ART : The Fall Season Is About to Rise

Observers of casual Los Angeles folkways have long suspected that these casual mores come from our benign climate. Despite the odd heat wave, absence of marked seasonal change causes us to forget that time is passing and that we should therefore hurry up and get things done before it starts snowing.

Normally we make up for this lack of meteorological drama by observing certain customs that let us know the time of year. We know it is New Year’s Day on account of the Rose Parade and the attendant football skirmish, no matter what the weather is. Without such gyroscopic events we would tumble about helplessly in time, forgetting to take vacations and going back to school in the middle of the semester. We need them to maintain balance like the Earth needs the ozone layer.

In the past, the art world used to fall into an annual stupor that was a sure sign of summer. Recently, however, our galleries and museums barely stop for breath all year, due to Los Angeles’ alleged arrival as the aesthetic locus mundi of the Pacific Rim. Naturally, local artniks are delighted with their new status, but they are having trouble figuring out what month it is.

It’s September, folks. The month used to mark the beginning of the fall and winter art season. It still does, except there is almost no seam between it and the spring and summer season. Never mind. It is still time to peer into the future, predicting the high points, spotting the trends and hoping nobody remembers how wrong you were when it’s all over.

Is the local grass-roots art world being gobbled up by our two mega-museums, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art? A scan of advanced schedules makes it look that way. Probably an illusion. We need hefty museum fare to sustain us, but the spice of the art life is the brilliant little connoisseur shows that show up quietly at the Getty and Huntington as well as the curiously refreshing young artists who emerge unexpectly in downtown alternate spaces and college foyers.

If, however we are talking Major Event here, the hands-down high-profile fall phenomenon will certainly be as much an architectural as an artistic event. The public opening of LACMA’s Joe D. Price Pavilion for Japanese Art on Sept. 25 will officially unveil a piquant new building designed by Bruce Goff to house Price’s samurai-sharp collection in a setting that has been inciting vigorous discussion during its rise in the museum sculpture garden. Masterpiece or oddity? Stay tuned.

Happenings of four miserable little months do not a trend make. On the other hand they can bolster what we know about existing cultural threads. It is by now no secret that architecture in the ‘80s has been so vivid and interesting as to gobble up art. This is not necessarily due to an inherent weakness in art but because some architectural minds--like that of Frank Gehry--have come to work much like those of artists, and some fine artistic minds--like that of Robert Irwin--have come to think in spaces of architectural proportions; there has been a kind of fusion.

If that whets the architectural appetite, there is more. A quick air-shuttle to San Francisco between Oct. 6 and Dec. 1 will get you a look at “Chicago Architecture 1872-1922” at the Museum of Modern Art. That period saw Chicago laying the groundwork for all modern architecture and producing authentic geniuses from H. H. Richardson to Louis Sullivan.

Back home, UCLA will present “Master Drawings of Otto Wagner” (Oct. 25-Dec. 11), representing turn-of-the-century Vienna, another period that saw a great fusion and flowering of art, architecture and design. (We are probably not as decadent, but one can hope.)

Funny. LACMA is also doing a show related to the Germanic fin-du-siecle. “Art Nouveau in Munich: Masters of the Jugendstil” (Dec. 22-Feb. 19) will concentrate on their predictably rich and heavily stylish decorative arts in some 150 objects.

As if that weren’t enough Deutschkunst , LACMA will also present “German Expressionism 1915-1925: The Second Generation,” put together by curator Stephanie Baron. Her earlier “German Expressionist Sculpture” was the hands-down original hit of its season, so one has high hopes for this one.

This is getting weird. The Long Beach Museum of Art has “Watercolors Yesterday and Today” up its sleeve (Sept. 25-Oct. 30). Sounds innocent enough but it too begins with artists closely associated with German Expressionism and with the Russians Wassily Kandinsky and Alexi Jawlensky.

A trend. A trend. We start with a Japanese pavilion and move by easy steps to German Angst . Blossoming aesthetic admiration for former foes and present economic partners and rivals.

Actually it makes perfect sense. L.A.--long part Japanese--has carried on a long opposites-attract affair with German modernism. Two of the most mind-expanding exhibitions ever seen here were the Max Beckmann retrospective at LACMA and MOCA’s Anselm Keiffer survey (closing today, incidentally).

Well, that’s all just fine, but I thought Los Angeles was famous for its own art, a seedbed of now and future creativity.

Don’t worry. The local vintage has not dried up. There will be the usual deluge of emerging talent in the galleries and in exhibitions, such as the Municipal Art Gallery’s “Present Tense,” whose nice punning title wraps six young locals from Oct. 2 to Nov. 6. Riper minds will inhabit the debut show of the Muni’s new director, Ed Leffingwell. His “One of a Kind” (Dec. 6-Jan. 15) will catch us up with the likes of John McCracken, Mary Corse and Nick Wilder.

Sounds good, but the premier event for a local pioneer will indubitably be the first retrospective in 20 years devoted to the art of L.A.’s godfather of macho chic, the Burt Reynolds of Venice, Billy Al Bengston (muffled applause). Called “Billy II,” it will roost at LACMA Dec. 1-Jan. 9, providing a needed update of a local cult figure whose reputation is just short of that of an established contemporary classic. The show may call the deciding vote.

The industrial-strength retrospective at MOCA (Oct. 4-Jan. 29) will be a traveling survey of the art of Richard Artschwager, a former furniture manufacturer turned sculptor whose works most often look like Formica tables and chairs in mid-transformation toward total impracticability and therefore a kind of mordantly chuckling Duchampian art.

MOCA installations of works by Vito Acconci, Nancy Spero and performances by John Woodall sound less prepossessing, but you never know.

Lovers of classic Abstract Expressionism are guaranteed a lift when a traveling survey of paintings by Joan Mitchell appears at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (Dec. 2-Jan. 29). The work combines the grittiness of New York in the ‘50s with the lyric lift of the French countryside where Mitchell has long resided.

There you go ignoring the great traditions again. What about the Old Masters?

Gotcha. The County Museum, ever mindful of its role as a general-history-of-art museum, has scheduled a singular look at the paintings of Guido Reni. For some that is high-mindedness approaching the esoteric. Reni (1575-1642) tamed the Italian classical Baroque of the Carracci brothers and was much admired by the Victorians for his subtlety and sweetness.

Any optical gourmand not sated by that spread and free to travel in fact or fantasy can find blue-plate fare on the road. As close as the San Diego Museum of Art, a cache of graphics and paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec will go on view Oct. 15-Dec. 31, representing a munificent gift bequeathed by collector Baldwin M. Baldwin.

Back East, the big-ticket shows appear to be a once-in-a-lifetime retrospective of Edgar Degas visiting Manhattan’s Met (Oct. 11-Jan 8), a long-delayed update of the paintings of Jasper Johns at the Philadelphia Museum (Oct. 3-Jan. 5) and a unique American appearance of the casual magnificence of Paolo Veronese at the National Gallery (Nov. 13-Feb. 20).

A trip to the Atlantic Seaboard for these events will smarten up any Californian, who will come back knowing definitively what season it is.