UPTOWN

PABLO PICASSO--Saidenberg, 1035 Madison Ave. at 79th. Jacqueline, the youthful model whom the Spanish master, 82, married three years ago, shows up often in these twelve oils (1955-63). Many may wonder, looking at the twisted caricatures he paints, why he bothers with a model at all. But he uses her to express the infinite changes and fundamental unity of the Picasso vision, turning her face every which way and examining it like the facets of a diamond. Through April 4.

DARREL AUSTIN--Perls, 1016 Madison Ave. at 78th. Austin casts a lunar spell: rarely does he paint a picture without a moon in it, and a full one at that. Capering in the silvery light are foxes, bulls, elephants, tigers-and maidens, round, ripe and waiting. Twenty-five oils. Through April 4.

JACQUES VILLON--Thaw, 50 East 78th. Death put an end last year to the more than 60 years in art that Villon called "a long love affair." It was a happy one that mellowed and matured with the man, and it is tellingly revealed by these 15 oil paintings. The earliest is a 1909 Portrait of the Artist; he is young, bearded, not yet taken with cubism. The latest is The Environs of Rouen, painted in 1960, luminous proof of how apt was his self-summation as a "cubist impressionist." Through April 18.

JEAN DUBUFFET--World House, 987 Madison Ave. at 77th. Dubuffet has rushed from mixed pastes and putties to butterfly-wing collages to painting with knives and forks. Here shown are examples of his spirit for adventure and experiment, including works from the Arabe, Texturologie and Personnage series. Oils, assemblages, gouaches and drawings, done between 1943 and 1960. Through April 11.

STILL LIFES--Schweitzer, 958 Madison Ave. at 75th. The stimulus of still life is ages old, the artist's response to it always new. Persuasive testimony to the fact: a collection that begins with Vanderhamen, a Spanish painter of Flemish ancestry who worked in Madrid more than 300 years ago, embraces Ruoppolo, Bernard, Lebasque, Marie Laurencin (a pink bouquet of roses on wood believed to be her only extant still life), Pechstein, Hartley and others, concludes with a contemporary Spaniard, Josep Roca. Through March 28.

RICHARD STANKIEWICZ--Stable, 33 East 74th. Dada takes the credit, but the ability to look at trash and find something of esthetic value begins with children. As a child, Stankiewicz played in a foundry dump; today he leads the sculptors who make assemblages of junk. Scavenging in scrapyards, rusting and welding the iron and steel he finds, he makes figures and abstractions. Says he: "I take something already degenerating, discarded, and then I make something beautiful of it. It should hit people over the head and make them ask, 'What is beauty?' " Through April 18.

FAIRFIELD PORTER--Tibor de Nagy, 149 East 72nd. Porter took his training at the Art Students League from Thomas Hart Benton, felt "you don't deserve to paint abstractly until you can paint representationally." But he admits that De Kooning has been a major influence. One painting, September Clouds, points up that affinity: an abstract rendering of nature, it suggests that Porter is ready to follow a new path. Through April 11.

LEON HARTL--eridot, 820 Madison Ave. at 69th. Neoimpressionism was a babe in the arms of Seurat when Hartl was born in Paris in 1889. But it seems to have influenced him even after he moved to the U.S. as a young man. He rains pointillist dots on his canvases and fills atmospheres with the pure breezes, smells and colors of a virgin nature. The bowls and vases are often the same ones he painted 30 years ago, the bouquets as fresh as if cut this morning. Through March 28.

SIDNEY GOODMAN--Dintenfass, 18 East 67th. With eerie light and pale colors, Goodman illuminates gloomy metaphors. His ghostly figures are either cramped in space or lost like insignificant specks. The Philadelphia painter, 28, has a tragic sense of life: The Walk suggests the death marches; a three-panel Trilogy seems to portray a man who enters a closet and hangs himself; The Play's ephemeral characters watch an agonizing struggle of love and death. His brushwork is fine, his chiaroscuro carefully controlled. Through April 11.

JOEL FALGUIERE--Hutton, 787 Madison Ave. at 67th. Twenty-two recent works by a Paris artist who shapes globs of paint to hold shadows and throw light over earthy abstractions and luminous cosmoscapes, making his thick pigments brightly fluorescent. Through April 4.

MIDTOWN

ANTONIO SAURA--Matisse, 41 East 57th. Says the Spanish painter: "Sometimes when I see a beautiful woman I almost lose consciousness! But painting is a way of accomplishing the impossible. For after all, what is an empty canvas? A bed, a nude. When I throw a blob of paint on my canvas, I am committing a rape. When I work, I become a monster." Brigitte Bardot, if she saw his portraits of her, would doubtless agree. Through April 4.

JEAN IPOUSTEGUY--Loeb, 12 East 57th. Split skulls and bashed-in faces underscore the theme of violence in this French sculptor's first one-man show in New York. Ipousteguy sculpts with a sure sense of balance and a sharp eye for basic paradoxes and brutal ironies. The Crab and the Bird captures in one movement the rapport between crawling and flying, and in David and Goliath, the giant lies upended while an armless David appeals sadly to the heavens: his own chest is crushed. Fourteen black bronzes. Through April 18.

GEORGE SEGAL--Green, 15 West 57th. Segal sets life-size plaster casts of his friends in a Pop-like environment of everyday objects. What he gets is not a likeness of life but a sense of the absence of it: the ashen figures are like fossils of previous lives, frozen in time. Also some pastel studies of bold nudes on colored paper. Through April 4.

THEOBALD--Partridge, 6 West 56th. "I think first of color, then of composition," says Theobald, a Parisian woman making her New York debut. She slathers vivid reds and blues on canvas with a palette knife, does the final shaping of her exuberant landscapes and restrained orchestra figures with a brush. Included: some attractive scenes of New York City. Through April 4.

JULES OLITSKI--Poindexter, 21 West 56th. Butterfly Kiss, Fatal Plunge, Pink Casanova, The Flaming Passion of Beverly Torrid. Carnegie Winner Olitski's titles sound more like lipsticks than paintings, but they are provocative. Butterfly Kiss, for example, is a yawning cavity of empty canvas that separates a pulsating orange blob from a passionate pink blip. Through March 28.

PAINTERS OF THE BEAUTIFUL--Durlacher, 538 Madison Ave. at 54th. "Cockney impudence," snorted Ruskin at Whistler's painting. Whistler sued and won. The arrows the Victorians flung at one another had more zing than their painting, which they tried to free from what they called the "claptrap" of emotions. Albert Moore, Charles Conder and Lord Leighton come close to succeeding; Whistler, fortunately, does not. Beauty without feeling, after all, is like being dressed up with no place to go. Some 30 works in various media. Through March 28.

LEONARD BASKIN--Associated American Artists, 605 Fifth Ave. at 49th. Ten etched portrait studies of Ensor, Bruegel, Callot and other figures from the past. As a portraitist, Baskin is incisive; crisscrossing a face as if tracing its nerve network, he seems to probe the subject's inner nature. His Munch is a memorable expressionistic achievement of the Norwegian painter's own aim to synthesize modern form and symbolic expression. Through April 11.

MUSEUMS

METROPOLITAN--Fifth Ave. at 82nd. "World's Fairs--the Architecture of Fantasy" makes a retrospective visit to 16 expositions by means of prints, photographs, posters and souvenirs. Also Dutch and Flemish paintings, and the Met's superb collection of 19th and 20th century French works.

FINCH COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART--62 East 78th. Fifty Venetian paintings from the 17th century range from Palma II Giovane, who worked in Titian's studio and is thought to have finished Titian's last Piet`a, to Sebastiano Ricci, the uncle and teacher of Marco Ricci, who set the style for 18th century Venetian landscape painting. Through April 30.

GALLERY OF MODERN ART--Columbus Circle at 59th. The elegant white marble museum opens with the pallid permanent collection of Museum Founder Huntington Hartford and a large exhibition (300 works) of the late Russian-born painter, Pavel Tchelitchew (see ART). Through April 22.

MUSEUM OF PRIMITIVE ART--15 West 54th. Ivory drums, carved canoe prows and paddles, dance shields and other ob jects from the Massim region of New Guinea. Also 60 tempera paintings of primitive sculpture by Mexican Miguel Covarrubias, an important scholar in the field. Through May 10.

WHITNEY--22 West 54th. A retrospective of the sculpture and drawings of Gaston Lachaise, the French-born American noted for his massive, busty women. Through April 4.

THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE--New School Art Center, 66 West 12th. The truism that the artist is concerned with society serves as an excuse to bring together some of the best realistic paintings --and a few not so realistic--of this century. The works range from Ben Shahn's famed The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti to Robert Rauschenberg's tribute to President Kennedy, Buffalo 1964. Through April 4.

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