A surprising number of sculptures are included in ''Masterpieces of Renaissance Portraiture,'' which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday. But rather than display them against gallery walls the curators will show many of them free-standing and in the round. That's because Keith Christiansen, chairman of European paintings at the...
''One no longer remembers where Mr. Ray was born. After having been a coal merchant, a millionaire several times over and the chairman of a chewing-gum trust, he decided he was open to the Dadaists' invitation to show his latest paintings in Paris.'' This fictitious biography, written by the Dada ringleader Tristan Tzara on the occasion of Man...

New music and avant-garde film have long been kindred spirits, and in its ''Free Radicals'' program at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday evening, the Viennese contemporary-music ensemble Klangforum Wien acted as a matchmaker and, at times, marriage broker. Like awkward teenagers gathered on opposite sides of a dance hall, short, engagingly quirky films...