TEFAF New York, the European Fine Art Foundation fair, is not short on artworks to keep a visitor’s attention. But just outside the walls of the Park Avenue Armory, the site again of this year’s event, lie many more options for viewing and buying art at the nearby galleries on the Upper East Side.
Four current exhibitions in particular make a perfect walking tour on the way to the fair or after attending it, and they are all within a 10-minute walk of the armory, and each other. On a nice spring day, strolling these blocks is an extra source of pleasure.
The shows spotlight artists who exemplified and investigated the complicated currents of the 20th century’s art movements, particularly Modernism.
The fact that three of the four shows take place in townhouses or mansions adds a little frisson: The domestic settings allow you to imagine being the owner of the works, casually hanging your acquisitions on the walls at home.
Rosenberg & Co., 19 East 66th Street
Françoise Gilot, who died last year at 101, first became renowned for her 1964 memoir “Life with Picasso,” which chronicled her decade-long affair with the older artist; a famous 1948 Robert Capa photograph of Picasso holding a beach umbrella over her as they walked on the sand added to the legend. She went on to write many other books and to marry the creator of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk.
Gilot was a lifelong artist herself, as seen in the 36 varied works on view through July 3, the first posthumous exhibition of her work in New York. Picasso appears in the graphite and pencil drawing “Pablo with Red Background (Les yeux basilic)” (1944), and his influence comes through in the works — but he held sway over many artists.
The dealer Marianne Rosenberg, who organized the show with several collaborators, explicitly set out to show Gilot’s range. “I hate that she’s only associated with Picasso,” said Rosenberg, who knew Gilot through family ties; her grandfather was Paul Rosenberg, who helped create a market for Picasso’s work and was a powerful art dealer of the early 20th century.
The works on view include a charmingly simple ink portrait, “Paul Éluard” (1951), depicting the French poet, as well as a 1958 oil still life, “Sunflowers.” As her work evolved, Gilot increasingly began to explore abstraction, culminating in works like the painting “August Stillness” (1997), which features large areas of red, a color she frequently favored.
David Zwirner, 34 East 69th Street
The name Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900-95) will not resonate with most casual art lovers, but the Brazilian painter is a favorite of the influential dealer David Zwirner, which means that attention will be paid.
The gallery first showed Lorenzato’s work in 2019 in London, and now this show features 25 works in what is only the second U.S. exhibition of his art. Notably, a work by Lorzenzato is included in the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, perhaps the world’s premier art event, which opened last month.
Lorenzato, born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, painted recognizable scenes — largely landscapes — but pared his subjects down to geometric forms. He cited Cézanne as a major influence. In “Nuvem de Gafanhotos (Cloud of Crickets),” the titular insects become simple plus signs, and several of the works depict a sun as a red ball.
The works, on view through May 25, are modestly scaled, and they look at home on the walls of the 1910 townhouse that became a branch of the gallery in 2017. Up close, you can see Lorenzato’s technique: After brushing on paint, he would make crosshatch patterns with a comb, a stick or a fork, giving the works a texture that almost seems to vibrate.
Zwirner praised the “disarming and captivating” effect of Lorenzato’s work. “I bought a couple of his paintings myself,” he said. “We love looking at them every day.”
Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street
A male artist who creates work by having nude female models drag each other through paint on a canvas lying on the floor, all while surrounded by onlookers, might not go over well in 2024. But around 1960 it was considered peak avant-garde.
Yves Klein (1928-62) used that unconventional technique — he called it employing “human paintbrushes” — for his “Anthropométries” series. In his “Fire Paintings,” he made art with a huge flamethrower, torching a canvas that, moments before, had a water-soaked nude model on top of it, so that the resulting scorching would retain a bodily outline in the wet areas. Examples of both series are on view in “Yves Klein and the Tangible World,” a show of around 30 works on view in the gallery’s sprawling mansion through May 25.
“This show was 10 years in the making,” said the dealer Dominique Lévy, who has long represented the Klein estate. “Usually, shows of his work focus on his ethereality, like the ‘Monochromes’” — Klein’s single-color canvases — “but his show is anchored in the materiality and the tangible.” She added, “Right now, we need a show with beauty, harmony and aliveness.”
Klein got a patent in France for the process used to create the color he called International Klein Blue, and he was associated with it during his short, acclaimed career.
So there is plenty of blue on display in this show, both in the works on the walls — including “Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 77)” circa 1961 — and in a “pool” of color on the floor, a reinstallation of a 1957 work called “Pure Pigment,” at the bottom of the mansion’s grand staircase.
Di Donna Galleries, 744 Madison Avenue
The Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee (1879-40) drew and painted compositionally sophisticated scenes, sometimes with a childlike whimsical quality, while the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) pioneered three-dimensional work, particularly the kinetic sculptures he called “mobiles” and his large, standing “stabiles.”
The combination of two beloved artists is a surefire crowd-pleaser, but “Enchanted Reverie: Klee and Calder” is also noteworthy for its installation, with dark gray walls and elaborate lighting that enliven the art and cast dramatic shadows. Featuring more than 40 works, it is on view through June 8.
The dealer Emmanuel Di Donna wanted to draw out the connections between the two artists, who both had a talent for concision as well as a playful side. “They had a shared sensitivity,” Di Donna said. “They’re both looking for something beyond nature — all the way to the cosmos.” He added, “They rhyme.”
The show features loans from both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Originally it was going to have an explicit underwater garden theme, but then Di Donna expanded it to include other works. Traces of that idea remain, with both artists depicting fish as only they could.
In one of Klee’s aquatic-themed works, the watercolor “Fische in der Tiefe (Fish in the Deep)” (1921), multiple fish eyes look out at the viewer. Calder returned to the fish form again and again throughout his career, including in the red mobile “Le Poisson de huit heures” (1965), made of sheet metal and wire.
As he prepared for the show to open in April, Di Donna gently blew on “Poisson” and it performed on cue, doing a delicately turning dance in response — a perfect bit of inspiration for art lovers who want to get in the swim of things this spring.
