It was a tough year for museums, with endowments if not necessarily attendance down at many, and layoffs, furloughs, and exhibition cancellations looming as real possibilities if not realities. But that didn’t stop institutions worldwide from putting on some groundbreaking, soulful exhibitions. Here in New York, we were treated to surveys of greats from Wassily Kandinsky to Francis Bacon to Marlene Dumas to William Eggleston; scores of pivotal performances; and debate-provoking group shows like the New Museum’s “Younger than Jesus” and “After Nature.” Here are a few more of our favorites from 2009.

“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective” at the Museum of Modern Art, March 1 – May 11, 2009

Over Martin Kippenberger’s too-short career, which MoMA catalogued in all of its shambolic glory early, he cranked out a panoply of memorable self-portraits. In an early photograph, he is gingerly astride a horse, cutting a handsome if too-pretty profile for the landscape of the American West behind him. In a late painting, he is a paunchy, middle-aged man, stripped to his white boxer shorts. But there is, for me, no more iconic depiction of Kippenberger than the one he farmed out to a sign painter in 1981 in which he sits regally on a run-down black leather couch on a New York street corner. Clad in a grey suit — the very ideal of elegance despite the looming heap of garbage bags within arm’s reach — he appears to rest only momentarily, ready to bound off on another adventure, to a new hotel, on whose stationary he would could quickly dash off new drawings. We often say that the art world splintered apart in the 1970s, forgetting that artists and their projects remained largely intact. Kippenberger was among the first artists to drop such commitments, wandering from one medium and style to another, a tendency best exemplified in the sprawling installation that filled MoMA’s atrium, which comprised furniture ranging from a lifeguard chair to a 1973 Gerhard Richter painting that he had rather unceremoniously turned into a table. Whatever contemporary art has become, Kippenberger is one of the chief figures responsible. —Andrew Russeth

“Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sept. 10 – Nov. 29

There are currently only around 30 paintings by Johannes Vermeer in the world (the imprecision deriving from uncertainty about the authorship of a few works and the fate of at least one stolen piece). I propose that their current custodians form a partnership and agree to rotate the paintings among themselves on a regular basis, so that they can enjoy the same pleasure that was bestowed on the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its visitors this year when Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum graciously loaned Vermeer’s Milkmaid in celebration of the 400th anniversary of New York’s founding. The exhibition’s slightly heavy-handed title and its curator’s insistence that the sublimely tranquil scene hid raunchy secrets notwithstanding, this 350-year-old wonder, painted when Vermeer was just 25 years old, was the year’s finest gift. —AR

“Kenneth Anger” at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, Feb. 22 – Sept. 21, 2009

This show was successful not only as a survey of an influential American filmmaker, but also as a sensory extravaganza that allowed viewers both to get a broad overview of his oeuvre and intimately experience the work. The exhibition was mainly housed in one large, dimly lit lounge-like room covered in red vinyl that emitted a pungent plastic odor. Hanging screens and TV monitors often resting on the floor or with accompanying low-lying platforms allowed visitors to sit comfortably and become engrossed in films such as Pleasure Dome (1954-66) and Scorpio Rising (1963). The immersive environment was a strong complement to Anger’s saturated colors, the sexual associations of the vinyl playing perfectly into the baroque splendor of the bikers, leather-chapped crotches, and sailors’ hard, tattooed biceps present in Anger’s videos. The scattered installation of screens allowed the show to be viewed in its totality as a massive homage to excess and camp, but also made it possible to watch each video at close range by moving from platform to platform. Creating a space as intense as the videos themselves easily could have been a bad, distracting move, but in this case, all of the elements came together as a perfectly overdone container for the tone and scope of the videos themselves. —Amber Vilas

“The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 21 – August 2, 2009

The Met squashed criticism this year for its lack of significant contemporary-art exhibitions in its lineup with “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” a compelling exhibition of works by artists who have contributed to our view of the art world today. While the original “Pictures” show, organized by Douglas Crimp at the New York nonprofit Artists Space in 1977, included pieces by Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, and Robert Longo, this incarnation contained 160 works by 30 artists who have been inundated with a postwar consumer diet of advertising, movies, television, and pop music, but educated in the intellectual, visually stark practices of Minimal and Conceptual Art. As a result, the “Pictures” artists created playful, sometimes ironic or skeptical reinterpretations of the images that surrounded them. This survey, laid out in rough chronological order, was a great examination of the underlying themes and concerns that motivated them. The ideas they worked with are connected enough to the influences impacting today’s young artists to be worth thinking about, but far enough in the past to approach with critical distance. —AV

James Ensor at the Museum of Modern Art, June 28 – Sept 21, 2009

It really wasn’t until this career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that the greater masses got a good look at James Ensor, one of the great outlier geniuses of modern art in the late 19th century. The hard-to-pin-down Belgian started as a great realist and naturalist but abandoned that direction early on, becoming the leader of the avant-garde Belgian painters Les Vingt (The Twenty). When several of its members converted to neo-Impressionism (a la Seurat and Monet), Ensor bitterly ditched the group to become the “anti-Seurat” painter. Masks and bones became specialties, he saw more interesting possibilities in what one can’t see than what one can, and he used this opportunity to fill his canvases with perverse, satirical jokes and bizarre macabre material (i.e. winged skeletons, ruling classes defecating off walls), mocking and confronting death and mortality and criticizing contemporary society and the privileged. The show, installed chronologically, from Ensor’s school days to his final works, and with placards brimming with detailed biographical information, put the viewer right inside the artist’s world. The word “cacophony” was echoed in reviews of this show, and it’s not hard to see why: The artist was marvelously inconsistent in subject matter and style, deliberately and uniquely unconventional. —Marina Cashdan

“Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” at the New Museum, Oct. 21 – Feb. 7, 2010

I love Urs Fisher. I just do. I love that he demolishes things and builds things out of bread and that the works in this show, still on view at the New Museum, range from his gargantuan and creepily corporeal cast-aluminum magnifications of squeezed clay to the dainty Cumpadre (2009), a croissant and butterfly suspended on fishing line. This show, and his work in general, offers catharsis in the form of objects that seemed birthed in anger and escape in their wit and whimsy. —Kris Wilton