MUSEUMS

JEWISH MUSEUM--Fifth Ave. at 92nd. Twenty U.S. artists show 39 astringent black-and-white paintings plucked from the usually warmer palettes of such painters as Albers, Hofmann, Pollock, Motherwell and De Kooning. Stripped of color, the ironwork of their composition shows off the tough structure of abstract expressionism. Through Feb. 2.

METROPOLITAN--Fifth Ave. at 82nd. Anyone with enough derring-do to push through the wooden tunnels disguising the Met's current dishevelment (it's installing air conditioning) will discover:

> Seventy newly acquired prints, including a red-chalk drawing, Prudence, by the Dutch master engraver Goltzius; Rembrandt's masterly etching, Landscape with a Man Sketching (circa 1645); a rare Goya lithograph, Men Spitting at a Fire, showing the Spaniard's early use of the medium.

> The Cubiculum, a Pompeian bedroom slathered with wall paintings that was buried for 18 centuries under cinders from Mount Vesuvius, dug up in 1900, and only recently restored by the museum.

> Dutch and Flemish paintings, including 33 Rembrandts, and French paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries.

WHITNEY--22 West 54th. The museum's annual weather vane of the winds of contemporary U.S. art shows that nothing that gets into the vocabulary of painting ever gets out: realism in varieties from Social to Pop; expressionism in forms from New York abstract to the tough geometry of hard-edge painting; impressionism from still lifes to mental landscapes. Rather than prove that the wind blows strongest from any compass point, the Annual proves that it is rising everywhere. Through Feb. 2.

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