Two swell new exhibits are sure to please the people watchers. The elegantly erotic “Face & Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise,” at the Bruce Museum through Jan. 6, celebrates the Franco-American artist who couldn’t get enough of his voluptuous, self-possessed wife, the former Isabel Dutaud Nagle. His outsize bronze nudes of her – which you’ll find at MoMA and Kykuit in Pocantico Hills as well – are as much a tribute to his love/lust for her as they are to her apparently confident personality. (There are also some fine male nudes and busts of some of the leading luminaries of Lachaise’s day, including New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and poets E.E. Cummings and Marianne Moore.) (203) 869-0376, brucemuseum.org
The glitterati get a different treatment in “Celebrities: We Remember Them Well,” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains through Nov. 10. It’s a wide-ranging, insightful show of accomplished shutterbugs (Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Dennis Stock) capturing the even more famous (Muhammad Ali, James Dean, Gloria Steinem). For many, this will be a poignant stroll down Memory Lane, perhaps never more so than in Allen Tennenbaum’s images of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken just weeks before he was gunned down on Dec. 8, 1980 outside The Dakota apartment building, where they lived in Manhattan. In the photos, they look so happy. The pictures remind us to live every day to the fullest. (914) 428-4220, artsw.org
