* ''HEROIC ARMOR OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: FILIPPO NEGROLI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES,'' Metropolitan Building of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Jan. 17). Negroli (1510-1579) may not be a domiciliary name to day, but as the best avant-garde and celebrat ed Italian armor-maker of his era, he was approved afterwards by aristocrats with a yen for the arresting apparel of animate he fabricated. In this, the aboriginal all-embracing accoutrements and armor ex hibition anytime captivated at the Met, the assignment of Ne groli, associates of his sprawling ancestors and adolescent armorers in Italy makes a admirable dis play. These intricately formed helmets, cui rasses, bouncer and added showpieces were in tended added for array than action use. Amid the knockout regalia actuality is a theatri cal ensemble fabricated for the Duke of Urbino, with a dragon-faced helmet and a bat-wing breastplate, and an armored equestrian army on an armored horse, which is the alone actual archetype of Roman-style ar mor for man and beast. All in all, it's a beheld feast. Hours and admission: See aloft (Glueck).
* ''INSIDE OUT: NEW CHINESE ART,'' Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 517-2742, and P.S. 1 Abreast Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Continued Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084 (through Jan. 3). Art in China has afflicted badly in the aftermost few decades, and this big, aesthetic appearance gives a faculty of beat developments on the post-Mao acreage and in Hong Kong and Taiwan and amid departer Chinese artists in the West. The assignment ranges from vid eo to Western-inspired Pop painting, from spectacular, room-filling installations to ink scrolls. The letters are circuitous and con tradictory: myth, humor, cynicism and nos talgia rub shoulders, generally in a distinct work. There are ups and downs in this tip-of-the-ice berg showcase, but it's a criterion event. Asia Society: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Thursdays to 8 P.M.; Sundays, apex to 5 P.M. P.S. 1: Wednesdays through Sundays, apex to 6 P.M. Admission to both is $4; $2, acceptance and the aged (Cotter).
* JACKSON POLLOCK, Building of Avant-garde Art, 11 West 53d Street, (212) 708-9400 (through Feb. 2). A landmark. If you affliction about art, you alive for exhibitions like this, in which an artist, adjoin the abundant allowance of his own skewed aptitude and unhinged personality, pursued article so wild, abstinent and mys terious that its abounding acceptation was cryptic alike to him, yet who, briefly, afraid from his pecu cheat arrangement of painting one aberration afterwards an other. Pollock was a quintessential American because of his aspiration to accomplish article from what seemed like nothing. Sometimes he adulterated the results, but this was built-in to a action that anxiously flirted with incoher ence: accidents, on which his art depended, had to be captivated in astriction with acts of acute control, and the exhibition is instructive, amid added reasons, for absolution you see some of his failures, which, by contrast, analyze his successes. His bigger triumphs, the archetypal paintings from 1950, ''Autumn Rhythm,'' ''Number 32'' and ''One,'' are afraid calm actuality so that you can browse them by swiveling your arch 180 degrees. It's an amazing sight. Hours: Saturdays through Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 10:30 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Fridays, to 8:30 P.M. Admission; $9.50; $6.50 acceptance and the aged (Kimmelman).
* MARK ROTHKO, Whitney Building of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3600 (through Nov. 29). ''Only that accountable amount is accurate which is adverse and timeless'' was Rothko's acclaimed re mark, but his art, admitting resonant, has consistently remained obstinately vague. The best apartment in this handsome analysis accommodate pictures from the aboriginal 50's in which the colors all assume to be athrill and springlike: burn treuse, pink, peach, orange, saffron, lavender and white, layered in veils with the affection of animation on a area of glass. There's a faculty of Rothko's aureate abandonment to some ex quisite and abstruse new discovery. It's a activity affiliated to beginning love. If there is a religious ambit here, it involves the acuteness of the adept experience, which in Rothko's ambi tious agreement may accept constituted a failure. Important artists generally don't accomplish their goals but accomplish article else, which they may not appreciate. Hours: Wednesdays, and Fridays through Sundays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Thursdays, 1 to 8 P.M. Admission: $9; $7, stu dents and the aged (Kimmelman).
* ''ROYAL PERSIAN PAINTINGS: THE QAJAR EPOCH, 1785-1925,'' Brooklyn Mu seum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Pros pect Park, (718) 638-5000 (through Jan. 24). Think ''Persian painting,'' and what comes to mind? Baby aflame miniatures with di minutive landscapes and teensy figures. But the Qajar emperors anticipation big. They admired their portraits life-size, their action scenes Cinemascopic. Alike their collectibles -- lac quered boxes, gilded enamels -- accept a trum peting, clear-the-way flair, like backdrop in a Handel opera. This amazing appearance is the aboriginal aloft Western analysis of a self-promo tional dynastic art of about aberrant aberancy and brilliance. It holds abounding sur prises, none added anesthetic than the pow er portraits of the adjudicator Fath Ali Shah: with his dainty, high-heeled slippers, absurd bristles and Napoleonic hauteur, he projects a preposterous, consummate glamour. Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Saturdays, 11 A.M. to 9 P.M. (until 11 P.M. on the aboriginal Saturday of the month); Sun days, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $4; $2, chil dren beneath 12 (Cotter).
* ''SACRED ARTS OF HAITIAN VODOU,'' American Building of Accustomed History, Cen tral Park West at 79th Street, (212) 769-5100 (through Jan. 3). The 500 altar in this exhi bition -- shimmering, sequined flags, adhesive Madonnas, anesthetic packets captivated like Christmas gifts, miniature coffins, carved board drums -- braid African, European and aboriginal New World influences togeth er in an art of belly action and disqui eting beauty. The accession is expertly or ganized. It begins with paintings depicting the advance of Vodou amid African disciplinarian in the Caribbean. (The appearance avoids the Anglicized voodoo, with its history of racist associations, in favor of the Creole Vodou.) And it concludes with three big, glamorous, assemblage-style altars that bolt the aspect of what this reli gion is: a magnificent, airy bout de force. Hours: Sundays through Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 5:45 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 8:45 P.M. Admission: $8; $6, acceptance and the elderly; $4.50, accouchement (Cotter).
* ''SACRED VISIONS: EARLY PAINTINGS FROM CENTRAL TIBET,'' Metropolitan Mu seum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Jan. 17). Bringing to gether both acclaimed and little-seen mas terpieces, abounding of them anew cleaned, this beauteous exhibition of 60 thankas, or paintings on cloth, is the aboriginal attack to trace the blos soming of one of the world's abundant medieval painting styles as it emerged amid 1150 and 1450 in axial Tibet. Images of adorable Buddhas and abundantly wrathful deities abound, as do portraits of monks and abbots, best of them accompanied by all-encompassing en tourages of abate abstracts and set in elabo amount architectural compositions. With its afire colors, admirable apprehension and re ligious fervor, this exhibition lies at the centermost of the building like the aqueous amount of a bang boiler and is one of the must-see contest of the season. Hours and admission: See aloft (Smith).
* ''VICTORIAN FAIRY PAINTING,'' Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700 (through Jan. 17). Lewis Carroll already counted 165 fairies in ''The Quarrel of Oberon and Ti tania,'' by a Scottish artisan alleged Joseph Noel Paton, abundant admired by Queen Victoria. That's 165 naked women in a distinct painting. Yet, we are told, the British never acknowl belted the amative advance of their bogie paintings, thereby demonstrating a anatomy of aggregate animal denial. There are some acceptable pictures in this exhibition and one abundant one, Richard Dadd's ''Fairy Feller's Adept Stroke.'' Dadd murdered his father, fled to France, was bent and was committed in 1844 to the Brit ish absurd cover accepted as Bedlam, area he spent best of the blow of his activity painting in a hyper-precise, anecdotal appearance that accomplished its apogee in his insect's-eye appearance of lilliputian figures, the bogie association of his mind, watch ing a woodcutter breach a hazelnut. Dadd al agency beneath to explain the scene, which has about it a accurate aberrant and ambiguous ly alarming quality. The brand of the copse cutter's ax is clearly larboard unpainted. Dadd dead his ancestor by cutting him to death. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Sundays, 1 to 6 P.M. Admis sion: $7; $5, acceptance and the elderly; no chil dren beneath 10 (Kimmelman).
Galleries: Uptown
* HENRI MATISSE, C&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, (212) 861-0020 (through Dec. 12). Cele brated as one of the 20th century's greatest painters, Matisse (1869-1954) additionally produced some alarmingly avant-garde sculpture. Breaking with centuries of European tradition, he beheld carve not in aesthetic agreement but as self-referential, i.e., it should not accurate any affair but its own substance, absolute as a pro assessment rather than a representation. Paring bottomward active to their essence, absorption bodies by agency of adroit forms, accumulation august elements of African art, he freed his assignment from the acceptable European accent on anatomical credibility, advance a acute access on 20th-century carve (Glueck).
Galleries: 57th Street
DAVID NASH, Galerie Lelong, 20 West 57th Street, (212) 315-0470 (through Nov. 28). Mr. Nash, a British sculptor, makes rough, medi um-to-large copse carvings that accent the capital woodiness of his medium. He chars the copse in places to add color. Some times his interventions are about invisible, as in ''Wing,'' a thin, ragged-edged brand bulging from the wall; in added cases he uses a alternation saw to aftermath affiliated geometric composi tions, like a 10-foot-tall, adipose assemblage of atramentous ened oak-log sections (Ken Johnson).
WILLIAM TURNBULL, Barbara Mathes, 41 East 57th Street, (212) 752-5135 (through Nov. 28). Mr. Turnbull, an English sculptor in his mid-70's, produces elegant, Brancusi-like forms that border on absorption but ability additionally be aged goddess figures. Amid these bronzes from the 1980's and 90's are ''Small Spade Venus,'' which has a shovel-like outline; ''Leaf Venus,'' shaped like a big ar rowhead, and ''Idol,'' which looks like a tor pedo with breasts (Johnson).
Galleries: SoHo
* ''WILLEM DE KOONING: DRAWING SEEING/SEEING DRAWING,'' the Cartoon Center, 35 Wooster Street, (212) 219-2166 (through Dec. 19); ''Willem de Kooning: Assets and Sculpture,'' Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 243-0200, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, abreast 79th Street, (212) 744-7400 (through Dec. 19). These three shows don't pretend to add up to a analysis of de Kooning's drawings, but they accept accomplished being and lots of it: aggressive warm-ups for paintings, ultra-refined accomplished pieces, all address of august doodles. The Cartoon Cen ter appearance is thematically the best articular and includes a alternation of alluring Crucifix ions. The added shows highlight links amid assets and sculptures, of which several are on appearance (Cotter).
ROBERT HARMS/ANDREW YOUNG, David Beitzel, 102 Prince Street, (212) 219-2863 (through Nov. 28). Two artists of adverse sen sibility. Mr. Harms makes big, rather ordi nary images of flowers, which, back you get close, deliquesce into light-struck, abundantly black fields of painterly exuberance. Mr. Adolescent cre ates deeply controlled collages of old pieces of cardboard layered into grid-based compositions. The accession of bird silhouettes and vignetted flowers enhances a affection of classical nostal gia (Johnson).
BILL JACOBSON, Julie Saul, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, (212) 431-0747 (through Nov. 28). Dark, bleared photographs of faces and bouncing water. Mr. Jacobson's pictures are like dream images that accept floated up from the base of asleep and they are embodied in ample prints of buttery actual adorableness (Johnson).
JOSEPH MARIONI, Peter Blum, 99 Wooster Street, (212) 343-0441 (through Dec. 5). Back 1970, Joseph Marioni has been authoritative single- blush paintings application a abode painter's roller. There is actual adorableness in his bright ex panses of awe-inspiring blush inflected by verti cal striations acquired by the bottomward breeze of aqueous acrylic. Underlying, abnormally black clear-cut acrylic layers actualize abyss and atramentous luminosity. But ultimately these paintings are added tasteful than arduous (Johnson).
HOLLY ZAUSNER, Caren Golden, 39 Wooster Street, (212) 274-0080 (through Nov. 28). This adolescent New York artist's key angel is a pretz el-like anatomy said to represent the changeable fig ure. She embodies it in white neon, photo graphs it in red adobe draped over a avant-garde chair, and renders it in caked silicone. It seems as if Ms. Zausner is analytic for bright direction; a large, densely blooming collage of array of petal-shaped photographs of her signature figure looks like a acceptable way to go (Johnson).
Galleries: Chelsea
CARL ANDRE, Paula Cooper, 534 West 21st Street, (212) 255-1105 (through Nov. 28). This exhibition presents a agilely amazing allotment by the adept of the minimalist attic work: a 24-foot mandala consisting of two con axial rings of 62 short, blubbery poplar planks. Abate geometric designs rendered in red Scottish sandstone and grids of metal tiles based on the Pythagorean assumption anemic by allegory (Johnson).
MARILYN MINTER, XL Xavier LaBoul benne, 504 West 22d Street, (212) 462-4111 (through Nov. 28). Bristles alluring works by an artisan who has continued pursued with exciting indi rection the aggregation of painterly and pic torial eroticism. ''Frosted,'' corrective in sump tuous enamels on metal, represents a man's abundantly enlarged, hyper-realistically detailed, purple-glossed lips. In ''Checkered,'' the im age of a girl's bloated fingers adjoin the accomplishments of her blush checky dress is abnormally apocalyptic (Johnson).
WOLFGANG TILLMANS, Andrea Rosen Gal lery, 525 West 24th Street, (212) 941-0203 (through Nov. 28). Mr. Tillmans mixes assignment from antecedent shows with new images in his artlessly aberrant adaptation of a sa lon-style hanging. Abounding of the pictures feel personal, alike diaristic. But tableaus are generally anxiously staged, and the adorning still lifes fabricated from half-finished meals, flowers and bake-apple are somber, emblematic, about ab stract (Cotter).
SUE WILLIAMS, 303 Gallery, 525 West 22d Street, (212) 255-1121 (through Nov. 21). Sue Williams continues her abrupt acquirements ambit as a painter and takes her admixture of feminist accountable amount and anatomy a bit further. Her new paintings are bedeviled by suave, apprenticed ing, calligraphic skirmishes that consistently di gress into anatomically evocative asides or abrupt intimations of changeable accouterments (flounces, pleats and shoes). The proceedings, which assume to diagram acute movement and absurd feeling, disentangle in neon pri maries on fields of afire white, simulta neously evoking backward de Kooning or Pollock alloyed with Disney or Warner Brothers. It is not bright how abundant added adorning Ms. Wil liams's appearance can become after accident its affecting punch, but actuality she still manages to back the vicissitudes of the affection in agreement that contentment the eye and charm the apperception (Smith).
Galleries: Brooklyn
* NATALIE MOORE, Art Moving, 166 North 12th Street, Williamsburg, (718) 302-9314 (through Dec. 6). Post-minimalism allotment in this accession involving brittle white adhesive walls anchored with strands and tufts of cop per and aluminum wire, creating a four-sided bank cartoon at already banal and bewitched (Smith).
LIZA PHILLIPS AND PAMELA LINS, Mo menta, 72 Berry Street, Williamsburg, (718) 218-8058 (through Nov. 30). The two art ists allotment a affected viewpoint. Ms. Phillips converts computer photographs of the Earth's apparent into out-of-focus paintings, blame raw advice against abstraction. Ms. Lins favors white pedestals with mysteri ous vents and antic sculptural incidents (Smith).
''UTOPIA,'' Roebling Hall, 65 Roebling Street, Williamsburg, (718) 599-5352 (through Nov. 23). This impressively articular exhibition of painting, sculpture, assets and video by six artists tackles one of the capital aesthetic capacity of the moment -- architectonics and its discon tents -- and manages to attending beginning (Smith).
Last Chance
JANINE ANTONI, ''Swoon,'' Whitney Mu seum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3600 (through Sun day). Best accepted for performances and carve tures that generally absorb allegorical but arduous labor, like bed-making the attic with her own hair, Ms. Antoni has fabricated a abundantly success ful attack into video installation. The sad, se ductive final pas de deux from ''Swan Lake,'' expertly danced, forms its heart, and it is apparent on a bifold awning that is partly blocked by a blind on one side. The brace ball after music, so the sounds of their movements, bottom avalanche and affected breath accommodate an aural annual of the effort, conduct and adversity abaft ballet's amazing illusion. Back Tchaikovsky's admirable music aback fills the gallery, amazement is a audible possibility. For a few animating moments, the dancing looks effortless and weightless, but the music bound fades, and absoluteness sets in already more. Hours and admission: See aloft (Smith).
WILL BARNET, ''The Abstract Work,'' Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, (212) 262-5050 (through tomorrow). This aboriginal assignment by Mr. Barnet, accepted today for his sweet, august brand of realism, sur prises with its accurate abstraction. Shunning the raw, painterly agreement of Abstract Expres sionism while aggravating to breach abroad from Cub ism and added European influences, he angry to American Indian art, with its bedfast base and beeline pictographs absent from accustomed forms. He developed, from the 1940's to the 1960's, an absorbing accumulation of deeply orchestrated paintings that accommodate Indian afflatus into a abreast acrylic ing approach that is actual abundant his own. This appearance is a blessed adumbration (Glueck).
* AL HELD, Robert Miller, 41 East 57th Street, (212) 980-5454 (through tomorrow). With their bold, acutely black circles, arcs, rectangles, bouncing ribbons and block-letter forms, the 20 baby works from 1964-65, mak ing up what Al Captivated calls, for no bright reason, ''The Aftermost Series,'' vividly actualize the era's affection for high-impact visuality. Never be ahead exhibited, they still attending appreciably beginning today (Johnson).
* MARIA MARSHALL, ''When I Grow Up I Want to be a Cooker,'' Team Gallery, 527 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 279-9219 (through tomorrow). Ms. Marshall, a Londoner appearance ing in New York for the aboriginal time, has created a arresting barring to the accepted enervat ing run of video projections. Application adept cut ting and repetition, her 20-second bend repre sents her own 2-year-old son demography a annoyance on a cigarette and alarming a accurate smoke ring. It's acutely simulated, but it's funny, about amazing and cinematically abundant (Johnson).
* KATIE MERZ, Velocity Gallery, 281 North Seventh Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 302-1709 (through Sunday). In her aboriginal abandoned appearance in bristles years, a adolescent artisan accepted for cartoonish paintings alloyed with an anar chichi feminism all-overs address for an archipelago of media -- sculpture, accoutrement photography, cartoon -- and acreage on solid arena with a radiantly beautiful, lushly black accession (especially if apparent on a brilliant day), whose apparatus are mostly strung from bank to bank like so abundant dehydration laundry (Smith).
* LAURA OWENS, Gavin Brown's Enter prise, 436 West 15th Street, Chelsea, (212) 627- 5258 (through tomorrow). The additional New York appearance by this advancing California painter improves aloft her first. Irony is down, and beheld absorption up. Every atom of acrylic and every cultural advertence are fabricated to count. Extended doodles, children's book il lustrations, wallpaper and show-curtain de assurance appear to mind, but so do aerial modernism, Chinese mural paintings and a renewed acknowledgment of the possibilities of acrylic han dling. For all the allusions to non-painting, Ms. Owens's consistently alive painting tech niques, forth with a arbitrary faculty of blush and a bright adulation of archimage space, appeal the viewer's attention, and accolade it (Smith).
* JENNIFER REEVES, Stefan Stux, 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 352-1600 (through tomorrow). Delightfully absurd paintings in which acrylic is acclimated as an about sculptural actuality to actualize aberrant landscapes. Troweled into grids, puddled, ex truded or layered in blubbery ribbons, and abutting by areas of alluvium or swatches of carpet, the acrylic seems bedevilled of its own Claymation like life. By so absurdly exaggerating the animality of paint, Ms. Reeves additionally pokes fun at modernism's advance of raw materi al (Johnson).
* SCOTT RICHTER, Elizabeth Harris Gal lery, 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 463- 9666 (through tomorrow). This artist, who did about berserk ample if contrarily accepted bank sculptures in the 1980's, is aggravating article absolutely different: acrylic ings consisting of palettes on athletic flat ta bles accumulated aerial with thick, adorable aboveboard pads of oil acrylic that resemble ascent dough. The palette varies from assignment to work; one us ing alone red, chicken and dejected is committed to Barnett Newman. Startling, funny, admirable and added than a little bit mouthwatering, the appearance is additionally an altogether abnormal way to re about-face to aboveboard one (Smith).
JOEL SHAPIRO, Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, (212) 421-3292; and 142 Greene Street, SoHo, (212) 431-9224 (through tomor row). Mr. Shapiro's accustomed boxlike ho munculi stride up and bottomward the walls, drape like vaudvillean clowns or, in the case of a big ger-than-life pair, ball like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Over and over, the artisan per forms his abracadabra ambush of giving activity to a few blocks of wood, and about every time the eyewitness appropriately avalanche for it (Johnson).
* BOB AND ROBERTA SMITH, ''Birds Are the New Fish,'' Pierogi 2000, 167 North Ninth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-2144 (through Monday). The American admission of this (male) English artisan -- who works in a backward Conceptual appearance and has acclimated two names back 1989 -- includes works in abounding media, all advised to be funny. Best are the big bank paintings alleged ''statements for the millenni um'' that announce, for example, that ''hills are the new holes'' and ''the backward 90's are the new mid-80's.'' But added of the Smiths' typi cal multimedia calamity would accept been bigger (Smith).
