By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2007

The art season coming up isn't as grand or blockbusterized as some we've seen, but may be more intriguing. Here are a few shows that avoid the household names in art, as well as one show of unknowns that strikes me as iffy.

- "Italian Women Artists From Renaissance to Baroque," coming to the Museum of Women in the Arts in March, will give us a look at the tiny handful of pioneering female painters who dared to struggle against lousy odds. It's no news that, until very, very recently, Western women hadn't had a decent chance to take up an art career, let alone succeed in one. Artemisia Gentileschi, one of Caravaggio's most talented successors, is the best known of those who did succeed, sometimes making art about the challenge: After being raped by a fellow painter and facing public humiliation at her assailant's trial, she got payback by painting several pictures of men undergoing violent, bloody deaths. This exhibition should let us see how -- and sometimes, if -- living as a woman affected the work of the few other female artists of her era.

- "Wolfgang Tillmans," a major solo exhibition coming to the Hirshhorn Museum in May, promises to show some of the stranger art around. Tillmans, who was born in Germany in 1968, makes photographs so peculiar, so very nearly ugly, that they leave you all off balance. Typically, Tillmans takes casual, snapshot-style pictures of friends and acquaintances (often flash-lit, sometimes nude or half-undressed) and installs them scattershot across a gallery's walls, alongside the occasional "still life" shot of everyday trash. The effect is rather like a bomb going off in the discard box of a discount photo lab. Is it good art? It must be, because nothing else unsettles quite like this.

- In June, the stars will have aligned to offer three of the world's most important surveys of contemporary art, all at the same time. If you've decided it's finally time to come to terms with current creativity, this summer is the time to do it and Europe's the place. (Save those air miles, or cadge some from a business-class relative.) The 112-year-old Venice Biennale offers something like 70 art-filled national pavilions, as well as a massive group exhibition that transcends national borders. In Kassel, Germany, the twice-a-decade Documenta show will pull together an even more prestigious spread of the most ambitious current art, as it has since 1955. And up the road, the medieval college town of Muenster will welcome the fourth edition of its famous Sculpture Projects festival. Every 10 years since 1977, the entire city has been filled with large-scale objects and installations by many of the world's most interesting artists.

- I don't usually weigh-in on a show before I see it. That's why I'll do my best to miss "Portraits of Sandra Day O'Connor," opening in late March at the National Portrait Gallery. It presents work by 25 artists from something called the Painting Group, based on a one-day sitting they were granted last August with Justice O'Connor. The 40-year-old New York group is "led" by David Levine, whose famous caricatures are as potent as his watercolors are insipid -- rather like the work of his fellow leader Aaron Shikler, whose formal portraits of the rich and famous are toadying made flesh.