UPTOWN

NORRIS EMBRY--Elkon, 1063 Madison Ave. at 80th. Embry lifts the curtain on a drama in which shadows and echoes are the actors, and reality is as fleeting as a specter. With charred cinders for eyes, a face floats freely into space, tilting wanly as it rises, while tiny robed figures wander aimlessly in streams of nervous color. Embry affirms this disressing vision with a bold, negative gesture: he signs his works NO. Thirty small monotypes, mixed media and oils. Through May 16.

GRAHAM SUTHERLAND--Rosenberg, 20 East 79th. There is nothing pastoral about Sutherland's nature: a praying mantis peers from a wicked void of scarlet, a skull dangles in a tapestry of leaves and blue sky, a snake sneaks up to a formal fountain, a torso flails agains: gravity. In his own words, Britain's topflight painter makes "emotional paraphrases of reality." They have never been more horrible or beautiful. Twenty-five recent oils. Through June 5.

GERALD GLADSTONE--Graham, 1014 Madison Ave. at 78th. A young Canadian sculptor sees the universe as rigid and definite in shape, favors the cone as a fundamental form. His welded-steel Galaxies, laced with a network of rods and discs, make lively geometric studies of space and time. Through May 23.

STEPHEN GREENE--Staempfli, 47 East 77th. "There is always something terrible happening in a beautiful world," says Greene. As a figurative painter he showed it by placing live bodies in coffins. Now he abstracts the figure, with a dismembered limb or an amorphous heap of flesh leaves only the sense of the human presence. Recent works, flooded with clear uncluttered color, and drawings. Through May 23.

WALTER MEIGS--Nordness, 831 Madison Ave. at 69th. Meigs' paintings make an alluring invitation to Greece where he has lived the past two years. He often plays sea green against sky blue, counterpoints the delicate sheen of acrylic polymer with the coarseness of his mixed me dia to create spatial ambiguities in Aegean landscapes and seascapes. Through May 9.

SAM FRANCIS--Jackson, 32 East 69th. Francis translates the furious vitality of his abstract expressionism into bright, brash prints. Reds, yellows, blues and greens splash across new lithographs; one, Bright Jade, Gold, Ghost, resplendent in five colors, is shown in five variations. Through May 23.

JEAN XCERON--Fried, 40 East 68th. A major artistic talent, Xceron, 74, left Greece at 14 to study art in the U.S., later spent ten formative years in Paris. A colorful sampling of his graceful cubist abstractions is given in recent oils, water-colors and drawings composed with lyrical lines in delicate pastels. Through May 23.

ARTISTS FOR CORE--American Federation of Arts, 41 East 65th. Just about everyone who is anyone on the New York art scene--some 200 artists ranging from Agostini to Zorach and including Motherwell, Marisol, Rothko and Rauschenberg --has contributed paintings and sculptures for the third annual exhibition and sale to benefit the Congress of Racial Equality. Through May 16.

ART OF NEPAL--Asia House, 112 East 64th. The first major exhibition of Nepalese art spans 14 centuries. Limestone sculptures of classical simplicity, gilded idols adorned with precious stones, elaborate cloth paintings of mandalas, the Buddhist diagram for spiritual reintegration. Through Aug. 30.

PHILIP EVERGOOD--Gallery 63, 721 Madison Ave. at 63rd. American-born, English-educated (Eton, Cambridge). Evergood saturates his paintings with biting wit and sharp social commentaries. His sensuous figures are caught in a Rabelaisian revelry of human rapacity and foolishness. Among the oils, watercolors and drawings: a wistful Look Homeward, Marilyn. Through May 23.

MIDTOWN

PIET MONDRIAN--Frumkin, 32 East 57th. Mondrian depicted nature--before he stripped it to its bare essentials--in scenes of Dutch windmills, rivers and forests. These drawings and oils, done between 1905 and 1908, show keen insights and rhythmic vitality in a self-assured style, but offer little indication of the plastic purist he was to become (through May 23). For that, see "Mondrian, De Stijl and Their Impact," at Marlborough-Gerson, 41 East 57th, where his spatial austerity and its potential for beauty is fully realized in his own and in the works of 22 followers. Through May 16.

ALBERT MARQUET--Knoedler, 14 East 57th. Matisse said of him: "He is our Hokusai." But Marquet, though cunning and concise with lines, was a painter more dexterous than daring. He was also well-traveled, painted the harbors of Hamburg, Le Havre, Naples, Algiers with a tourist's sweeping gaze, as well as Paris scenes. One hundred works cover 49 years. Through May 29.

MODEST CUIXART--Bonino, 7 West 57th. Spanish Painter Cuixart mixes his own concoction of materials, juxtaposes baroque designs with flesh-colored cubist construction. Sensuous red and black lines speak of darkness and calamity. Through May 23.

HUGH TOWNLEY--Pace, 9 West 57th. A Brown University art professor nails together all kinds of wood (walnut, oak, mahogany, cherry, maple, rosewood) and, with whalebone and horn, exploits the different shapes, grains and tones to endow his abstract anomalies with a curious vitality. Says he: "I want a thing that provokes and tantalizes and satisfies ... a bitchy piece of sculpture that lives." On view: 15 such pieces in relief and in the round. Through May 16.

WORLD'S FAIR ARTISTS--Parsons, 24 West 57th. Sculpture and paintings of ten U.S. artists whose murals adorn the exterior of the New York State Pavilion: Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Chamberlain, Kelly, Liberman, Indiana, Warhol, Rosenquist, Agostini, Mallary. Through May 23.

GEORGE ORTMAN--Wise, 50 West 57th. In "illuminations" and painting constructions, Ortman juggles signs and symbols into colorful allegories. Also drawings, prints, sculpture. Through May 23.

GEORGE SPAVENTA--Poindexter, 21 West 56th. New York Sculptor Spaventa's figures are malformed blobs of metal that look as if they were still taking shape--or beginning to melt. But his elongated, bulbous nudes are balanced firmly on broad bases, seem to grow naturally out of their own bulky substance. More than 60 small bronzes, also some drawings. Through May 16.

GEORGES BRAQUE--Associated American Artists, 605 Fifth Ave. at 49th. A first U.S. showing of 22 color prints done for French Poet Rene Char's Letter a Amoroso, the last lithographs Braque made, signed by him last July shortly before his death. Through May 16.

MUSEUMS

JEWISH--Fifth Ave. at 92nd. Fifty drawings of Arshile Gorky span his career from the early portraits, through an esthetic pilgrimage that visited Cezanne, Picasso, Miro and others, to the time when his imagination was ripe and he became in turn an influence on other artists. Through June 30.

GUGGENHEIM-- Fifth Ave. at 89th. The cities in which Van Gogh lived are landmarks in his style. His nephew's collection (120 works) offers a unique opportunity to follow the painter's path. Leaving the bleak peasantry of Nuenen (The Potato Eaters) for Antwerp and Paris, his palette brightens. When he reaches Aries in the south of France it bursts into the brilliant light of high noon (Sunflowers, The Harvest, his own Yellow House). Van Gogh spent the last two months of his life at Auvers-sur-Oise, there painted skies deepening with twilight. Through June 28.

METROPOLITAN--Fifth Ave. at 82nd. A two-sided Raphael drawing believed lost for nearly 100 years and purchased by the Met for $89,600 highlights a small show of recent acquisitions (through May 30). In the 18th century, Josiah Wedgwood revolutionized the potter's art with creamy earthenware that he made for shopkeepers as well as royalty; 250 pieces, the first exhibition of its kind, include the humbler versions and some made for Catherine the Great. Through Sept. 27.

FRICK COLLECTION--Fifth Ave. at 70th.

Especially appealing: William Blake's watercolors (through May 24), Houdon's perfectly balanced terra-cotta sculpture of Diana the Huntress, Bellini's St. Francis in Ecstasy, Holbein's Sir Thomas More, La Tour's Education oj the Virgin, Fragonard's series of canvases representing "The Progress of Love," commissioned and rejected by Madame Du Barry.

GALLERY OF MODERN ART--Columbus Cir cle at 59th. A mammoth exhibition of the late Russian-born painter, Pavel Tchelit-chew (through May 24); a comprehensive survey of Pre-Raphaelite painting that includes Founders William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; also, a 50-work showing of French Sculptor Antoine Bourdelle who, before his death in 1929, did 21 agonized studies of Beethoven, some of them on view. Both through May 31.

BROOKLYN--Eastern Parkway. Watercolor was the first medium that Joseph Mal-lord William Turner attempted and he continued in it long after he became England's great romantic painter. This major exhibition of his watercolors, lent by the British Museum, embraces his genius from the disciplined draftsmanship of his student days (the earliest was drawn at 14) to later seascapes so impressionistic in color and spare of design as to border on the abstract. Through May 31.

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