Art: Art and artists that challenge and surprise

This is no season for old masters. Rather it is a season for artists you might not have seen or thought about lately. It is a season when familiar names might surprise us, and artists do some odd things - like produce a soap opera.

Philadelphia-born William Glackens painted a few of the works between the masterpieces at the Barnes Foundation, and, as a friend of Albert Barnes from childhood, he was a major influence on the collection. A retrospective at the Barnes provides the first chance in some time to see his work. Richard Pousette-Dart is remembered as the last, and perhaps the least, of the generation of Pollock and de Kooning; a Philadelphia Museum of Art show of his works on paper promises pieces that owe little to the abstract-expressionist giants.

David Lynch, known for his eerie films and television, has been painting and drawing all his life. A show of this little-known work has come back to his alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. And even the huge retrospective of the great modernist photographer Paul Strand has a bit of a surprise in it - a selection of his motion pictures.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art, meanwhile, local artist Alex da Corte has collaborated with New York artist Jayson Musson to create a telenovela influenced by, among others, Jim Henson, Daffy Duck - and David Lynch.

Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (Oct. 21-Jan. 4, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The Art Museum recently acquired more than 3,000 photographs by Strand, a champion of both abstraction and humanism. In celebration, it is mounting the first major Strand retrospective since 1971, with works from many phases of his long career, including his films, and his long-term projects in Italy, Ghana, and elsewhere. (215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org)

William Glackens (Nov. 8-Feb. 2, Barnes Foundation). This traveling retrospective, the first of its kind in nearly half a century, features more than 80 oil paintings and works on paper on loan from museum and private collections. Glackens paintings often depicted well-heeled people at leisure, but he was known in his time as one of America's strongest advocates of modernism, seldom more so than when Barnes gave him some money to buy paintings in Paris, and he came back with works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, and others. This show reunites for the first time pictures exhibited at major shows early in the last century. (215-278-7000 or www.barnesfoundation.org)

David Lynch: The Unified Field (Through Jan. 11, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). The filmmaker who placed the severed ear on verdant lawn in Blue Velvet has been making paintings and drawings for the last 50 years, often with the same kind of shocking, hypnotic imagery. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied in the late 1960s, has mounted the first American exhibition of his visual art, including about 90 of his paintings and drawings. There is also a smaller show about the Philadelphia scene of which he was a part. (215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org)

Easternsports (Friday-Dec. 28, Institute of Contemporary Art). This telenovela is a first-time collaboration between Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson. The in-the-round, four-channel, multilingual video installation is described as a "vignette-driven update of Thornton Wilder's Our Town," starring the artists. Also on view, a major traveling retrospective of the painter Nicole Eisenman. (215-573-9975 or www.icaphila.org)

Kongo Across the Waters (Oct. 25-Jan. 25, Princeton University Art Museum). Exhibitions of African art are fairly rare in the area, so this traveling show, which draws on the collections of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, stands out. It examines five centuries of art from west-central Africa, and traces its influence through the age of slavery into the Americas and the present, featuring objects that have never been seen before in the United States. (609-258-3788 or http://artmuseum.princeton.edu)

Schofield: International Impressionist (Thursday-Jan. 25, Woodmere Art Museum). This ambitious show at Woodmere seeks to make the case for William Elmer Schofield (1866-1944) as an artist important in both the United States and Europe and as a master of both impressionist and realist styles. Like Glackens and Lynch, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he was highly acclaimed, the winner of many international prizes, acquired by important museums, then largely forgotten. (215-247-0476 or www.woodmereartmuseum.org)

Robert Indiana From A to A: The Alphabet and the Icons (Oct. 12-Jan. 25, Allentown Art Museum). This show features nearly 100 works from the private collection of an artist whose entire career was spent experimenting with colors and the letters of the alphabet. He has said he does not love the version of his iconic LOVE sculpture that stands at the base of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway because it is too small, but those who do love it can go to Allentown to see what he has been up to since. (610-432-4333 or www.allentownartmuseum.org)

Full Circle: Works on Paper by Richard Pousette-Dart (Through Nov. 30, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The American artist Richard Pousette-Dart is remembered as part of the pioneering generation of abstract expressionists. But the more than 65 works in "Full Circle" at the Art Museum show a different, more complicated picture, one influenced by Byzantine mosaics and medieval stained glass, among other things. (215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org)

Breakfast (Nov. 7-30, Clay Studio). The Clay Studio asked a number of ceramic artists to turn their attention to breakfast, resulting in an egg holder, a toast rack, a butter dish, and other accoutrements to the full English. (215-925-3453 or www.theclaystudio.org)

Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography (Nov. 8-Feb. 8, the Michener Museum of Art). More than 100 images by 35 photographers make up this show, with subjects ranging from starry landscapes to deep-sky objects, including some of the first pictures ever taken of celestial events we have only begun to understand. (215-340-9800, www.michenermuseum.org)

Mother and Child Reunion (Through Nov. 9, Fabric Workshop and Museum). In this exhibition, Kazumi Tanaka, artist in residence at the Fabric Workshop, explores traditional Japanese textile techniques, along with family stories and folklore, in order to understand and explain her cultural heritage. (215-561-8888 or www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org)

Enchanted Castles (Nov. 28-Jan. 4, Brandywine River Museum of Art). Following its current knockout Charles Burchfield show, on view to Nov. 16, the Brandywine will return to its roots with this show of illustrations by Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and others for books about knights and chivalry. One holiday attraction is a model of a castle, made for Andrew Wyeth and painted by his father N.C. Wyeth. (610-338-2700, www.brandywinemuseum.org)

Vitra - Design, Architecture, Communication: A European Project With American Roots (Nov. 22-April 26, Philadelphia Museum of Art). This Swiss firm, which began by licensing the designs of great American modernists such as Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, is renowned as a force in high-style furniture and as a patron of architecture at its office campus near Basel. The exhibition will have furniture, drawings, studies, models, and other materials that document the Vitra influence. (215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org)

Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (Nov. 14-April 5, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Blume (1906-92) rendered dreamlike allegorical scenes with meticulous technique. In a large show of 59 canvases and more than 100 drawings, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is giving this neglected American modernist his first exhibition since 1976. (215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org)

Allora and Calzadilla (Dec. 12-April 5, Fabric Workshop and Museum/Philadelphia Museum of Art). This large show of videos and installations, a collaboration between the Fabric Workshop and the Art Museum, spotlights a widely exhibited Puerto Rico-based couple whose work deals with cultural issues, through video, sound, photography, and other media. It will be shown both in the Art Museum's Perelman Building and on three floors of the Fabric Workshop and Museum. (215-561-8888 or www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org; 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org)