketballs (2013)

Canada, 333 Broome Street

One of the most out-there, loose painters working right now. The show is packed with large-scale forays into still life via depictions of Americana. The color is brash enough to make you clap—or run.

Brian Belott, Phone (2013)

Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street

A good group show of the graphic masters; don’t miss the drawing-force-of-nature Brian Belott, who has never seen a surface or wall he doesn’t want to aesthetically assault.

Rachel Mason, Doll Audience (2014)

Envoy Enterprises, 87 Rivington Street

Once I saw this gremlin’s 2004 sculpture of herself kissing George W. Bush, I understood that she had a chance to wreak havoc. Here she’s back doing some sort of mad voodoo with mirrored dolls of female artists.

Michelle Segre, Self-Reflexive Narcissistic Supernova (2013)

Derek Eller, 615 West 27th Street

Often overlooked in the rush to whatever’s next in good gunky sculpture, Segre combines geometry, nature, weaving, and whatever else artists do with their rat-piles of material. This one looks like a nightmare catcher.

David Altmejd, The Flux and the Puddle (2014)

Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street

Room-filling sculptural vivisection of mythical beings, sexual encounters, insects from the id, and werewolfian creatures at a table; a great gaudy part-by-part congealing into a whole tour de force.

Richard Serra, 7 Plates, 6 Angles (2013)

Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street

Richard Serra, man-o’-steel, fashions a heavy-metal mountain range in a gallery that is our own personal Babylon, Niketown, and museum.

Iván Navarro, This Land Is Your Land (2014)

Madison Square Park, Broadway at 23rd Street

You people from warm climes who think we New Yorkers don’t go outside until spring: I give you this sculpture of hard-core light-emitting water-tower shapes. Who you callin’ soft?

William Bailey, Afternoon in Umbria IV (2012–13)

Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street

Who’s largely to blame for artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and their exaggerated realisms? The longtime Yale teacher William Bailey: Here, he’s going his own Balthus-meets-Cézanne-and-Courbet way on the grass. An argument-starter.

Julia Wachtel, A Dream of Symmetry (1988)

Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 545 West 20th Street

A forgotten ’80s artist who’s back with appropriations of cartoon figures and photographs that combine in funny-strange-sick-silly ways, becoming underground Hallmark cards.

Michel Majerus, Pornography Needs You (2001)

Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street

A much-needed survey of this Luxembourgian artist, killed in a 2002 plane crash, whose shaped, graphic canvases and use of text, collage, and installation predicted much of what was to come. This one’s a recruiting poster of desire.

Christopher Moss, Freedom Blowjob (2014)

Theodore:Art, 56 Bogart Street, Bushwick

Paintings covered with grit that have holes and protrusions that morph into faces. This one’s a mix between voodoo doll, paper-bag mask, and excavation site.

Jasper Johns, Flag (1954–55)

Two things you may never have noticed about this icon: It is a triptych—made on three panels placed together—and the words UNITED STATES curve over the shoulder of the bottom-left star. Go look again.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)

It’s an absolute masterpiece, always worth ogling, even though you’ll never get to really see it because of the hordes of tourists taking pictures and selfies with the poor thing. I wish we could build a museum for it, the Mona Lisa, and Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43)

This is where this great artist was heading when he died. A blueprint to thousands of past and future artists. One of the most generative works in this hemisphere. The title alone is an art-world madeleine.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1914–26)

All young art lovers need to park themselves in front of this masterpiece to trip out all day. In the old days, there was carpeting and kids would sprawl. I once met a girl there.

Donald Judd, Untitled (1989)

I know, it just looks like a big metal box. Think of it as a color chart, where everything is telling you about its scale, what it’s made of, and how color becomes a concrete thing even though we have no idea what it really is. Just like this tremendous thing.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

This is Picasso’s shot heard round the world. With everything that’s been written about it, I never noticed—until an artist named PE Sharpe pointed it out on my Facebook page— that these Spanish prostitutes have Brazilian waxes and no armpit hair. Clairvoyant!

Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape With a Footbridge (1652)

The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street

The Monuments Men may be meh, but this masterpiece—confiscated from Baron Louis von Rothschild by the Nazis and saved with thousands of other artworks, probably via a mine in the Alps—will make you glad that others loved art as much as you do.

Jonah and the Whale (ca. 1400)

Gallery 455

The Qur’an, like the Old Testament, relates the story of Jonah being saved from the belly of a whale by an angel of God. The bold colors, blocked composition, and monumental figures in this large Iranian painting may represent a lost tradition of painting.