Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Sept. 6-Nov. 29, 2009
Twelve works by the Uruguay-born modernist, selected from Houston collections, in a show coordinated with the exhibition of Torres-García works in wood at the Menil Collection [see below]
Curator: Mari Carmen Ramírez

Getty Center
Sept. 9, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010
The entirety of Penn’s "Small Trades" series, depicting tradespeople posing in their work clothes, exhibited together for the first time -- 155 gelatin silver prints and 97 platinum prints
Curators: Virginia Heckert, Anne Lacoste
Catalogue: 272, pp., $49.95

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sept. 10-Nov. 29, 2009
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage from Amsterdam to New York, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum sends the legendary Vermeer work to NYC, to be seen alongside the Met’s own Vermeers and works by Pieter de Hooch, Gabriël Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Emanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet and Hendrick Sorgh
Curator: Walter Liedtke
Catalogue: The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer, $9.95
Funding: William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Daphne Recanati Kaplan and Thomas S. Kaplan, Bernard and Louise Palitz

Morgan Library & Museum
Sept. 11, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
100+ works by William Blake, including 21 watercolors from his illustrations for the Book of Job, and 12 drawings illustrating John Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso
Curators: Charles Ryskamp, Anna Lou Ashby, Cara Denison
Funding: Fay and Geoffrey Elliott

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Sept. 12, 2009-Jan. 31, 2010
Works by Philadelphia photographers Will Brown, Emmet Gowin, Catherine Jansen, Will Larson, David Lebe, Sol Mednick, Ray K. Metzker and Carol Taback
Curators: Peter Barberie, Julia Dolan

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 12-Dec. 20, 2009
Photos, magazines and artist books by avant-garde pioneers in post-War Japanese art, known for their association with Provoke magazine: Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu
Curator: Lisa Sutcliffe
Funding: Carpenter Foundation

Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 13, 2009-Apr. 12, 2010
The full group of Claude Monet’s late paintings from the MoMA collection, plus two loans of closely related works, in a show that debuted at the High Museum of Art in June 2009
Curator: Ann Temkin
Funding: Hanjin Shipping

Whitney Museum of American Art
Sept. 17, 2009-Jan. 17, 2010
130 paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculptures by O’Keeffe, focusing on her abstract work, alongside Alfred Stieglitz’s photos of O’Keeffe and excerpts from the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence
Curators: Barbara Haskell, Bruce Robertson, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Sasha Nicholas
Catalogue: 256 pp., $65
Funding: Henry Luce Foundation, others
Tour: Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Feb. 6-May 9, 2010; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28-Sept. 10, 2010

Guggenheim Museum
Sept. 18, 2009-Jan. 13, 2010
Ca. 100 works by abstract art pioneer Vasily Kandinsky
Curator: Tracey Bashkoff, Annegret Hoberg, Christian Derouet
Catalogue: $55, 320 pp.
Tour: This show has already appeared at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and the Centre Georges Pompidou

Art Institute of Chicago
Sept. 19, 2009-Jan. 24, 2010
Spotlighting the work of three contemporary photography artists

Dallas Museum of Art
Sept. 20, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
40+ examples of the "artistic furniture" Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936), who merged the "abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau styling" with the "boldly direct forms characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement"
Curator: Joseph Cunningham
Catalogue: 304 pp., $65
Tour: This show has already appeared at the Milwaukee Art Museum; it continues to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Jan. 30-Apr. 25, 2010; the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, Ca., May 22-Sept. 6, 2010; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Oct. 19, 2010-Jan. 23, 2011

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sept. 22-Nov. 29, 2009
Sixty works of art by the Rococo master and his contemporaries, showing "the tension between an imagery of power, associated with the court of Louis XIV, and a more optimistic and mildly subversive imagery of pleasure that was developed in opera-ballet and theater early in the 18th century"
Curator: Katharine Baetjer, Georgia J. Cowart
Catalogue: 176 pp., $35
Funding: Florence Gould Foundation

Walker Art Center
Sept. 24, 2009-Feb. 28, 2010
Work by the artist who recently represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale, including a new installation Yearning Melancholy Red (2008), co-commissioned by L.A.’s REDCAT
Curator: Doryun Chong
Funding: Linda and Lawrence Perlman

Menil Collection
Sept. 24, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
Focusing on Torres-Garcia’s works in wood from the 1920s to the 1940s, alongside a selection of oil paintings and drawings
Curators: Mari Carmen Ramírez, Josef Helfenstein
Catalogue: 256 pp., $65
Funding: Meredith and Cornelia Long, Sysco Corporation, Mike and Diane Cannon, Olive M. Jenney, National Endowment for the Arts, Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation, Clare Casademont and Michael Metz, William J. Hill, W.S. Bellows Construction Corporation, Hotel Granduca, Wortham Foundation, Houston Endowment, Fayez Sarofim & Company, Sterling-Turner Foundation, City of Houston
Tour: San Diego Museum of Art, Feb. 20-May 30, 2010

Yale Center for British Art
Sept. 24, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
The life, world and work of Mary Delany (1700-1788), best known for her almost 1,000 botanical "paper mosaics," now housed in the British Museum
Curators: Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Mark Laird
Catalogue: 416 pp., $75
Tour: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, Feb. 18-May 1, 2010

Saint Louis Art Museum
Sept. 25-Dec. 13, 2009
Small exhibition illustrating the impact of Japanese artists like Hiroshige, Sharaku and Utamaro on the likes Mary Cassatt, Henri Riviere, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh and James McNeil Whistler
Curator: Eric Lutz

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Sept. 26, 2009-Jan. 31, 2010
The diverse influences of architecture on contemporary art, in the work of Michaël Borremans, Matthew Buckingham, Los Carpinteros, Catharina van Eetvelde, Jakob Kolding, Julie Mehretu, Paul Noble, Sarah Oppenheimer, Matthew Ritchie, Hiraki Sawa, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Rachel Whiteread and Saskia Olde Wolbers
Curator: Robin Clark
Funding: David Guss, others

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Sept. 27, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
Twenty paintings by the 18th-century artist Luis Meléndez (1716-1780), known for virtuoso depictions of everyday objects, who aspired to be royal painter to the king but died a pauper 
Curator: J. Patrice Marandel
Catalogue: 192 pp., $60
Tour: This show has already appeared at the National Gallery of Art; it continues to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan. 31-May 9, 2010

Hammer Museum, UCLA
Sept. 29-Jan. 3, 2010
Video by Chinese artist Chen Qiulin, documenting the rapid urbanization of the area around her home in Sichuan
Curator: James Elaine

Museum of Arts & Design
Sept. 30, 2009-Jan. 31, 2010
200+ pins from the collection of the former Secretary of State
Catalogue: 176 pp. $40
Funding: Bren Simon