Curated by Charles Wylie

Thomas Struth made his art-world debut with the late ’70s black-and-white street scenes he shot in such locales as Düsseldorf, New York, and Tokyo. In the ’80s, the Becher prodigy expanded to color photography, with individual and group portraits as well as large-scale images of museum-goers in situ. Most recently he has created almost unreal images of forests and jungles. As becomes apparent in work from each stage of his career—which is explored in this retrospective curated by the Dallas Museum of Art’s Charles Wylie—Struth recovers the word teeming for the vocabulary of art criticism.

— David Rimanelli

Curated by William Feaver

If ever there was an occasion to learn to stop worrying and love expressive figuration, this is it. Lucian Freud’s most comprehensive retrospective to date presents six decades of yummy, icky bodies rendered in yummy, icky paint, with subjects ranging from provincial lads and lasses to performance artist Leigh Bowery to the painter’s own fabulous family. Freud biographer William Feaver does the curatorial honors and is joined in the catalogue by painter Frank Auerbach and Tate Britain curator Lizzie Carey Thomas. On the way from angry young man to grand old master, Freud never softened the work’s alienation, sexuality, or aggression; he’s not getting older, he’s getting better.

— Katy Siegel

“Why have there been no great women artists?” Linda Nochlin asked famously—and a bit rhetorically—three decades ago. The standard reply usually involves male oppression and old-boy institutional bias. Add to that those relatively benign accidents of fate—if you’re Joan Mitchell, being in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g., France during the heyday of American abstraction), not to mention being an ornery person—and the deck is decidedly stacked. With a sixty-picture retrospective and a full-scale catalogue, the Whitney and freelance curator Jane Livingston aim to make the case for Mitchell. Headlining: a “compositionally daring” diptych as yet unseen outside the artist’s studio.

— Peter Plagens

Curated by Kristen Lubben

With his poetic evocations of industrialized northern New Jersey from the late ’60s and early ’70s, George Tice seems an unlikely choice of weapon for the International Center of Photography’s critically armed new curatorial regime. But there is an undeniable appeal to the photographer’s finely printed black-and-white pictures of nearly deserted urban oases like a White Castle burger joint and a Mobil gas station. Tice’s reputation took a hit with the rise of a less romantic landscape style epitomized by Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, and his life and work have taken some curious turns, too (e.g., his 1977 social-reportage book Artie Van Blarcum). Still, this exhibition organized by the ICP’s Kristen Lubben shows that his heart belongs to Jersey.

— Andy Grundberg

Curated by Yve-Alain Bois

With the Pompidou-organized “Henri Matisse–Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings” show alighting at the Saint Louis Art Museum (on the heels of the Pulitzer Foundation’s Kelly exhibition across town), not to mention the July SF MoMA survey of the artist’s work culled from the rich holdings of Bay Area collections, US fans of the artist have a lot to cheer about. Now, in an exhibition curated by Kelly authority Yve-Alain Bois (who also authored the accompanying catalogue), we can see 188 of the artist’s quirky assemblies. Around 1973 Kelly went through his files gathering sketches, clippings, and other ephemera, then mounted them in groups on fifteen-by-twenty-odd-inch gray boards. The resulting paste-ups prove that Kelly is one of the great “visualists” (his word) of our time.

— Harry Cooper

Curated by Paulo Herkenhoff

Maybe it has to do with the end of one century and the beginning of another, but lately artists and curators seem to have the issue of time on the brain. In this timely exhibition, MoMA curator Paulo Herkenhoff explores the gamut of temporal categories as they are reflected in contemporary art, including geologic time, history, personal memory, metabolism, experience, and duration. The thematic heavy lifting here is done by Herkenhoff’s conceptual organization. The curator has isolated the nearly fifty artists in his show into five broad areas, but will the art bear the weight of the ideas? See the show to find out. The clock is ticking.

— Katy Siegel

Matisse-Picasso? Haven’t we been down this road before—and recently? Art historian Yve-Alain Bois’s Kimbell Art Museum exhibition a few years back examined the relations between the two grands maîtres. How will this show—a joint production of the Tate, MoMA, the Pompidou, and the Musée Picasso under the respective direction of John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling, John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, and Anne Baldassari—advance the discussion? Either way, given the organizing institutions, the cumulative loans in themselves represent an embarrassment of riches.

— David Rimanelli

Curated by Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein

Museums and private collectors in New York are temporarily shedding their Gauguins—an exceptionally rich hoard—to supplement the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s own holdings in a nearly 120-piece survey of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and works on paper. Organized by Met curators Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, the show is just the latest of several recent manifestations of Gauguin’s perennial fascination. While the artist today may not have the creative grip still exerted by contemporaries such as Seurat and Cézanne, the unfolding twenty-year trajectory of his work—from imitative Sunday impressionist to exotic liberator—continues to enthrall.

— Richard Shone

Curated by Anne Ellegeood

Architecture: art. Art [architecture]. Architecture = Art? Where one fief ends and the other begins—and all the encroachment along the frontier—is becoming a fallback fascination in both weary camps. Into the fray comes “Out of Site.” Organized by the New Museum’s Anne Ellegood, the show focuses on “fictional architectural spaces and topographies” as elaborated by fifteen young artists—among them the brilliant Haluk Akakçe. There are imaginary lands, futuristic cityscapes (some critical, some just plain fun), and—what else?—the obligatory site-specific demonstrations of disciplinary irrelevance.

— Philip Nobel

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach

Forget Paris—and New York and London. Think Kwangju, Havana, and Tirana: dynamic cities where politics, class, and the market are in constant flux. This may spell bad news when it comes to living, but it’s ideal for making art. Or so argues P.S. 1 curator Klaus Biesenbach, whose exhibition considers one such locale, Mexico City. Biesenbach’s well-timed show examines the heady, often conflicted dialogue between the teeming, difficult, extraordinary city and the artists who live and work there, including Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderón, Gabriel Kuri, and Daniela Rossell.

— Meghan Dailey