Curated by Peter Galassi

It’s fitting, if inevitable, that a Lee Friedlander retrospective should originate at the Museum of Modern Art, an institution that championed his work early on (John Szarkowski put him in the historic 1967 “New Documents” show with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand) and has collected it in depth ever since. With some five hundred prints drawn from throughout Friedlander’s insanely prolific fifty-year career, the show is likely to be as unruly and unconventional as the work, which includes genre-busting portraiture, self-portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, and architectural studies, virtually all in black-and-white. This maverick traditionalist has quietly and relentlessly redefined the medium. At MoMA, he’s bound to make some noise.

Travels to the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Nov. 12, 2005–Feb. 12, 2006.

— Vince Aletti

Curated by Elisabeth Sussman

To look closely at the world is to understand that the line between familiar surface appearances and the complex, hidden structures that constitute them—between the “real” and the abstract—has never been as definitive as conventional wisdom would have it. Exploring this zone of indeterminacy via science, psychology, and hallucinatory symbolism, the eight artists in this show—including Franz Ackermann, Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie, and Terry Winters—are all supremely skilled mark makers who synthesize information in dazzlingly idiosyncratic ways. The ninety-odd works on view are accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Sussman, Caroline A. Jones, and Katy Siegel and a story by novelist Ben Marcus.

— Jeffrey Kastner

Curated by Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker, Brigitte Murnau, and Karole Vail

The Museum of Non-Objective Painting was eventually renamed for its benefactor, Solomon R. Guggenheim, but its first curator and founding director (1939–52), visionary and champion, was the German artist Hilla Rebay. It was Rebay who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build “a temple to non-objectivity” and who supervised the museum’s inaugural show, “Art of Tomorrow.” This double retrospective recreates part of that exhibition and presents Rebay’s own collages, drawings, and paintings.

Travels in two parts to co-organizing institutions Schlossmuseum Murnau and Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Sept. 8, 2005–Jan. 8, 2006; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, May 4–July 30, 2006.

— Frances Richard

Curated by Joachim Pissarro

Displacing the monographic privileging of the solitary genius in favor of fraternal pairings, MoMA is following the success of “Matisse Picasso” with a show devoted to the twenty-year artistic relationship between Cézanne and Pissarro. The exhibition (organized by the latter’s great-grandson, now a MoMA curator) offers as evidence of dialogic contact and mutual response some eighty-five paintings and eight drawings—portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, some of which were made when the artists worked side by side in the regions of Pontoise and Auvers. Get ready for more long lines!

Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oct. 20, 2005–Jan. 16, 2006; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Feb. 27–May 28, 2006.

— Suzanne Hudson

Curated by Katherine French

For the last three and a half decades, Joan Snyder has fused process (whether desultory or earnest) with politics, and the resulting works, nearly thirty of which are on view for this survey at the Jewish Museum, have made Snyder a doyenne of feminist painting and an increasingly likely subject for art-historical canonization. Betraying the marks of their making, Snyder’s best works play the materiality of language against its signifying possibilities in gestures that are by turns surprisingly intimate and barbarously significant. Her graphic utterances—most recently against the war in Iraq—are often performative accusations, scrawled salvos that refuse to be just writing on the wall.

Travels to the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, Nov. 10, 2005–Feb. 5, 2006.

— Suzanne Hudson

Curated by Andrew Bolton and Harold Kota

Perhaps nothing in culture more effectively validates the Platonic distrust in physical forms than fashion. By its very definition, fashion hinges on a temporality that condemns its participants to imminent outdatedness. One name in couture has, however, managed to achieve household status while always remaining à la mode, and that is Chanel. Deemed a reassessment of aesthetic values rather than a retrospective, this show spins through eighty years of Chanel history (1920–2000) and more than fifty dresses from the label’s Parisian archive—naturally, with matching shoes and accessories. The sleek modernism of Coco Chanel’s wool suits and quilted-leather bags is contrasted with current house-heir Karl Lagerfeld’s audacious postmodernist rhyming on his predecessor’s fabrics and cuts.

— Christopher Bollen

Curated by Mary Ceruti, Anthony Huberman, and Franklin Sirmans

Overlapping with the UCLA Hammer’s show on new sculpture in LA, “Make It Now” offers the bicoastal a chance to compare and contrast the state of sculpture, East and West. Those grounded in New York will have plenty to absorb in Queens, where Ceruti, Huberman, and independent curator Sirmans present some fifty works—most made within the last year, almost all specifically for the show—by about thirty up-and-coming object makers, including Ester Partegas, Gedi Sibony, and Nicole Cherubini. Despite the eclectic roster, this is not merely a here’s-what’s-new survey: The curators argue for the relevance of specific strategies, such as the unironic revival of conventions like the monument and the pedestal.

— Elizabeth Schambelan