The most-anticipated New York art world event of the upcoming season undoubtedly will be the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art, on November 20. MoMA’s newly renovated and expanded space on 53rd Street, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, will nearly double in size. The museum will be free to the public on opening day, but raises its admission cost to $20 thereafter.

The permanent collection will be reinstalled on two floors around themes “to explore in greater depth the work of an individual artist or artists or a specific issue or idea.” Based on some of the artists, issues, and ideas that MoMA has continued to entertain lately, this leaves me more than skeptical. But I hope still.

To christen itself, MoMA will open with three solipsistic shows that deal more with the institution’s own documentation than on art. “Nine Museums by Yoshio Taniguchi” will “present the new [MoMA] in the context of other extraordinary art museums that Taniguchi has designed.” “Projects 82: Mark Dion, Rescue Archaeology – A Project for the Museum of Modern Art” will feature artifacts – “including architectural cornices, moldings, shards of ceramic, wallpaper samples, and fireplace mantels” that Mr. Dion excavated from the museum’s construction site. Finally, “Michael Weseley: Open Shutter at the Museum of Modern Art,” will be large-scale, extremely long-exposure photographs of the evolving construction of the museum.

P.S. 1, MoMA’s sister institution in Long Island City, Queens, is not doing much better. The museum is featuring retrospectives of Manny Farber (September 27), who paints illustrative, frenetic, and unstructured banalities, and Katharina Sieverding (October 24). Ms. Sieverding, a Czech-born German filmmaker and photographer of billboard-scale self-portraits, is well known in Europe for her confrontational critique of society and gender, but her images often feel fueled by the coldness of fashion photography.

This fall the Whitney is mounting two shows of very popular though overrated artists: “Jacob Lawrence’s War Series” (September 24) and “The Art of Romare Bearden” (October 14). Another exhibition, “Romare Bearden at the Met” (October 19), will complement this latter show. The real treat, though, in celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, will be the Whitney’s long-awaited retrospective of the great sculptor Isamu Noguchi (October 28), whose pareddown stone enigmas masterfully merge European modernism and Japanese asceticism.

If Noguchi’s particular blend of East-meets-West appeals to you, you will also want to see the show “Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation” (September 22) at the Japan Society on East 47th Street – one of the best-kept museum secrets in New York. Tomatsu (b. 1930) is considered Japan’s most important post-war photographer. The show of nearly 260 works will include “Nagasaki 11:02,” which examines the lives of A-bomb survivors.

Certain to be popular are three other photography shows, at the International Center of Photography: “Looking at Life,” 200 images from the Time Inc. Picture Collection at the ICP; “JFK for President: Photographs by Cornell Capa,” newly discovered photographs of JFK’s campaign and first five months in office; and “Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib” (all three start September 17). The show that I most look forward to at the ICP, though, is “The Mysterious Monsieur Bellocq” (December) of photographs by Ernest J. Bellocq (1873-1949), portraying New Orleans prostitutes.

After you have visited the JFK show, it would only be fitting that you take in the 200 photographs by 39 photographers in the Brooklyn Museum’s show “I Wanna Be Loved By You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe from the Leon and Michaela Constantiner Collection” (November 12). These include iconic works by Cecil Beaton and Cartier-Bresson.

Also on view at the Brooklyn Museum will be the exhibitions: “Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children,” of 43 works (October 8); a show of paintings by Kehinde Wiley, who combines “hip-hop culture with Old Master influence” (The work, worse than it sounds, will be up October 8); and – heaven help us – “14 Stations: Photographed by David Michalek Depicts Former Homeless Enacting the Christian Passion” (November 12).

The Guggenheim will kick off the season with a show that could be fabulous. “Aztec Empire” (October 15), comprises more than 450 works, including sculpture, jewelry, musical instruments, and household items. It will be “the most comprehensive survey of the art and culture of the Aztecs ever assembled outside Mexico,” the museum claims.

Two shows that should be more than worthwhile are “European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection (September 28) at the Frick Collection, and “Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living” (October 1) at the Cooper-Hewitt. “European Bronzes” brings together nearly 40 small- and medium-scale sculptures of mythological figures by artists such as Hendrick de Keyser, Hubert Le Sueur, and Giambologna. “Josef and Anni Albers” will include dozens of objects designed by Josef (1888-1976) – graphic design, furniture, and housewares – and, more importantly, the spectacular textile and jewelry designs of Anni (1899-1994), many of which are abstract masterpieces.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, under the superb directorship of Philippe de Montebello, continues to be the only museum in New York that consistently mounts shows of aesthetic and scholarly importance. This fall, the Met will bring to us “The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830” (September 29), 175 works of colonial Andean art from the Viceroyalty of Peru that were generated after the arrival, and dramatic influence, of the Spanish in 1532; as well as “Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court, 1580-1620” (October 26), a show of 250 exotic objects from one of the richest periods of economic prosperity in Europe.

Other Met offerings include “China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 AD” (October 12) – one of the largest exhibitions ever to come out of China – which will feature some 300 objects of works on paper, gold artifacts, luxury articles of glass and precious metals, and Buddhist sculpture. “Heritage of Power: Ancient Sculpture from West Mexico” (October 19) includes 40 works of ceramic tomb sculpture that date from between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D. Two shows of political more than artistic interest are devoted to George Washington: a retrospective of the portraitist Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), who painted portraits of Washington, and “George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument” (both October 19), a complementary show of images of Washington from the Met’s collection.

I am getting ahead of myself, but I cannot help but mention that the Met is mounting “Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings,” which opens January 15. An exhibition of 115 major drawings in pen and ink and red, black, and white chalk, this show, the first major retrospective of the Flemish artist’s works on paper, will certainly be one of the blockbusters of the spring season.