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POINTILLIST PAINTINGS—Hirschl & Adler, 21 East 67th. More than 60 works by 19 exponents of the neo-impressionist technique that built up form through the juxtaposition of tiny stippled dots of brightly contrasting colors. Among the masters of the school: Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Lucie Cousturier, Henri-Edmond Cross, Hippolyte Petitjean, Camille and Lucien Pissarro. Through Dec. 14.
PAINTING AND DRAWING THE NUDE, PART I: THE MALE—Banfer, 23 East 67th. Adam as depicted by 23 U.S. artists. Besides an assortment of mundane classical studies there are some forceful skinscapes: Jacob Landau's unbound Prometheus agonized by fire and trance; Paul Cadmus' eerie, restive painting, The Shower; John Fenton's intimations of mortality in Death of a Bullfighter. Through Dec. 14.
IRANIAN CERAMICS—Asia House, 112 East 64th. More than 100 pieces of Persian pottery and porcelain, dating from the 4th millennium B.C. into the 19th century A.D. Through Dec. 15.
ARTHUR JOSEPHSON—Seiferheld, 158 East 64th. Fifty drawings in silverpoint, ink, tempera and wax encaustic by a facile, delicate draftsman. Included are some out-of-this-world portraits of Moondog, the blind musician clad in army blankets, who haunts Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas. Also 16th to 19th century old master drawings. Through Dec. 31.
MIDTOWN
ROBERT BEAUCHAMP—Green, 15 West 57th. Crimson-stained harpies perform jungle witchery and nature attends the gleeful, macabre rites. The artist is the real sorcerer: his brash and bleeding colors, laid on with the free brushstroke of the German expressionists, are bewitching. Besides the oils, some drawings in pencil and crayon. Through Dec. 14.
HEDDA STERNE—Parsons, 24 West 57th.
By the former wife of Cartoonist Saul Steinberg: bands of luminous grey and beige that subtly transport the viewer to romantic visions of receding waters, misty skies and diminishing days in 14 synthetic Horizons. Through Dec. 14.
WILLIAM PALMER—Midtown, 11 East 57th. Palmer is a teacher as well as a painter, and art students have much to learn from his glowing use of underpainting and subtle glazes. The show includes 25 new landscapes. Through Dec. 21.
SALVADOR DALI—Knoedler, 14 East 57th.
The enraging, engaging Spanish surrealist with well-beeswaxed handlebars has arrived in Manhattan with ten surprises in tow. Samples: Galacidalacidesoxiribunu-cleicacid, Twist in the studio of Velasquez, and Fifty abstract pictures which as seen from two yards change into three Lenines masquerading as Chinese and as seen from six yards appear as the head of a royal tiger. Somehow, he frequently manages to top his titles. Through Dec. 26.
FRANZ KLINE—Janis, 15 East 57th. At 40, the burly painter was unknown beyond New York's 10th Street galleries, but in the decade before his death last year he earned worldwide recognition as a dynamo of abstract expressionism. Mostly on loan and rarely shown are 30 paintings, spanning his heyday, from 1952 to 1962, which provide in Kline's first New York posthumous show a survey of his black-and-white clashes as well as some uncharacteristic excursions in flamboyant color. Through Dec. 28.