Mr. Sánchez’s landscape paintings have been likened to the work of Caspar David Friedrich as well as the American painters of the Hudson River School. This is itself very high praise, but not any higher than the work deserves. Like Friedrich and the Hudson River painters, Mr. Sánchez brings an epic vision to the depiction of landscape—a vision that combines the most meticulous depiction of nature with a metaphysical comprehension of its spiritual implications.

From the clouds in the sky to the majestic waterfalls that flow into the leafy, rocky terrain of a virgin wilderness, Mr. Sánchez is a master of everything he surveys, and he never hesitates to pack his paintings with a surfeit of detail that affords every rock, tree and sunlit vista its share of pictorial brilliance.

Who, then, is this remarkable painter? Born in the village of Aguada de Pasajeros in central Cuba, Mr. Sánchez studied for two years at the San Alejandro School of Plastic Arts in Havana in the mid-1960’s and later at the National School of Art. He won the Joan Miró Prize (awarded by the Miró Foundation in Barcelona) in 1980; in 1984, he won the Amelia Peláez Award for painting at Havana’s first biennial. His first retrospective exhibition was at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana in 1985. Four years later, he left Cuba for Mexico, and afterwards moved to southern Florida. He now divides his time between Miami and his home in Costa Rica.

Surely we would have heard of Mr. Sánchez long ago had it not been for the troubled political relations that have obtained for so many years between Cuba and the United States. But now that we’ve been given the opportunity to see his extraordinary paintings, it’s safe to assume that he’ll enjoy a good deal of attention in this country.

Tomás Sánchez: Buscador de Pai-sajes, New Paintings and Drawings remains on view at the Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, through Dec. 30.

To all of this, however, the paintings and drawings of the American artist Dozier Bell, on exhibition at the DFN Gallery in Tribeca, are a brilliant exception. I’m not at all certain that I’m able to describe Ms. Bell’s religious views with any sort of accuracy, but that hardly matters. As a painter of landscapes and skies who usually works in acrylic on linen, and as a draftsman working in charcoal on acetate, she’s in such total command of her mediums that she engages our interest and wins our confidence well before we attempt to identify the sometimes hermetic character of her imagery.

What’s also instantly apparent is that Ms. Bell’s pictorial depiction of both earth and the heavens is at once very dark (in every sense), highly mystical and deeply moving. If we also discern in her work a debt to the German master Caspar David Friedrich, this adds another layer of interest to this riveting exhibition. And, as a further interest, Ms. Bell’s work in this show turns out to be a very specific response to a tragedy of modern history—the physical devastation of Germany as a consequence of its central role in the two World Wars. Indeed, the drawings and some of the paintings are based on photographs of Germany dating from 1917 and 1945.

Ms. Bell’s German connection, as it may be called, derives from her experiences as a Fulbright Fellow in Weimar in 1995. To this she brings a perspective that’s neither political nor reportorial but something more akin to spiritual meditation. Thus, in the nocturnal, starlit skies in her paintings, there’s at once an extraordinary visual beauty and a grim reminder that in modern warfare, it’s from the heavens that a merciless destruction rains down. The crosses that dot the skies in some of the nocturnal paintings reinforce this double meaning: While they obviously serve as a Christian symbol of the divine, they also refer to the crosshairs of a murderous technology.

In pondering the complexities of this subject from a religious perspective, Ms. Bell has come to focus on a 12th-century German concept called Heimsuchung. Like much else in German metaphysical thought, this is a concept that harbors multiple meanings. We are thus informed that Heimsuchung "originally meant visitation by God and God’s omniscient presence, but gradually gave way to its use as a term for the singling out of a person or people for visitation by disasters such as plague, famine and war. The term still encompasses these two extremes of human experience: everyday union with the divine, and the devastation and annihilation of the physical self and/or its environment."

Lest all this may sound like an unduly heavy burden for modern pictorial art to bear, it must also be said that Ms. Bell handles both its moral gravity and its visual challenges with an unfailing command of style. Hers is an art devoid of excessive rhetorical flourishes. If we’re reminded at times not only of Friedrich’s forays into the art of the Sublime, but of the similarly ambitious efforts in that direction by the English painter J.M.W. Turner, Ms. Bell’s landscapes nevertheless remain vividly earthbound, and her starlit skies have a visual poetry that’s all her own. I’ll leave it to others to assess the religious implications of her art. What remains obvious to us nonbelievers, however, is that as a subject for an art of high ambition, what Ms. Bell has described as her "personal iconography of faith" has served her extremely well.

Dozier Bell: New Paintings and Drawings remains on view at the DFN gallery, 176 Franklin Street in Tribeca, through Oct. 9.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a revival of the work of the American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius, and it looks as if the exhibition that Steven Harvey is organizing at the National Academy– Louis M. Eilshemius (1864-1941): An Independent Spirit , bringing together 40-odd pictures–will at last do justice to this enchanting painter who, though greatly esteemed in the last century by figures as diverse in their tastes as Alfred Stieglitz and Clement Greenberg, Marcel Duchamp and Duncan Phillips, is now virtually unknown to a younger generation.

Alberto Giacometti is anything but unknown, but I doubt if we have ever before seen a show on the scale of the one coming to MoMA, which marks the centenary of the artist's birth. Organized at the Kunsthaus Zürich, it is said to encompass some 90 sculptures, 40 paintings, 60 drawings and works in plaster that are rarely allowed to travel. This is clearly one of the major events of the season.

Come spring 2002, however, MoMA will be closing the season with Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting , organized by Robert Storr (Feb. 14 to May 21), which I cannot say I am much looking forward to. Mr. Richter is currently a great favorite at MoMA, which may say more about the intellectual plight of the museum than about the quality of this artist, who strikes me as little more than a clever master of pictorial legerdemain. Yet the Richter show may have one beneficial (if unintended) consequence: It may help to ease whatever feelings of pain or loss the public is likely to suffer at the prospect of MoMA shutting down its historic West 53rd Street building for several years in order to complete its huge expansion into West 54th Street. Following the Richter show, MoMA will temporarily shift its operations to Queens, and will not reopen as a mega-MoMA in midtown Manhattan until sometime in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be serving up something called Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 (Oct. 18 to Jan. 6), consisting of film, video and slide installations by, among other luminaries, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono–an appropriate prologue, perhaps, to the next Whitney Biennial, coming in the spring of 2002.

It's anyone's guess as to what awaits us in a show called Vital Forums: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960 , which the Brooklyn Museum of Art is mounting in the fall (Oct. 12 to Jan. 6). This exhibition is said to explore "organic images" from the Cold War era in all the visual arts–which probably means a melange of high art, pop culture, commercial design and the kitchen sink à la the lamentable American Century debacle at the Whitney two years ago. If nothing else, this Atomic Age gambit may settle the question of whether the Brooklyn Museum has learned anything from its recent disasters.

Mercifully for grown-ups, the Metropolitan Museum of Art can still be counted on to uphold a high standard of quality and seriousness. (No, I haven't forgotten the Jackie Onassis hokum, but we live in an imperfect world.) This month, the Met is bringing us two exhibitions of special interest. First comes Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers (Sept. 11 to Nov. 11), which brings together three versions of this German Romantic painter's most celebrated subject–two on loan from museums in Dresden and Berlin and the third, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (circa 1830), a recent addition to the Met's own collection. Among the other paintings on this Moonwatchers theme are works by Friedrich's contemporaries, among them the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl and the Danish painter Martinus Rorbye. Whether or not you are an acolyte of the Friedrich mystique, this will be a rare opportunity to see prime examples of the art that has caused this curious cult to prosper.

Of even more interest is the Met's exhibition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints (Sept. 25 to Dec. 2), organized in collaboration with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Some 52 of the 61 extant drawings by the artist will be exhibited, plus 60 Bruegel prints and 20 drawings by Bruegel's contemporaries.

Next month, the Met will open a major exhibition (Oct. 9 to Dec. 30) of the work of the French Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac (1863-1935), documenting a 50-year career with 120 oils, watercolors, drawings and prints–the first such exhibition, I believe, to be devoted to Signac on this scale. It will be accompanied by a similar exhibition of 60 Neo-Impressionist works from the Met's own permanent collection. Signac was a considerable figure in the turn-of-the-century Paris avant-garde, a prolific artist who also served as president of the Société des Artistes Indépendents and wrote a treatise on color– D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme (1899)–which is still read today, and it will be interesting to see if his talents as a painter can support an exhibition of this size.

Elsewhere, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia will be exhibiting Medici portraits from the collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (Sept. 15 to Dec. 9), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will mount a huge exhibition of an American master, Thomas Eakins (Oct. 4 to Jan. 6): 60 oil paintings and 120 photographs in addition to drawings, watercolors and sculpture. The Eakins show will later travel to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and then come to the Met in the summer of 2002.

There will be two exhibitions of 17th-century Dutch painting this season: Art & Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt at the Newark (N.J.) Museum (Sept. 30 to Jan. 20), and the first ever international loan show devoted to Aelbert Cuyp at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Oct. 7 to Jan. 13). The Phillips Collection in Washington will be showing Impressionist Still Life (Sept. 22 to Jan. 13), and the fall will also bring yet another look at the most turbulent friendship in modern painting with Van Gogh and Gaugín: The Studio of the South at the Art Institute of Chicago (Sept. 22 to Jan. 13). And back in New York, the winter will bring a no doubt fascinating look at Pierre Matisse and His Artists , at the Morgan Library (Feb. 14 to May 19).

Best of all, perhaps, winter will also bring us Goya: Images of Women at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (March 10 to June 2). This is said to include some 115 works and will first be seen at the Prado in Madrid (Oct. 30 to Feb. 9).

Last and certain to be least, we shall presently be treated to the latest chapter in the long and inglorious history of public television's meddling and muddling in the contemporary art world. This is a PBS series called Art: 21–Art in the Twenty-First Century , which is expected to make its debut on Sept. 21 and 28–but, as they say, check your local listings for exact times. As it happened, I attended a preview of some excerpts from this dog's dinner of a documentary a few weeks ago at Bowdoin College in Maine. I'll return to this melancholy event when I've had an opportunity to view the whole damned thing.