MUSEUM VENUES: THE BEST OF NEW YORk (c) By Polly Guerin

Museum venues percolate with extravagant exhibitions from the Terror of the Soul to Rockefeller's Vision and photography visionaries. It's the best of New York, and Only in New York my friends. Here’s the scoop!!

EDGAR ALLAN POE: TERROR OF THE SOUL The works of Edgar Allan Poe have frightened and thrilled readers for more than 150 years and continues to enchant and intrigue today’s followers. The Terror of the Soul, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, through January 26, 2014, brings together more than one hundred items related to Poe’s poetry, fiction and literary criticism, and explores his profound influence on his contemporaries and later generations of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Valdimir Nabokov, and Terry Southern. “The common perception that Edgar Allan Poe was a writer solely with tales of the macabre and grotesque fails to do justice to the full range of this extraordinary talent,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Poe was also a superb literary critic, and early pioneer of detective fiction, and a celebrated poet. On view will be such works as “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” in Poe’s own hand; one of the earliest paintings of “The Raven,” the first printing of “The Cask of Amontillado,” and an unprecedented three copies of Tamerlane, Poe’s earliest work and one of the rarest books in American Literature. The Poe Double feature films Nov. 8 at 7pm include adaptations of short stories, House of Usher and Murders in the Rue Morgue. At 225 Madison Ave. , at 35th Street. www.themorgan.org

THE NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER VISION: In Pursuit of the Best. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) celebrates the genesis of its permanent collection with a special exhibition that opened this week and runs through October 5, 2014. Highlighting some 50 masterpieces and many unpublished documents select from the more than 3,000 Rockefeller gifts reveals his vision for The Museum of Primitive Art, the first institution dedicated entirely to the artistic excellence of the arts of AAOA. “A generation before ‘globalism’ became a household name, Nelson Rockefeller’s vision for The Museum of Primitive Art was to make evident the enormous spectrum of artistic absent in the Met’s fine art holdings,” said Alisa LaGamma, Curator in Charge of the Dept. From the America’s: a ceramic ‘Baby’ figures, from Oceanic Solomon Island Shields with mother of pearl inlay, from Africa: a monumental D’mba headdress from Guineas and a Tlingit knife from Alaska. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue. www.metmuseum.org

MoMA'S NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2013 highlights eight contemporary artists whose works expand the definition of photography in the 21st Century. The exhibition held through January 6, 2014, features 762 recent works: the photographer’s porous practices---grounded in photographic books, mass media, photomontage, music, film and science---mark a shift in the understanding of “what a picture could be. The artists selected for this year’s exhibition include Annette Kelm, Lisa Oppenheim, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, to name a few. “Understanding the idea that there has never been just one type of photography,” Roxanna Marcoci, curator, says, “The artists in this exhibition explore reversals between abstraction and representation, documentary and conceptual processes, the uniquely handmade and the mechanically reproducible, analogue and digital techniques. Brendan Fowler (American, b. 1978) is a musician who has been practicing as a visual artist since 2008. In his signature works, Fowler overlaps up to four framed pictures by literally crashing one through another, mixing photography, sculpture, and performance. In her series of photographs "It’s Not My Body" (2011), Josephine Pryde (British, b. 1967) references both the history of the darkroom experiments and contemporary medical imaging techniques. At 11 W. 53 Street. www.MoMA.org

Ta Ta darlings!! A Poe’s Terror of the Soul is my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.

Author: Polly Guerin, The Cooper-Hewitt Dynasty of New York (History Press 2012)