The Errant Æsthete

Out of Bloomberg, welcome news on the New York art scene. Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York these days may hardly recognize the place. The deadly second-floor atrium, where a stunted bronze obelisk by Barnett Newman has unhappily held court since the building’s 2004 opening, has suddenly come alive with the soaring, monumental and poignant wood sculptures of Martin Puryear. Puryear, 66, is the subject of a lyrical new, 47-piece retrospective that is as unpretentious and plain as the Washington, D.C.-based artist himself.

The show couldn’t be more welcome. (And the Newman is now behind a tree in the sculpture garden.)

As the anti-Richard Serra, Puryear works with a variety of natural woods that he carves, weaves, molds and assembles by hand into large, elegant and accessible structures suggestive of waterfowl, drinking flasks, boats, shelters, farm implements and tribal reliquaries — partly the result of Puryear’s wide travels.

“Ladder for Booker T. Washington” (1996), a crooked, 36- foot-long stairway to nowhere, begins a few feet above the atrium floor and narrows to a vanishing point near the ceiling from which it is suspended.

Working with young saplings and sawed planks as well as tar and such found objects as wagon wheels and an African mask, Puryear adds both a cultural and a psychological edge to minimal, bulbous or hard-edged geometric forms.

What’s more, Puryear’s cedars, pines, cypress and ash are so fragrant that they give his show a wonderful aroma.

“Confessional” (1998-2000), a wire mesh, wood and tar construction in the shape of a sweatshirt hood, has a closed door where a face might be, at once familiar and unknowable.

To stroll through this veritable village of expressive structures, thematically arrayed along the floor as well as on the walls, is to see all and yet have much to discover — surely the optimum experience of any art.

Hirst’s Shark

A completely different sculptural experience awaits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde- preserved tiger shark has gone on display for a three-year term (loaned by SAC Capital’s Steven A. Cohen, its owner).

For all its notoriety, the recently rebuilt 1991 work, titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” is as startling a confrontation with mortality as one is likely to find this side of Hades. Floating in a glass tank whose blue-green liquid turns fluorescent in daylight, it doesn’t actually look very real, but as a victim of human curiosity it elicits both sympathy and repugnance.

Ghiberti’s Doors

No such ambiguity attends “The Gates of Paradise,” an exhibition showcasing three of the 10 gilded bronze panels that Lorenzo Ghiberti made for the baptistery doors in Renaissance Florence. After a 25-year period of restoration, they are traveling for the one and only time, ever, before being permanently installed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

At the Met, it is possible to study the magnificent details of these biblical reliefs more closely than it ever was when pollution and thick crowds of tourists made viewing difficult. Most surprising is the oddly minimal Jacob and Esau panel: its cinematic narrative is really quite modern.

“Martin Puryear” continues at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 14, 2008, and later travels to museums in Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. CIT is the show’s corporate sponsor at MoMA. Further information: +1-212-708-9400; http://www.moma.org/martinpuryear .

“The Gates of Pardise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece,” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan. 13, 2008, while Damien Hirst’s shark is on loan through 2010. Further information: +1-212-535-7710; http://www.metmuseum.org .