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