•The Met is also showing a dream team of Old Master photographers: 13 early practitioners who invented and perfected the medium. Beginning with the first photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, and Gustave Le Gray, with about a dozen outstanding prints by each, the exhibition showcases later portrait photographers such as Nadar, Édouard Baldus, and Julia Margaret Cameron, up to modernist, midcentury masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray. You see each photographer's eye for composition as the art form develops from embryo to maturity.
•The Jewish Museum presents a group of painters who shifted the hub of avant-garde art from Paris to New York in the middle of the last century. "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976" (through Sept. 21) highlights the inventors of Abstract Expressionism. All the big names of this golden age of experimentation are here: after Pollock and de Kooning come giants of the New York School such as Rothko, Gorky, and Hans Hofmann. Innovation was king; abstraction reigned supreme. Two critics who explained this radical art to the public are enshrined as its godfathers: Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
