NEW YORK – The nose rarely figures in the sensory experience of a museum visitor. That is about to change at one New York City museum.

The Center of Olfactory Art dedicated to scent as an art form was recently launched at the Museum of Arts and Design.

“What we’re going to be able to do … with the center is place scent directly in the mainstream of art history and demonstrate that it is the equal of paintings, sculpture, architecture and all other artistic media,” said Chandler Burr, the former fragrance critic of The New York Times whom the museum said it hired as its – and the nation’s – first curator of olfactory art.

More a curatorial department within the museum than a separate entity, the museum created the new center because “scent is a really interesting part of the world of design,” said museum director Holly Hotchner.

An appeal to the senses

It fits the institution’s DNA as a “sensuous, sensory-orientated museum” where patrons can touch and feel many of the objects. And, of course, smell is as much a part of the senses,” she added.

The center will present its first exhibition, “The Art of Scent, 1889-2011″ next November, examining the reformulation and innovation of olfactory works by some of history’s best-known perfumers through 10 seminal scents.

An audio guide, narrated by Burr, will explain the context in which they were created. Each perfume will be identified only by artist and year to allow visitors to appreciate each as an independent work.

And don’t expect fancy fragrance bottles, brand perfumes, design graphics and packaging to be part of the exhibit.

Visitors to “The Art of Scent” will experience each fragrance along a 6-foot-wide path that will follow the curvature of the gallery wall where buttons on a specially-designed atomizing machine will release “the work of art.”

With the center’s launch, the MAD is the only museum to study fragrance as art. A museum in Grasse, France, focuses on the history of perfume and another perfume museum in Madrid “is entirely about bottles,” said Burr, who is also the scent editor at GQ magazine and the author of two books on scent.

Among the featured perfumes is “Jicky,” one of the first to use non-organic ingredients,and pave the way to the modern era of fragrances. Designed in 1889 by Aime Guerlain, Burr called it “the first work of modern perfume art … and the first major perfume to use synthetic molecules that freed the scent artist from nature.”

“Jicky is one of the great neoclassicist, romanticist works of olfactory art of the late 19th century,” he said. “It’s an expression in this artistic medium of exactly the same aesthetic concern and intellectual concern and the artistic style used by (Jean-Auguste-Dominique) Ingres in painting and used in music by (Frederic) Chopin.”

Creating art

Scent artists or perfumers, colloquially known as “The Nose,” are fragrance composers or painters. Among the masters featured in the exhibition will be Jean-Claude Ellena, whom Burr called “one of the most important artists alive in this medium.”

“He is intentionally wiping away any reference to nature, effacing and erasing natural landmarks. He is doing work that is cutting edge in it’s forcing us to experience and rethink works of oflactory art,” he added.

Other leading perfumers whose work will be shown include Olivier Cresp, the creator of “Angel,” and Alberto Morillas and Annie Buzantian whose “Pleasures” made the use of a carbon dioxide extraction that’s considered a major technological advance in the art of perfume-making.

A pivotal role of the center also will be to present public programs, including informal discussions with scent artists and perfume industry executives talking “about the tension between olfactory works of art and perfume as product,” said Burr.

Future shows will include a retrospective on Ellena’s work; a technology exhibit demonstrating the use of synthetic molecules in perfume making; one on the raw materials that constitute fragrances such as Ugandan vanilla and Peruvian pink peppercorn. Many of the exhibitions will travel to other museums, Burr said.

The new center also will have an artist in residence program in which perfumers will work and be observed in MAD’s artist studios creating new fragrances over a period of several months.

Because most people don’t associate perfume with art, Hotchner said, the center will introduce them to the creative work of “very serious, very talented and very sought-after designers who are artists who create scent – and have for hundreds of years.”

:The Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition “Glorious Sky: Herbert Katzman’s New York,” the first major museum retrospective of this Twentieth Century American expressionist painter, is on view through February 6.

Born in Chicago, Katzman (1923–2004), rose to prominence in the 1950s in New York, where he exhibited at the Downtown Gallery and in the landmark exhibition “Fifteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art. Through his early career, Katzman exhibited with such major Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, yet he remained committed to a figurative mode of painting, and most consistently, to depictions of New York City’s built environment.

“Glorious Sky” includes nearly 90 paintings and works on paper, featuring images of the city that, over the course of more than 50 years, became the artist’s enduring muse. The rivers, bays and bridges under New York’s changing skies became recurrent motifs in Katzman’s work, and New York landmarks were transformed through his pictorial technique into emotive images.

Katzman studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1946. Inspired by European expressionism, Katzman left Chicago for Paris, where he lived for three years supported in part by the GI Bill. It was in Paris that the artist absorbed firsthand the lessons of European Modernism, developing a hybrid style that combined representations of place with abstracted forms and brushwork.

Katzman returned to the United States in 1950 and settled in New York. Almost immediately his work came to the attention of Edith Halpert, owner of the prestigious Downtown Gallery. It was through Halpert’s contacts and an article in Life magazine that Katzman came to the attention of collectors and curators nationwide. Joseph Hirshhorn figured among the artist’s first patrons, and his work was acquired by major American museums, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Among the most powerful works on view are large-scale drawings from his later career, and tiny, never-before-exhibited drawings, created at the end of his life. These exquisite drawings, made after September 11, 2001, are small — small enough to fit in the artist’s hand — with extraordinary detail depicting the view from Katzman’s studio overlooking the Hudson and the site of the former World Trade Center. Precious examples of the artist’s work, they were made when his deteriorating health forced him to give up working in oils. Katzman died in his studio on October 15, 2004, a drawing of New York Harbor on the table in front of him.

The Museum of the City of New York is at 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. For more information, 212-534-1672 or http://www.mcny.org/ .