Museum Shows Put on Their Traveling Shoes : Some major exhibitions take to the road but bypass our freeways

Sated as we are by reviews of the past year and decade, it’s a relief to look ahead in 1990. Forget about the disappointments of 1989. Here come big exhibitions of art by Francis Bacon, John Baldessari, Kasimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Titian. The Soviets are sending more loan shows from their great museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is organizing a landmark exhibition on “The Fauve Landscape” and the J. Paul Getty Museum is planning a special show of ancient Cypriot art.

In short, 1990 offers a typically impressive slate of celebrated names and ambitious projects--particularly if you take a coast-to-coast view of exhibition highlights and if you extend both ends of the calendar year. The first 1990 event at the County Museum of Art, for example, is a double bill of contemporary artists’ traveling retrospectives that debuted last year in other cities.

One is a survey of British artist Francis Bacon’s work, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington to mark his 80th birthday in 1989. The eagerly awaited celebration of an artist whom many critics consider to be the best living painter will be at the County Museum of Art from Feb. 11 to April 29, then go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 23-Sept. 4).

“Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective,” which honors a New York painter known for stained abstractions, premiered at MoMA last year. The show of 40 years’ work will appear at LACMA from Feb. 11 to April 22, then have its final engagement (Nov. 5-Jan. 7, 1991) at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

The biggest feather in LACMA’s cap this year may turn out to be a brand-new exhibition, called “The Fauve Landscape.” Judi Freeman, the museum’s associate curator of 20th-Century art, has selected 175 paintings made between 1904 and 1906 by artists who were dubbed fauves (wild beasts) because of their use of vivid, unnatural color and their modern vision. The show will premiere at the County Museum of Art (Oct. 4-Dec. 30) before moving on to the Met (Feb. 14-May 5, 1991) and the Royal Academy of Art in London, (June 13-Aug. 18, 1991).

Two of the most important 1990 exhibitions at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art are also major traveling shows. One, a long overdue retrospective for Los Angeles conceptual artist John Baldessari, was organized by MOCA and will appear there first (March 25-June 17). Then the show will set out on an exhaustive tour, going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 12-Sept. 16), the Hirshhorn Museum (Oct. 16-Jan. 6, 1991), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Feb. 3-April 28, 1991) and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (July 10-Sept. 29, 1991).

At the end of the year, MOCA will honor another internationally known Los Angeles artist, Edward Ruscha. His exhibition of about 50 paintings from the ‘80s, which was organized by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Pompidou Center in Paris, will wind up in Los Angeles (Dec. 9-Feb. 24, 1991) at the end of an international tour.

As the world grows smaller through speedy transportation and instant communication, art shows take to the road almost as routinely as people. This tends to homogenize the art scene for frequent fliers, making it appear that the same exhibitions eventually pop up in every major city--right next to McDonald’s hamburger stands.

On the other hand, Angelenos continually complain--with justification--that many important exhibitions never come here. The 1990 list of major attractions that are not booked in the Southland includes the following:

- “Matisse in Morocco: The Paintings and Drawings, 1912-1913.” The exploration of a short but vital period of the French modernist’s oeuvre will be at National Gallery in Washington (March 18-June 3), New York’s Museum of Modern Art (June 24-Sept. 4), the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (Sept. 28-Nov. 20) and the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (Dec. 15-Feb. 15, 1991). The show will include 24 paintings--about half of them from Soviet collections--and 36 drawings made while Matisse traveled around a country that he considered an earthly paradise.

- “Titian, Prince of Painters.” The assembly of 60 works will celebrate the Venetian Renaissance master’s 500th birthday at the Ducal Palace in Venice (June 1-Oct. 7) and the National Gallery (Oct. 28-Jan. 27, 1991).

- “Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings.” Sure to be a popular success, the exhibition of 90 paintings will include images of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, gardens at Giverny and other subjects that Monet painted repeatedly during the 1890s. The show will appear at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Feb. 7-April 29), the Art Institute of Chicago (May 19-July 21) and the Royal Academy in London (Sept. 7 to Dec. 9).

- “From Poussin to Matisse: The Russian Taste for French Painting.” The Hermitage and Pushkin museums have agreed to lend 50 paintings for this exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 20-July 29) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Sept. 8-Nov. 25).

Regrettable as these losses may be, Los Angeles isn’t exactly out of the traveling show loop. The County Museum of Art has scheduled a staggering array of exhibitions to be trucked in from afar. They include “Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings and Photography by Georg Grosz and His Contemporaries,” featuring German Expressionist views of America (April 19-June 24); “Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original,” a retrospective of 81 paintings by the American Regionalist (April 29-July 22) and “The New Vision,” 125 innovative works by 70 modernist photographers (May 10-July 15).

Also on LACMA’s 1990 agenda of traveling shows are “A Primal Spirit: 10 Contemporary Japanese Sculptors” (June 17-Aug. 26), “Treasures From the Fitzwilliam Museum” (June 21-Sept. 9) and “Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection” (Aug. 16-Nov. 4).

The first imported attraction at Armand Hammer’s new museum in Westwood, which he plans to open in May, will be a landmark retrospective of works by Soviet modernist Kasimir Malevich (Nov. 25-Jan. 13, 1991). The exhibition of more than 100 paintings and works on paper, primarily from Soviet museums, will have its first U.S. engagement at the National Gallery in Washington (Sept. 16-Nov. 4) and end a three-city tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Feb. 3-March 24, 1991).

The Museum of Contemporary Art will present paintings from the “AMERIKA” series by Tim Rollins and KOS, a highly publicized New York workshop for adolescent artists (July 8-Sept. 2). Among other imports, MOCA will adapt Ellen Sebastian’s “Sanctified” performance piece as a collaborative exhibition with Betye Saar (April 22-July 22). “The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty” (Nov. 4-Jan. 13, 1991) will present a British group’s responses to American technology, mass media and popular culture in a show that MOCA has jointly organized with the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum will start off the year with “Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol” (Jan. 21-March 18). This exhibition on Warhol’s early development as a designer and artist, featuring 194 works made between 1945 and 1963, was organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. “Tony Cragg: Investigations into Chaos” is a Newport production, however, and a big one at that. The first solo American exhibition of works by the British sculptor will premiere at the Newport museum (Oct. 14-Dec. 30) before going on a national tour.

Still other exhibitions are for local consumption only. Out-of-towners will have to come here to see them. The California Afro-American Museum, for example, will present “The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism,” an examination of a merger of blues music, black folk culture and modernist elements (Jan. 13-March 4). More or less concurrently (Jan. 31-March 3), USC’s Fisher Art Gallery will offer “Celebrations: Sights and Sounds of Being,” an exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures by 25 African-American artists, which will be accompanied by taped music.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition program will continue to offer important glimpses of the museum’s steadily growing collection in small, comprehensible shows. This year’s agenda includes “Renaissance and Mannerist Drawings in Northern Europe” (Jan. 9-March 25), “The Art of the Written Word: Medieval and Renaissance Calligraphy in Illuminated Manuscripts” (Jan. 16-April 1) and “Carleton Watkins: Western Landscape and the Classical Vision,” a show of 19th-Century photographs (March 13-May 27).

The Getty generally concentrates on its own art, but this year a rare loan exhibition will bring 32 objects from the Cyprus Museum and three from the Menil Collection in Houston together with a Getty-owned idol in a special exhibition called “Chalcolithic Cyprus” (Feb. 22-April 11). Sculpture and pottery dating from 3500 BC will include new finds from excavations at Kissonerga on the island of Cyprus.

Whether any or all of these exhibitions--not to mention hundreds of others--will live up to our most optimistic expectations remains to be seen. It’s a sure thing that both homebound and peripatetic art aficionados can keep very busy covering the 1990 scene.