Picasso's 1905-06 portrait of Gertrude Stein, in the Met's 'The Steins Collection' show. (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion
May 10–August 19
From the people who brought you Alexander McQueen’s dark, twisted vision and the lines out the door that went with it comes an ambitious project involving two of the 20th century’s greatest designers. Apparently inspired by the “Impossible Interviews” series in the Vanity Fair of the 1930s (Condé Nast has helped foot the bill), the show will feature a series of "Impossible Conversations” between the designers on topics ranging from politics to women and creativity, with each of their points hammered home by 80 designs from the two women. It’s sure to be an alluring tricolor of Surrealism, postmodernism and haute couture.

Neue Galerie
Heinrich Kuhn and His American Circle
April 26–August 27
Heinrich Kuhn was a turn-of-century photographic pioneer best known for his ability to translate the aesthetic vision of Impressionist painting into the medium of photography at a time when, in the mind of the public, the craft still toed the line between art and science. This new exhibition explores his relationship with New York’s avant-garde photography circle and his friendship with Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Those two have been museum darlings of late—now it’s Kuhn’s moment in the spotlight.

The Guggenheim
Francesca Woodman
March 16–June 13
The first major survey of the photographer’s brief career, this comprehensive show includes 120 photographs that range from her student photographs to studies for her Temple collage project, which reconfigured her friends as architecture. That piece was one of her later works, from 1980, a year before she killed herself at age 22. Woodman photographed herself and her friends in long exposure, yielding surreal black-and-white works that feel ripped from an earlier time, or a space that exists outside linearity. The show, which might provide something of a counterpoint to MoMA’s Cindy Sherman retrospective, will also include six of her recently discovered short videos.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde
Through June 3
You’ve watched your Midnight in Paris, you’ve read your A Moveable Feast, but still you want more. Well, buckle up, Alice B. Toklas, because you’re about to have 1920s Paris up to your ears. The Steins—Gertrude, Leo, Michael, and his wife, Sarah—collected hundreds of works at the cutting edge of art, in a period when the support of collectors meant everything to the legitimacy of an artist who might otherwise offend. Standouts from the show include Picasso’s painting of Gertrude Stein and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, purchased by Leo from the “fauve” Salon d’Automne of 1905. To quote Henry Miller: Fuck!

Asia Society Museum
Wu Guanzhong: Abstraction and Tradition
April 25–August 5
Is China going to be the dominant cultural force of the 21st century, as it’s already bound to be the dominant economic force? If, in the interest of hedging your bets, you’d like to brush up on your Chinese touchstones, you could do worse than this retrospective of Wu Guanzhong, one of the country’s most important 20th-century artists, whose show at Asia Society represents his first major retrospective in New York. The emphasis here is on his ink landscape paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, which
blend Impressionist attitudes with expressive lines—Paris school flourishes from a man who was once forbidden to paint for three years during the Cultural Revolution.

Park Avenue Armory
Tom Sachs’ Space Program 2.0: Mars
May 12–June 17
Prepare for re-entry! Expanding on his lunar landing at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Tom Sachs has planned a massive new installation for the 55,000-square-foot drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory. This new chapter of his Space Program is even more extensive than the first, and brings a hefty portion of the red planet to the Upper East Side. Visitors can watch crew members engage in rover deployment, red beans and rice preparation, and suiting protocol, and in some cases participate. “‘Space Program 2.0: Mars’ blurs the lines between art and science,” said Anne Pasternak, head of Creative Time, which is sponsoring the event, “offering audiences a fresh perspective on the past, present and future of space exploration.”

The Morgan Library
Winston Churchill: The Power of Words
June 8–September 23
Drafts, speaking notes and personal and official correspondence from the man who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” are the stuff of what promises to be a revelatory show. In addition to being a famously great speechwriter and orator, Churchill was also, at one time, a journalist, acting as a war correspondent for London newspapers; he went on to become the only prime minister ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Morgan has worked with the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge for this exhibition and the only foreseeable downside is the inevitable crowds. We will fight them on the free Friday evenings, we will fight them on the Sunday afternoons.

Japan Society
Deco Japan
March 16–June 10
Just when you thought the 3D Great Gatsby movie must be the most surreal take on the 1920s, Japan Society offers this fascinating look at the pre-WWII trends of cosmopolitan Japan. The show focuses on the way Art Deco bled into design across the board, but the centerpiece of the show is the aesthetic of the moga, “modern girls,” in all their geisha-meets-garçonnes glory. Picture kimonos with skyscrapers. Picture one of those angular travel posters from bad French restaurants, but imagine a heron flying serenely before the iron steam-liner. It’s considered appropriate to consume both sake and Champagne before attending this exhibition.

The Jewish Museum
Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel
Through July 29
The Jewish Museum presents new work by the ever-popular Kehinde Wiley, who has brought his classical style of painting urban young men to the discos and shopping malls of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Lod. The hand-carved frames for the new works, in what the museum calls the “Jewish decorative tradition,” feature writing—for the men in the paintings who are Jewish it’s the Ten Commandments, for the Arabs it’s Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” The exhibition is also, in a sense, curated by Mr. Wiley, whose work will is shown alongside items of Judaica from the museum’s  collection.

New York Historical Society
Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History
May 25–September 2
We’ve been making beer in this city for 350 years and, experts agree, consuming it for nearly as long. You might say that New York has a unique relationship with beer—consider former Yankees owner and brewery man Jacob Ruppert, or the fact that McSorley’s refused to serve women until the bar was sued by NOW—and this exhibition explores the history of the local craft from hops to hooch-slingers. Step right up to see the account book of the brewer who, in 1779, sold beer to both the British and the patriots. See our belligerent signs decrying the evils of prohibition. And, yes, there’s a bar.

'Untitled (Fold)' (2011) by Tauba Auerbach. (Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Tauba Auerbach at Paula Cooper
Opens May 5
This is unquestionably the season’s most anticipated show by a young artist. After trompe/Op painter Tauba Auerbach’s dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, left town to head L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago, while her work was on view at the last edition of the Whitney Biennial, she was courted by numerous high-profile dealers but settled on Paula Cooper. She has been weaving to make paintings recently, and focusing increasingly on color, but details remain scarce on her latest developments. “I paint and paint and then destroy nine out of ten paintings,” she recently told an interviewer when asked about her projects. “My standards are increasingly hard to meet.”

Alice Neel at David Zwirner
May 4–June 23, 2012
Alice Neel, who died in 1984 at the age of 84, remains one of America’s great but too-little-known artists, despite a recent biography by Phoebe Hoban: her brushy, piercingly perceptive portraits were outliers in an era enchanted with abstraction and Pop imagery. For its second show with Neel’s estate, Zwirner will exhibit iconic portraits—the young artist Joey Scaggs holding a leather jacket over his shoulder, energetic psychologist Sherry Speeth in a gray suit, nearly leaping out of his chair—alongside still lifes. Though less regularly exhibited than her portraits, these exacting scenes of flowers and interiors approach representation at an angle that is similarly, pleasantly askew.

Martha Rosler at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
April 20–May 26
The redoubtable, politically engaged Martha Rosler—whose complete suite of anti-Vietnam War photographs “Bringing the War Home” (1967-72) was just acquired by MoMA—will show black-and-white and color photographs, shot during a January 1981 trip she took to Cuba. These photos are being printed for the first time. Small in scale, the images show scenes of life in the communist nation—shots of storefronts, streets and murals of Fidel Castro—in the artist’s inimitable, offhand and elegant style.

Tom Thayer at Derek Eller
April 27–May 26
Over the past few years, Tom Thayer’s strangely enchanting, determinedly lo-fi animations and performances—often featuring birds and sticklike humans that he fashions from paper and tape and manipulates on strings—have slowly but surely gained attention. He’s attributed his hermetic, childlike iconography to “vivid, early memories of kindergarten and preschool in the 1970s.” A subtle, sinister undertone prevents the work from veering into preciousness. Following a star turn in this year’s Whitney Biennial, he has set a high bar for his solo debut at Eller.

Sturtevant at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
May 5–June 23
Sturtevant is the original punk. An integral member of the New York avant-garde art scene in the 1960s, she spent her time lampooning its leading men by producing identical copies of their most iconic creations: Johns targets, Warhol Marilyns, Lichtenstein damsels in distress. They’ve fetched big sums recently—a 1966 Sturtevant Lichtenstein made $711,000, an artist record, back in November at Phillips New York. GBE will show her nine-screen, narrative-free Elastic Tango video, which features jars of mayonnaise, Beavis and Butthead and other delights, and was a hit last summer at the Venice Biennale.

‘Spirit Level’ at Gladstone
March 24–April 21
Named for a collection of poetry by Irish bard Seamus Heaney, this show is curated by Gladstone artist Ugo Rondinone and features more than 100 pieces by 18 artists, including Amy Granat, Klara Lidén (whose Christmas tree-filled show at Reena Spaulings was one of the winter’s highlights, and whose solo show opens at the New Museum in May), Ann Craven, Joe Bradley, and Martin Boyce. Also here is work by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the Austrian performance artist long rumored to have died by cutting off his penis during an “action” performance. This should be one of the year’s most ambitious group show undertakings.

Xylor Jane at Canada
May 3–June 3
If one were to mix Sol LeWitt’s repetitive geometry with the mathematical fixations and jarring palettes of Alfred Jensen, and then pour on a bit of gently simmering anarchy, the result may approximate Xylor Jane’s paintings. She takes simple patterns and follows them obsessively to their conclusions: dots and numbers filling every inch of a canvas, though never quite cleanly, as in a LeWitt. Their accomplishment is defined by hard-wrought completion, not flawless execution. The work—to say nothing of the paintings’ pulsing color—is its own reward.

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures
April 26–June 9
For her latest show at Metro Pictures, which first exhibited her work back in 1980, Cindy Sherman will present new photographs that she made using attire mined from Chanel’s voluminous archive. As her blockbuster MoMA retrospective proved, Ms. Sherman has managed a nearly flawless career, achieving a relentless method of reinvention with an economy of means: she poses as every character in her photographs. The artist has adopted digital manipulation in recent years, subtly altering her
appearance and toying with her backgrounds (including landscapes she shot while traveling, in some of these pieces), so this latest body of work may surprise.

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Ramiken Crucible
April 1–May 13
Elaine Cameron-Weir’s first show at Ramiken, last year, featured a Persian rug dyed with rich indigo; a long, thin slice of wood covered with tobacco; and a wall-hung piece with wire mesh affixed with wax, the perfume Guerlain L’heure Bleue and pyralene, among other exotic materials. Trafficking in a romantic, elegiac strain of postminimalism, she makes art whose ephemeral components—and smells—conjure memories at the same time that they threaten to disappear.

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts
March 31–April 29
Japanese-American artist Yuji Agematsu will have his first-ever solo show at the increasingly potent Greenpoint outfit Real Fine Arts, exhibiting pieces of detritus he has collected while wandering the city for the past three decades. The battered, castoff works constitute a personal, chance-inflected history of his flânerie, and an alternative map of New York.

arusseth@observer.com

'The Robots' by Kraftwerk. (Courtesy the artist and Museum of Modern Art)

MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach has seen the German electronic music group Kraftwerk play live many times, but when asked to name his favorite performance he didn’t hesitate. “In the [2009] Manchester International Festival, they played Tour de France in the velodrome,” he said, referring to the band’s most recent album, its eighth, released in 2003. The crowd watched the performance through 3D glasses as the national cycling team of Britain raced around the stadium. “They were so fast,” he recalled. “I think this was just the most delirious performance.”

This spring, Mr. Biesenbach, who also serves as chief curator-at-large at MoMA, will bring that delirium to the museum. For eight straight nights, April 10-17, its soaring atrium will play host to concerts by the famously reclusive group in what the museum is terming a “time-based retrospective,” titled Kraftwerk–Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.  Each night the quartet will perform one of its albums, moving in chronological order from the laid-back jams of Autobahn (1974) to the taut, precise Tour de France, accompanied by elaborate sets and visuals designed by the group.

To say the event proved popular would be a gross understatement. When tickets went on sale last month, the series sold out in less than two hours, and the online ticketing site crashed. But those who failed to snag tickets are in luck. Kraftwerk is designing a special eight-screen surround-sound video installation for MoMA PS1’s performance dome, the Epcot-style structure that Mr. Biesenbach recently established at his Queens museum. “You can just go there, lie down, and totally dive into Kraftwerk,” he said. “It’s open for everybody.” In addition, during the day, listening stations will be available at MoMA for visitors.

When he spoke with The Observer, Mr. Biesenbach was preparing to visit the group’s Kling Klang studio outside Düsseldorf, Germany, to see the work, which is being made specifically for the New York shows. From around 1970 to 2009, Kling Klang was in Düsseldorf, though its exact location was a closely guarded secret. In 2003, a Guardian writer visited the city in search of the studio. He questioned a local record-store owner and found the bicycle shop frequented by Kraftwerk cofounder Florian Schneider, but he never found Kling Klang.

Mr. Schneider left the group to pursue solo projects in 2009, ending a 40-year collaboration with Ralf Hütter that began when the two were students at a music college in Düsseldorf, which was the center of Germany’s contemporary art world at the time. Just as Messrs. Hütter and Schneider were experimenting with early electronic instruments, the dealer Konrad Fischer was showing pioneering Conceptual and Minimal art, and Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys were teaching at the city’s art academy.

'Home Computer' by Kraftwerk. (Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Modern Art)

After three early albums of jams and experiments, Kraftwerk’s cofounders quickly found their distinctive sound on Autobahn: precise, pop-inflected electronic dance music paired with simple, ambiguous lyrics processed through a vocorder. The songs celebrate technology while also highlighting its alienating effects. “Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn” (“We are driving, driving, driving on the Autobahn”) they sing on the 22-plus-minute “Autobahn,” mimicking the chorus of their heroes, the Beach Boys, on their 1964 hit “Fun Fun Fun.”

Like the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk’s members expertly crafted their images. By their next album, Radio-Activity (1975), they had all adopted the same signature close-cropped haircuts and identical outfits. “After the war, German entertainment was destroyed,” Mr. Hütter told the music critic Lester Bangs in Creem in 1975, “The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off.”

“They are one of the very few bands who created a style,” said Monika Sprüth, the cofounder of the London/Berlin/Cologne gallery Sprüth Magers, noting Kraftwerk’s connection to early 20th-century Russian Constructivism, which informed the sharp geometries and bold colors of their album covers and stage sets. She met Mr. Hütter in the late 1960s, when they were in architecture school together, and now represents the band through the gallery. “We’re not selling anything from Kraftwerk,” she said matter of factly. “I’m the adviser.”

'Man Machine' by Kraftwerk. (Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Modern Art)

Many of Ms. Sprüth’s artists are devout Kraftwerk fans. When the German painter Thomas Scheibitz was planning his 2005 Venice Biennale show, Ms. Sprüth asked him if he had any special goals. He wanted to work with Kraftwerk, he said. Though he didn’t know it, it just so happened that his dealer had been friends with them for almost 40 years. The band played the Biennale.

That performance led to more discussions between the group and the dealer. “I was thinking it would be phenomenal if they could get honored in another way,” Ms. Sprüth said, “if they could get recognition at the highest level.” And so it happened that the band is now playing at MoMA.

For American audiences, Kraftwerk seems to embody a quintessentially German aesthetic: precise, cold, rigid. In the “Sprockets” skit on Saturday Night Life that lampooned German avant-garde culture, Mike Myers played a pretentious intellectual named Dieter who dances to Kraftwerk’s 1986 song “Electric Cafe.”

That aside, the band’s aesthetic is not so far from the meticulously constructed photography that emerged from Düsseldorf in the 1980s, in the work of Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and especially Andreas Gursky, another Sprüth Magers artist and Kraftwerk devotee, like Rosemarie Trockel. And “Klaus was always a big fan, too,” Ms. Sprüth said.

Mr. Biesenbach grew up just a short drive outside Düsseldorf in the 1980s. In 1991, he started the Kunst-Werke kunsthalle—a non-collecting museum like MoMA PS1—in Berlin, to which Germany’s contemporary art world had quickly gravitated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “That name was inspired by Kraftwerk,” the curator said. “It’s a dialogue.” Kraftwerk translates to power station, while Kunst-Werk reads as artworks.

For Mr. Biesenbach, Kraftwerk’s art is about “mobility, telecommunications, and more and more functions in our life becoming machine-made”—the group refers to this union of humans and technology on  The Man-Machine (1978), the fourth album in the retrospective series. (The complete lyrics of its title track, in English, are: “Man machine, pseudo human being / Man machine, super human being.”)

Kraftwerk’s focus on technology has proved prescient, Mr. Biesenbach argued. They addressed nuclear energy early, the union of man and machine and, on their fifth album in the series, computer technology. “They had Computer World when nobody had a computer and nobody had a laptop,” the curator laughed. “Just imagine those guys. They were the perfect iPhone people.” (These days, Mr. Biesenbach listens to Kraftwerk on his iPhone.)

'TDF' by Kraftwerk. (Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Modern Art)

While Kraftwerk’s influence on pop music is undisputed—it’s hard to imagine what electronic music would sound like without the band’s influence—its direct power on younger artists is harder to ascertain. It’s certainly there in the work of the New York music performance group Fischerspooner, who also appeared in the museum’s atrium in 2009 for a project that the curator organized for Performa.

The Kraftwerk extravaganza comes just two months after Mr. Biesenbach’s enormously popular Antony and the Johnson’s show at Radio City Music Hall. Could a shift in focus be on at MoMA—the curator taking on the role of blockbuster concert booker? “It’s actually a coincidence,” he said of the timing. “Kraftwerk should have been happening two years ago, but we really needed a supporter for this. It’s quite a huge effort.” Volkswagen is helping fund the project.

He compared the Kraftwerk show to Pipilotti Rist’s immersive installation in the atrium in 2009, which blanketed its walls in lush, digital videos, and Marina Abramovic’s exhibition-long performance at a table in the atrium the following year, where she stared down all comers from her wooden seat.

Mr. Biesenback is transporting their studio from Düsseldorf to the atrium, essentially letting audience members in on a studio visit.

“You can see them make art,” he added. “It’s about making art live.”

arusseth@observer.com