UPTOWN

JACQUES VILLON--Goldschmidt, 1125 Madison Ave. at 84th. The third major New York showing since his death last fall reveals that Villon, with artful agility, traced nature's rhythms on paper before transforming them in paintings and prints: 39 watercolors and drawings, media seldom displayed during his lifetime. Through April 25.

GEORGES BRAQUE--Four galleries bring together the largest showing of his work ever--some 200 paintings and sculptures on loan from American collections.

> At Saidenberg, 1035 Madison Ave. at 79th: Fauvist and cubist works.

> At Perls, 1016 Madison Ave. at 78th: the '20s.

> At Rosenberg, 20 East 79th: the '30s.

> At Knoedler, 14 East 57th: the '40s on through 1957, along with 25 sculptures. All through May 2.

RICARDO MARTINEZ--Contemporaries, 992 Madison Ave. at 77th. Emerging from a shroud of oil, the monumental figures of Mexico's Martinez strain at the bondage of the canvas' confines as if to divulge some ancient mystery. Through May 2.

JEAN MESSAGIER--Lefebre, 47 East 77th. A small retrospective going back to 1952 shows the growth of a school-of-Paris painter who caresses the canvas with soft shades of green and blue, or swings his brush in long, looping swirls of orange, summoning the rustle of the wind or June's last still day. Through May 16.

ELMER BISCHOFF--Staempfli, 47 East 77th. One of the brightest exemplars of the figurative San Francisco school, which more than a decade ago sprang full-bloom from abstract expressionism, Bischoff neatly tucks nymphs in the waves of a white-capped breakwater or barely hides them behind the curtain of a sun-filled room. Through May 2.

BERNARD REDER--World House, 987 Madison Ave. at 77th. A posthumous tribute shows 20 bronze sculptures and 50 graphics. Reder brilliantly skipped from classical to Old Testament subjects to pure fantasy: he planted blossoms in the back of a cat, perched a cow precariously on a trapeze. The most impressive work is an 8-ft. Aaron gingerly holding the tabernacle in his huge hands. Through May 9.

ALAN LOWNDES--Osborne, 965A Madison Ave. at 75th. The paintings of an English realist making his U.S. debut tell a tragic story of man and nature. His many windows speak of emptiness, his street scenes of dreary sameness, and his people are dull blotches in a vivid-hued environment that threatens to swallow them. Through May 2.

ANDY WARHOL--Stable, 33 East 74th. "Paintings are too hard," Warhol once complained. "The things I want to show are mechanical." So he had someone make 500 wooden boxes for him; someone else made silk screens of the designs on the cardboard cartons that hold the products of Del Monte, Brillo, H. J. Heinz, Campbell's, Mott's and Kellogg's. Warhol himself, with help, squeegeed the color onto the boxes, wrapped them in brown paper to be carted to the gallery, and planned their arrangement in towering tiers. Lest viewers think it's just another Saturday morning outside the local supermarket, he made their prices memorable: $300 and up--per box. Through May 9.

LYONEL FEININGER--Willard, 29 East 72nd. The many facets of Feininger in oils and watercolors spread over the years 1906 to 1955. On the Quay, painted in 1908, shortly after he quit drawing comic strips, shows purple clouds capering across a pea-soup sky. A 1915 Self Portrait finds the artist planted sternly in grand Gothic archways to express, perhaps, his fondness for Bach. Blue Cloud is a full realization of his cool, crystalline cubism, and the funny little worm creatures of the later watercolors hark back to his career as a caricaturist. Through May 16.

ROBERT A. NELSON--Banfer, 23 East 67th. Down the highways and byways of history, Nelson tracks the heroic image of man, finds it falling Icaruslike into the sea, flashing from a six-shooter aimed at a Wild West saloon, blazing in the faces of children defending the city of Naples from the German Wehrmacht. Paintings and drawings. Through May 2.

GEORG TAPPERT--Button, 787 Madison Ave. at 67th. Germany buzzed with artistic activity before World War I, and Tappert was at the center of it. In the New Secession, Blaue Reiter and Brucke groups, he had 300 exhibitions, but until now he never had one in the U.S. Swathed in the frank, feverish hues of German expressionism, his lush ladies whoop it up on the stage, pose in hats big as washtubs, and bask in the altogether amid the vestiges of Gauguin's great outdoors. More than 40 paintings and other works. Through May 16.

BRUCE CONNER--Alan, 766 Madison Ave. at 66th. "People live in their own trash heaps, spiritually and otherwise," says Conner. "That's where I take my material from." He fashions assemblages from such trivia as glass beads, yellowed lace, doilies, religious pictures and nail polish. Jean Harlow has no face but needs none: a pair of satin-gowned legs make a convincing illusion. In Reliquary, Conner expresses hope with a lighted candle, in Couch, horror with a knotted nylon. His repertoire is both witty and wise, sad and sinister. Through May 2.

IBRAM LASSAW--Kootz, 655 Madison Ave. at 60th. Sculptor Lassaw takes the eye on a tour through the tenuous roots of his airy abstracts, around and into the habitat of an imagination as glittering as the bronze rods with which he makes his fantasies. Through May 9.

A LOOK AT PARIS--Griffin, 32 East 58th. A lithographic look at the City of Light gives winning evidence of the printmaking savoir-faire of the French. By various processes, many of them secrets as closely guarded as a chef's recipe, some of the century's greatest artists impregnate paper with sheens of living color. The 32 signed lithographs, gathered for a special edition in 1962, are by Braque, Villon, Picasso, Chagall and six others. Through May 2.

MIDTOWN

CLAES OLDENBURG--Janis, 15 East 57th. Known for "happenings" and Hamburgers, Oldenburg performs a new kind of artistic hocuspocus. With a fine feeling for materials, he instills inanimate objects with Geist, then wrenches from them a whole range of emotions. His Soft Telephone, its mouthpiece dangling, its coin box regurgitating, is a sad sack in shiny black vinyl. A Soft Typewriter, its pearly Plexiglas keys hopelessly entangled, collapses into its shell with the mortification of a machine that suddenly finds itself ready for IBM's junk heap. Other objects in 22 materials along with some drawings. Through May 2.

JEANCHEVOLLEAU--Partridge, 6 West 56th. French Painter Chevolleau builds pictures --horses and sea scenes--by piling up bright blocks of color. Best in the show: Automne, his most abstract painting, creates the vibrant atmosphere of nature in the midst of change. Thirty oils. Through May 2.

MATT A--lolas, 15 East 55th. Chile-born, Paris-based Matta was a bright young acolyte in surrealism's heyday, but that label is too limiting for his talents. The variety of this excellent show proves that he is not to be confined by it. There are huge new spatial fireworks, exploding with the motion of the machine age, smaller works on the same theme, drawings and lithographs. But most interesting is a series of pastels that Matta calls Cabezas (portraits): four black, brutish simulations of heads that are magnificently ugly. Through May 9.

MUSEUMS

JEWISH--Fifth Ave. at 92nd. Since his death in 1948, the influence of Arshile Gorky has been spreading far and wide. These 50 drawings, which have toured the U.S. and go to Europe next, span his career from the early portraits through an esthetic pilgrimage that visited Cezanne, Picasso, Miro and others, to the time when he found his imagination ripe and plucked images from memory, mind and dream with his own original and elusive lines. Through June 30.

GUGGENHEIM--Fifth Ave. at 89th. The work of Vincent Van Gogh: his Sunflowers and Cypresses, Harvest, Yellow House and Potato Eaters are among 120 oils, watercolors and drawings on loan from his nephew's unique collection. Through June 28.

METROPOLITAN--Fifth Ave. at 82nd. The museum supplements its large collection of Rembrandt paintings with a selection of his prints, and puts on view a painting by Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy lent to New Amsterdam by old Amsterdam.

FRICK COLLECTION--Fifth Ave. at 70th. Handsomely hung in the spacious surroundings of the mansion are most of the 159 masterpieces in the collection by such master painters as Titian, Bellini, El Greco, Goya, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Turner.

WHITNEY--22 West 54th. Jack Tworkov, 63, head of Yale's art school and old-line abstract expressionist, gets the retrospective once-over in an exhibition that begins with a 1948 Figure garbed in cubist subtleties, proceeds to the brilliant reds and blues that slash through his 1963 oils. Paintings and drawings. Through May 3.

MUSEUM OF EARLY AMERICAN FOLK ARTS--49 West 53rd. Mrs. Edith Gregor Halpert is a commercial art dealer, but for some 40 years she has been collecting American folk art on the side. Part of her huge collection is on view, includes paintings on velvet, watercolors with applique of gold leaf on silk, weather vanes of all sizes--one is a 14-ft.-high railroad locomotive that must have frustrated many a light breeze--and a 6-ft. scarecrow carved from a tree. Through August 30.

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