An ugly dispute, and lonely beauty from Hopper

Bob Taylor (left), Luke Cannon (center), and Tom Conlon of the MFA hang Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" in April in preparation for an exhibit of the American modernist's paintings. (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)

It's been a fractious, newsy, exciting year for art, packed with mysteries to scrutinize and uncover and topped with one messy, pitiful dispute.

In May, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art filed a lawsuit against Swiss artist Christoph Büchel to show his giant unfinished exhibition "Training Ground for Democracy." The installation had stalled after going over budget, and it sat behind tarps in the museum's showcase Building 5 gallery for months.

The suit made an ugly situation uglier. There's no merit and only embarrassment in showing unfinished contemporary art. In September, after a judge ruled in the museum's favor, director Joseph Thompson announced that the exhibit would be dismantled, not exhibited. Too bad the museum hadn't quietly taken it down and moved on months before.

Yet Mass MoCA followed up the Büchel debacle with a wonderful palate-cleanser in Building 5: Jenny Holzer's installation "Projections," up well into next fall, is a fluid, magical piece, with projected poetry sweeping across the football-field-size gallery.

In another long-running controversy, art-world detectives bickered over whether new Jackson Pollock paintings had been unearthed when they went on view for the first time in "Pollock Matters" at Boston College's McMullen Museum. Last month, forensic scientist James Martin added to a growing weight of evidence when he reported his findings that many of the pigments used in the paintings weren't yet available at the time of Pollock's death in 1956, and one work he examined was on a board that was not produced earlier than the late 1970s or early '80s.

The potential Pollocks in "Pollock Matters" are probably not the work of the Abstract Expressionist master. But the show, which examined the relationship between Pollock and photographer Herbert Matter, was a highlight this year. Not knowing whether the paintings in question were authentic compelled museum-goers to scrutinize them and make their own decisions.

More buzz came when the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts brought British conceptual artist Martin Creed's Turner Prize-winning work, "The Lights Going On and Off," in which lights blinked in an empty gallery, to Boston. Artsy types tended to love it. Others wondered what the heck it was about. I loved the piece, which tweaked Yves Klein's 1958 installation that was, essentially, an empty gallery. As for the lights, they mirrored ideas sputtering on and off in the viewer's mind when left with no art to look at.

The Institute of Contemporary Art celebrated its first anniversary in the beautiful Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building this month, but it has yet to fully prove itself. Too much glitz drew crowds, but didn't make a mark. "Design Life Now: National Design Triennial" wasn't even about contemporary art. The ICA kept the more challenging and enlightening work to the smaller galleries, as if it had to be spoonfed to a resistant public.

Along those lines, the ICA's meaty "Momentum" series, which gives a small gallery over to up-and-coming artists such as Sergio Vega, Dave McKenzie, and Kader Attia, set the standard for what the museum should be doing on a larger scale: exhibiting art and examining trends that incite surprise and fresh ideas in its audience. Among larger exhibits, a highlight was the Philip-Lorca diCorcia photography show, which had both sheen and substance.

The Museum of Fine Arts had several stellar shows this year, in particular "Edward Hopper," a gorgeous survey of work by the iconic American modernist. His paintings suggest that Hopper viewed everything through a lens of loneliness, yet "Edward Hopper" was a generous, uplifting show, shot through with as much light as darkness, revealing an artist tenderly probing, with an able brush, the disjuncture of life in the 20th century.

The Asian collection at the MFA is one of the best outside Asia, and the museum is working on making it even better. This year, three shows - one from the museum's vaults, and two from those of extraordinary collectors, whom the MFA is wooing - shone. "Drama and Desire of the Floating World" dramatically debuted the MFA's 17th-century Japanese paintings depicting life around the brothels and theaters of Edo, now Tokyo. "The Weng Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy" showed just a small portion of the remarkable collection passed down through generations of one family. And "Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection" came from the notably ambitious holdings of a collector who has been at it for only a decade.

Exciting news arrived in August when the Museum of Fine Arts announced the discovery of a lost Van Gogh painting underneath the surface of one that had long been on exhibition there. Below the moody blue, gray, and green 1889 landscape "The Ravine," MFA conservator Meta Chavannes had found, in an X-ray, "Wild Vegetation," which matches a drawing in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. Curator George Shackelford speculated that Van Gogh had simply run short of canvases and recycled.

Another sense of discovery came with "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" at the Williams College Museum of Art, a stunner that delved into the lives of a Jazz Age It couple. By turns deliciously gossipy and rigorous, the exhibit held at its center seven paintings by Gerald Murphy, whose canvases of workaday objects (and one amazing depiction of a wasp and a pear), anticipated Pop Art.

"Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination," at the Peabody Essex Museum, was the first Cornell retrospective in 26 years. Cornell poured his imagination into the boxes and cabinets that framed his work, making magical worlds that covered a huge range of topics and embodied the tension between going deeper within and breaking out of the box.

The Worcester Art Museum examined the art of nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois through a narrow lens in "The Woven Child (in context)." The seven-piece show revolved around the artist's titular piece, which is in WAM's collection, and built upon it with other fabric-based works by the surrealist, whose art can be alternately comic and creepy.

And an exhibit at the Addison Gallery of American Art underscored the fact that good art can be a crowd-pleaser. "William Wegman: Funney/Strange," a 40-year retrospective organized by Trevor Fairbrother, featured the sly, comic photographs Wegman is best known for of his Weimaraners Man Ray and Fay Ray, as well as about 200 works in video, film, drawing, and painting.