Eager to surprise her new husband, Mrs. Pincus said, she sweet-talked a concierge at the hotel to tell her everything he could about Moore. She learned that the artist had tea delivered to his room early every morning. That night she slipped the concierge a note to go on Moore’s tea tray telling him what fans she and her husband were and asking him if they could possibly meet.

“The next morning the phone rang,” Mrs. Pincus went on. “David answered it and said, ‘It’s a man, and it’s for you.’ He wasn’t happy.” The caller was Moore, who invited the couple to breakfast.

For David Pincus, a clothing manufacturer, and his wife, that meeting — followed by countless visits to Moore’s home and studio in England — began a lifelong passion for artists and for collecting. Over a 50-year marriage the couple got to know many of the biggest talents of their day: Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Wall.

The couple also became involved with museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they served on boards, gave money and donated as well as loaned these institutions countless works of art.

Mr. Pincus died in December, and now Mrs. Pincus is selling a significant portion of her collection at Christie’s in New York on May 8 and 9, including seminal examples of paintings by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning: Abstract artists who are all the rage now. The collection is expected to bring a total of about $100 million.

Mrs. Pincus said the decision to hold an auction has been difficult. “Our foundation needs money,” she explained, referring to the Pincus Family Foundation, which supports various causes including pediatric AIDS initiatives, museums and hospitals.

Laura Paulson, a deputy chairwoman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, knew the couple for nearly 30 years. “They had a boundless appetite for art and would go all over the world buying from artists and from galleries,” she said. “David had an intuitive eye.”

Often their purchases reflected current events, Ms. Paulson explained. For example, in 1965, when the Institute of Contemporary Art organized Warhol’s first museum retrospective, the couple ended up buying his “Sixteen Jackies” (which they sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $15.7 million).

“Responding to the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the couple also bought eight Warhol paintings of electric chairs,” Ms. Paulson added. Over the years they sold or donated them to museums.

Top among the paintings up for sale is a 1961 Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which the Pincuses bought from the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1967. Measuring nearly 8 feet by 7 feet, the painting is unusually large and of vibrant orange and reds. It is estimated to sell for $35 million to $45 million.

There have not been many paintings by Pollock at auction recently, and Christie’s will be selling “No. 28,” from 1951, one of his combinations of drip and painting in shades of silvery gray with red, yellow and shots of blue and white. Its estimate is $20 million to $30 million.

The auction will also include Newman’s, “Onement V,” from 1952. The last of a series of five paintings, it is the only one that is not in an American museum. The canvas, of rich blues, is expected to bring $10 million to $15 million.

Christie’s will also be selling the Pincuses’ de Kooning paintings and sculptures. One of the paintings, “Untitled V,” from 1983, was included in the recent de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It is expected to bring $4 million to $6 million.

Asked why she thinks there is such a craze right now for abstract art, Mrs. Pincus paused and said: “I have no idea. When we started out, our friends said: ‘Are you crazy? Why are you putting that junk in your house?’ “

WORKS ON THE WATERFRONT IN BROOKLYN

A series of rectangular modules fashioned from galvanized steel, acrylic, Douglas fir, glass and plastic currently sits in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its Biennial. The work of Oscar Tuazon, born in the United States and based in Paris, “For Hire,” as the installation is called, is not just a visual environment; it has its practical uses too. On May 20 it will move to the Whitney’s fourth floor, where it will function as a runway for a fashion show by K8 Hardy, founder of the feminist art collective LTTR.

For his next act Mr. Tuazon is creating three site-specific sculptures for Pier 1 at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. On view from July 19 through April 26, the works will incorporate local trees, and like the sculpture at the Whitney they will be functional as well as interactive. (One will serve as a passageway along the pier.)

Having site-specific installations is a first for the park, for Mr. Tuazon and for the Public Art Fund, which has organized the project.

“We know that Brooklyn is an incubator for young artistic talent, so this is especially appropriate,” said Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund. “Michael Van Valkenburgh’s vision for Brooklyn Bridge Park has created one of the most extraordinary new landscapes in the middle of New York City, and now, for the first time, one of our most exciting emerging artists has the chance to respond to it.”

Mr. Tuazon’s installation is just one of many projects on the Public Art Fund’s spring and summer schedule. Perhaps the most unusual will occupy the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, on Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, from June 20 to Aug. 26. A twin-engine airplane rotating on its own axis, called “How I Roll,” is the first public art project in America for the Italian artist Paola Pivi. “It will be one of those projects that stops people in their tracks,” Mr. Baume said.

22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Through April 30

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village

Through April 21

Do you dream of anonymous sex with random strangers but fear actual physical contact? You are in luck. Sign on to any number of Web sites and you can fulfill your fantasies remotely with real, live others via the miracle of Skype.

Frances Stark, an assistant professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been indulging in this activity over the past few years and has distilled her experiences into visually chaste and verbally promiscuous videos. Her magnum opus, at PS1, is “My Best Thing,” a 99-minute film that she made for, and presented at, the 2011 Venice Biennale. What you mainly see are two digitally animated, childlike figures resembling dolls made from Lego blocks — a female who speaks in computer-generated standard English, and one or the other of two males, who each speak in heavily Italian-accented, grammatically uncertain English — isolated on green-screen backgrounds. (To create these animations, Ms. Stark used free software available from Xtranormal.com.)

Intermittent episodes of simultaneous masturbation are represented by expressions like “mmmm” and “omg!” Mostly, the characters talk about art, film, literature, language and philosophy, and about Ms. Stark’s plan to make an artwork out of these interactions for the Venice Biennale. Improbably, there unfolds a genuinely affecting story about the vagaries of emotional connection and the difficulties of making art and being an artist.

At Gavin Brown, more of this dialogue is video-projected in two rooms as lines of text accompanied by music. These shorter pieces feel like outtakes from “My Best Thing,” which is, against all odds, some kind of masterpiece.

534 West 26th Street, Chelsea

Through April 14

In her latest series, “High School Football,” the photographer Catherine Opie doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with this all-American, über-masculine subject. Her images run the gamut from action shots to sentimental “Friday Night Lights”-style views of the field and bleachers to landscapes in which the game seems incidental.

There are portraits of warrior-faced young men in their team uniforms, too, which turn out to be a pretty effective defense against emotional candor.

Her “Football Landscapes,” taken all over the country, showcase different climates and conditions, with the sport as a reassuring constant. In a shot from Waianae, Hawaii, the players are upstaged by a spectacular mountain view. A game in Poway, Calif., takes place in the pouring rain. An image from Twentynine Palms, Calif., goes further, with a desert background that reminds us of the nearby Marine Corps training base and reinforces some of the series’s latent associations between football and the military.

Among the portraits, few subjects give Ms. Opie room to play with gender. One exception is “Stephen,” who wears a sneer and a cropped Superman muscle T-shirt and holds his helmet at jockstrap level. Another is “Conor,” who cradles the ball as if it were an infant.

Ms. Opie’s stated subject isn’t the actual game so much as the feeling of community it engenders among athletes and fans. (“High School Football” is very much in the mold of her earlier series, “Surfers,” which also vacillated between portraits and groups of figures in the landscape.)

But she doesn’t tell us very much about this particular group: its fears of debilitating head injuries, its hazing problems, its life-changing athletic scholarships. And though her distanced approach allows her to avoid some of the clichés of sports photography, you can’t help wanting her to enter the scrum.

“Good lord,” said Pat, a New York friend, eyeing the eager faces, the stilettos, the sheer force field of energy. “Is anybody here over the age of 18?”

“I got a very good price on it,” I said.

We walked to a nearby bar in another hotel. There, the median age doubled, the lights didn’t throb, and screaming to be heard was optional, not mandatory. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel like my own mother.

Well, maybe you get a little self-conscious and defensive about aging when you’re in a hotel lobby crowd younger than your own children (who are grown, but still). Or maybe I was just in a chronological-spiral frame of mind after seeing the new play “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From a Midlife Crisis,” at Cap 21 Theater Company in Chelsea.

Based on the memoir of the same title by Amy Ferris, the play features three menopausal women with insomnia. They’re scouring the Internet for news of old boyfriends, researching dire diseases they’re sure they’re dying of, sweating out their latest hormonal surges, cleaning their closets. You know, what you usually do at 3 a.m. when you’re middle-aged, haggard and homebound in your torn bathrobe — and not young, fresh-faced, dressed to dazzle and in search of a New York party. The play’s three unnamed women speak of their demons and fears. They swap stories of recent weight gains and parents’ deaths, the disappearance of a waistline and the lingering of a mother who’s losing her mind to dementia. They drink wine, they loudly regret quitting cigarettes, and they dance and they sing.

All the above happened to her during her plunge into menopause, Ms. Ferris, a first-time playwright (who adapted the memoir with her husband, Ken Ferris, and Krista Lyons), said when we met at the nearby Tipsy Parson restaurant. (She is, I should add, happily married and does not personally know George Clooney, at least not yet.)

Ms. Ferris’s memoir, which is freewheeling, poignant, funny and cranky, ends in an epilogue recounting her last hours with her dying mother. As she tries to comfort her mother, her own mind is overwhelmed with images and memories from both their lives. In many ways, these final scenes in the book are more powerful than the staged versions. Or maybe, when you’re a reader, your mind is freed to imagine, and the dying mother — with her lifetime of rage and unhappiness — becomes your own.

“When I do book readings,” Ms. Ferris said, “it almost always ends up like a therapy group, with all the women in the audience talking about their mothers.”

Well, of course they do. Sure, middle-aged women talk about aging and wrinkles and menopause and how we’re not young any longer. But sometimes I think that’s only a passing phase, as we plummet into a new time in our lives and learn to adjust.

But our mothers! Do we ever outgrow talking about our mothers — apologizing to them, confronting them, reproaching them, grieving for their lives — no matter how long they have been dead?

Ms. Ferris’s mother wanted to be an artist. Instead she had children she loved but deeply resented. Ms. Ferris, with her own career as a screenwriter, author and now playwright, often feels she is leading the life her mother wanted for herself.

I was still thinking about mothers and their middle-aged daughters when I met my friend Nancy at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs. We wandered through the rooms marveling at the artist’s diversity, her intensity, the detail in her work, both subtle and lavish.

“Do you think,” I asked Nancy, “when Cindy was just beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, that her mother started saying, ‘Enough with photographing yourself, Cindy! What’s wrong with a nice landscape now and then?’ ”

Before I left town, I went shopping at Vince in Chelsea. Like the women at the Downtown Dream, every other woman I’d seen in New York, it seemed, had been wedged into skinny jeans and boots. The boots I could skip, but the jeans were a definite possibility.

I squeezed myself into a pair and went to peer into a store mirror. Both the young man and the young woman who worked there told me the jeans looked great. I said that, unfortunately, I couldn’t breathe or sit down. In fact, I felt I lacked the commitment to wear skinny jeans and, presumably, expire while looking great.

The experience made me sympathetic to all the young women I saw wearing skinny jeans after that. It isn’t only middle-aged women who suffer in this life, I told myself.

Maybe you had to get to middle age to realize your mother was right: you should never buy clothes you aren’t comfortable in.

Ruth Pennebaker’s latest novel is “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough.” She blogs at geezersisters.com.

 

PARIS — When London’s National Gallery mounted its blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition late last year, advance tickets sold out the first week, online scalpers pocketed up to $400 per ticket and crowds lined up around the block at dawn for the paltry number of tickets still for sale.

Now it may be Paris’s turn. On Thursday, the Louvre unveils a newly restored Leonardo masterpiece, “The Virgin and Child With St. Anne,” the centerpiece of a major exhibition running through June 25 of more than 130 works exploring the painting’s genesis, execution and legacy, as well as the cult of St. Anne in the late 15th century.

The new “St. Anne” dazzles with color and light. Gone is the heavy veil of yellow-brown and most of the dark stains left by aging varnish. New details have emerged: a rocky pool of water bathing the subjects’ feet; crisp lines in the imaginary landscape in pale blues; the right leg of the infant Jesus; the lamb’s tail and draping on the dresses that clearly show that Leonardo had not finished it when he died in 1519.

“It is a true resurrection of the ‘St. Anne,’” Vincent Delieuvin, the exhibition’s curator, said. “The painting has recovered a depth and a relief almost like sculpture, with an intense palette of lapis lazuli blue, lacquer red, grays and vibrant browns.”

Among the other works in “St. Anne: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ultimate Masterpiece,” as the exhibition is called, are preparatory studies by Leonardo; earlier versions of the work by his workshop; and other works influenced by it, the most important by Raphael and Michelangelo; a black-and-white study of the head of the Virgin lent by the Metropolitan Museum that resembles a photograph; and 22 Leonardo sketches lent by Queen Elizabeth.

The exhibition also brings together for the first time archival documents referring to the painting throughout history and two manuscripts by Leonardo on the science of painting.

Leonardo’s preparatory studies — including drawings, compositional sketches, landscape studies and the full-size cartoon tracing lent by The National Gallery of London — trace the transformation of the painting through three different versions. Infrared images and a full-scale photograph of the painting before restoration document the stages of the restoration.

Other Louvre treasures, including Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks,” are part of the exhibition, although “Mona Lisa” has not been moved from her place of honor in another part of the museum.

The “St. Anne” was acquired by Francis I of France in 1517 and is regarded as perhaps second only to the Mona Lisa among Leonardo’s later works. The museum hopes that the public viewing of the 500-year-old canvas will end a battle that has raged within both the art community and the Louvre’s own restoration advisory committee over whether the cleaning has been too aggressive.

Out of caution, the Louvre left an extra layer of varnish on the subjects’ faces and decided to leave two major repaintings believed to have been added much later: a group of tree trunks on the right and the puffed fold on the back of the Virgin’s robe.

But Ségolène Bergeon Langle, a chemist and former director of conservation for the Louvre and France’s national museums who resigned from the advisory committee, told the Louvre’s in-house magazine that she remained unhappy about some aspects of the restoration. Most important for her was the removal of a white patch on the body of the infant Jesus, which she believes may have been painted by da Vinci himself. “In doubt,” she said, “I would not have wanted it.”

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht is expected to draw around 70,000 visitors and collectors. More Photos »

By GUY TREBAY

Published: March 23, 2012

Maastricht, the Netherlands

 

THE lady in pearls was shimmying under a table. Valentino skirt tucked primly around her knees, she lay on her back beaming a flashlight on a yellowed label, a scrap of paper that lent apparent weight to the proposition that the article on view was as old as its seller claimed.

This was at the European Fine Art Fair, where it is not at all unusual to see well-polished people getting intimate with French-waxed consoles, where old specimens can be seen squinting through loupes at granite busts of even older specimens and where for the past quarter-century the acquisitive rich have descended each spring in hordes. The early social arbiter Emily Post once characterized groups like this as the Worldys, the Oldnames and the Eminents...

 

Vinyl records are a totem of the past, a nostalgic symbol of a time when Americans seemed to share more — at least in the way of music: People of a certain age can still remember when, say, Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry sold 25 million copies and engulfed the nation.

Simultaneously, vinyl records are up to the moment. Young hipster collectors now snatch them up both for the sheer physicality of playing a vinyl record and the artistry involved in record covers. DJs like the sound of vinyl: as local legend DJ Le Spam (Andrew Yeomanson) says, an MP3 download is like “a fax of a song.”

Visual artists have long put vinyl to their own uses, and the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl has a bit of everything: outsider artists, emerging artists and established icons like Ed Ruscha. Within the show, vinyl records are photographed, melted and deconstructed for other ends: most of the work has little to do with music directly, and remain conceptual works of art.

The Record — encompassing 99 pieces by 41 artists — originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. According to Nasher curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the show’s strength lies in its adherence to a mission of remaining serious contemporary art. “Some of the work refers to pop culture, but we don’t have any music ephemera, posters or whatever.”The intersection of pop culture and high art is tricky terrain, but it can be done right. In 2008, MOCA’s Sympathy For The Devil: Art and Rock & Roll Since 1967 revealed the not-so-quiet artistry of rock. Last year, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, the show Artist Unknown/The Free World created a compelling portrait of contemporary life using countless Facebook images of ordinary people.

At MAM, the first exhibition room of The Record strikes just the right note. In the middle of the room is a thoughtful sculptural installation by William Cordova, a Peru-born Miami artist who was exhibited – along with locals Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez — in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The piece, Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson, y Anna Mae Aquash) 2008 consists of a stack of 3,000 vinyl records, Peruvian gourds, a VHS tape and candles. Focusing on the ideas of transition and displacement, the monolithic work refers to three icons: Bastidas, a 18th century Peruvian independence martyr; Aquash, a 1970s leader in the American Indian movement; Wilson, a 1960s record producer known for his work with Bob Dylan.

The first exhibition room also has Laurie Anderson’s 1977 Viophonograph — a hybrid-creation between a record player and violin that Anderson played in concert — and David Bryne’s 1978 photo-montage for the album cover of Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. Created with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, the 90-inch-by-90 inch piece is a life-size rendering of the band, pieced together with countless close-up photos.

A smaller project space, covered in plywood and photos contains an installation by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, Thundersnow Road, North Carolina, 2010. Simmons, also a DJ, created a character of a folk rock singer posing for moody circa 1973 album liner photos in rural North Carolina. She then asked friends in music groups — Rain Machine, Midnight Masses, etc. — to compose songs based on the photos, ultimately making an entire vinyl album. This is perfectly-realized conceptual art, a world onto itself, filled with humor and loss, “Once we all listen to music with chips planted in our brains,” Simmons says, “maybe the first quaint iPods will inspire art shows.”

 

ON Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a hearing on Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. National memorials are managed by the National Park Service, which is why the Congressional subcommittee involved itself, even though reviewing architectural design, as Representative Raúl M. Grijalva observed, involves “something well outside our purview.”

What has fueled the Eisenhower memorial controversy in the media are the public pronouncements of two of the president’s granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, who have proclaimed themselves dissatisfied with the design. Understandably, their position is being taken seriously. Yet I am concerned that the growing public brouhaha will ultimately weaken the memorial design.

The Eisenhower memorial is to be located on a parcel of land just south of the National Mall, between the National Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education building. It covers four acres, slightly more than the area of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The proposed memorial would not sprawl over the entire site, as some critics have maintained. What Mr. Gehry has done is to place the memorial to the 34th president in what is effectively a new public park.

The dominant feature of the memorial, and one of the design elements to which the Eisenhower family objects, is the 80-foot-high colonnade that rings the site. The design has been described, somewhat pejoratively, as “Gehryesque,” as if it were an alien presence.

But this is precisely what it is not. As my former colleague on the United States Commission of Fine Arts, Michael McKinnell, pointed out when the commission reviewed the design (we unanimously approved the general concept), this is, in effect, a roofless building; more specifically, it is a roofless classical temple — in a city replete with classical monuments. Moreover, it provides a sense of cohesion to this city’s currently fragmented urban space.

The colonnade supports a metal screen that carries images of the Kansas landscape in which Eisenhower grew up. When first confronted with this idea, I was concerned that mechanically imprinted screens, which the architect insisted on calling “tapestries,” would resemble large billboards.

Since then Mr. Gehry and his collaborators have developed hand-weaving techniques so that the screens really do resemble tapestries. Having seen full-size mock-ups of the screens on the site, I am convinced that their size will not be out of scale with the surroundings.

Another target of the critics is the proposal to include a statue of the president as a youth, recalling that he sometimes referred to himself as a “Kansas farm boy.” Some consider this an affront to a man who was a victorious five-star general as well as a successful two-term president; others find it a touching reminder of Eisenhower’s modest Midwestern roots.

I fall in the second camp, but in either case, it is important to recognize that the statue, whose design has not been finalized, will not be the only, or the largest, representation of the president on the site. The design, as it currently stands, includes two very large bas-reliefs of Eisenhower, one as military leader and one as president, as well as inscribed quotations. In this context, the small statue will have the effect of a footnote.

Still, the debates over the memorial give the impression that Mr. Gehry is effectively being forced on the family, the city and the president’s legacy. But that’s simply not true.

The four finalists who prepared designs for the memorial were picked, by a jury that included Eisenhower’s grandson David, from a list compiled by a panel of leading architects, who in turn chose from among 44 firms that submitted their names to the memorial commission. Ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition was won by Maya Lin, then a college student, it is taken for granted that the best memorial designs are the result of open competitions, in which hundreds of (largely unqualified) individuals compete.

But the accepted wisdom is wrong — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an exception. It’s worth remembering that the Lincoln Memorial was the result of a competition between only two young architects — Henry Bacon and John Russell Pope — and the loser, Pope, was later invited to design the Jefferson Memorial; no one else was considered.

What’s more, both the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial were the objects of criticism when they were proposed: why was Lincoln portrayed as a tired rather than a triumphant leader; why was Jefferson housed in a Roman temple? Today, of course, these memorials are among the country’s most beloved structures.

Presidential memorials take a long time to come to fruition — the Lincoln Memorial took more than 12 years — and the design team will continue refining its design for the Eisenhower memorial. Mr. Gehry, our finest living architect, has already shown himself willing to listen to critical suggestions.

But in this case, too many cooks will definitely spoil the broth. Compromise and consensus are important when devising legislation, but they are a poor recipe for creating a memorial.

Witold Rybczynski is a member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the author, most recently, of “The Biography of a Building.”

Kehinde Wiley is one such artist. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale in 2001, Mr. Wiley, then in his mid-20s, began exhibiting his large, figurative oil-on-canvas portraits of young black men in hip-hop apparel.

With an emphasis on bright, acid colors and ghetto-fabulous outfits, Mr. Wiley’s paintings borrowed heavily from the work of an earlier Yale M.F.A., Barkley Hendricks, whose portraits coincided with the Black Power movement and the ’70s heyday of photorealist painting.

Mr. Wiley’s contribution was to push things in a more bombastic direction. Hijacking — or appropriating, to use the art world-approved term — the format of old master altarpieces and three-quarter-length portraits, he likened the notorious opulence of successful hip-hop artists to that of European aristocrats. And since most of his subjects were actually disenfranchised black and brown youths — that is, hip-hop fans rather than stars — he effectively transformed his subjects into aristocrats, at least in the world of the picture.

Mr. Wiley’s work hasn’t changed much over the last decade, although his scope has gone global. A series called “The World Stage” has featured youth in Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil, China, India and Sri Lanka. Now “Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel,” at the Jewish Museum, takes on that country.

This latest leg of Mr. Wiley’s world tour starts with a portrait of a young Ethiopian-Israeli man, “Alios Itzhak” (2011), set against a pattern borrowed from a 19th-century Eastern European mizrah, a papercut made to be placed on a wall to indicate the direction of Jerusalem for purposes of worship. The portrait, acquired by the museum, is joined by 13 additional paintings of young men by Mr. Wiley, along with 11 historic papercuts and textile works he selected from the museum’s collection.

Like Alios Itzhak, most of the other portrait subjects are shown in their street clothes and painted against elaborate patterns from traditional Jewish art. T-shirts advertising YouTube or sportswear companies are juxtaposed with decorative motifs like lions, birds and arabesques that wrap around the figures, moving from background to foreground. The result is a fusion of Pattern and Decoration painting with figuration, a mash-up or sampling of historical styles and references.

One canvas, “Kalkidan Mashasha” (2011), does feature a hip-hop-reggae artist, who is painted in a light brown military shirt with patches depicting the Ethiopian flag and commemorating Haile Selassie, the last emperor of the Ethiopian monarchy and a deified figure in Rastafarian culture. Meanwhile, cases nearby quietly display intricately painted mizrahs and textiles from 19th-century Italy, Poland and Ukraine.

There are some good elements to this show, and some problems. On the positive side, the Jewish Museum has been in the vanguard of showing contemporary art. The exhibition provides an opportunity to exhibit the work of an African-American while celebrating the Jewish diaspora’s diversity and Israel as a “melting pot” (to quote the catalog).

And yet the show raises some difficult questions. For instance, what is the position of the Ethiopian Jew in Israeli society? The gallery installation gives the impression of Jewish culture as a seamless visual narrative, slipping faultlessly from old Europe to modern-day Tel Aviv. It also posits, particularly in a video accompanying the paintings, Israel as a haven for persecuted Ethiopian Jews.

In the catalog, however, Mr. Mashasha, who cites thinkers and activists like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Marcus Garvey as influences, states, “I am struggling with the issue of not becoming what I criticize, not to be racist if others are, not to perceive things simply because I’m sensitive and I’m black.”

Another question is why Mr. Wiley’s work focuses solely on young men, when many of the textiles on view were made by women, and, as the catalog informs us, one of the best-known Israelis of Ethiopian descent is a female singer named Hagit Yaso, who won last year’s edition of an Israeli show similar to “American Idol.”

Part of the answer is that Mr. Wiley has generally painted preening young men, and there is a strong homoerotic element in his work that is glossed over here.

It’s not necessary to label him as a gay artist — or an African-American one — to understand or appreciate his work. And yet this omission speaks to the way Mr. Wiley has been packaged: as a slightly titillating but not too radical artist whose work nods toward racial and sexual taboos, but is safe enough to be shown just about anywhere. (This is reflected in the paintings themselves, which look particularly bland and factory-produced when viewed up close.)

Perhaps the greater problem is that Mr. Wiley’s work gains its currency by leaning on hip-hop for cultural authenticity, but veers away from what gives that medium its extraordinary power. In Mr. Wiley’s hands, one of the most vital and viral idioms of the last quarter-century becomes safe and palatable, a domestic product that has been successfully exported around the globe and re-enters American art as fashion or style, largely stripped of its political and emotional charge and dressed up with extraneous decorative motifs.

Just as music critics have complained of hip-hop’s becoming a corporatized global commodity, Mr. Wiley can be accused of using it to neutralize differences and difficulties like those cited by Mr. Mashasha in the catalog. And it is those very difficulties that we rely on art to broach.

“Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel” continues through July 29 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.