The Galleries’ Fall Offensive : Art: L.A. galleries mobilize for biggest fall season ever. A record 75 exhibition openings are scheduled this week, several new galleries have opened and more activity is on the way.

War? What war?

Recession? What recession?

Despite ominous news on military and economic fronts, Los Angeles art galleries are gearing up for the biggest fall season ever. Amid a glut of exhibition openings--the majority of them scheduled for this weekend--several new galleries have opened and more activity is on the way.

Seventy-five openings are scheduled for this week alone, up from 55 during the inaugural week of last year’s fall season. New attractions opening Saturday include the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery’s exhibition of paintings by David Wojnarowicz, who has been an outspoken critic of censorship in the ongoing controversy over government arts funding; new work by pioneering conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, at the Margo Leavin Gallery; and etchings by James Turrell, a leading figure of Light/Space art, at the Stuart Regen Gallery. About 50 additional art exhibitions will open next week, and 24 member galleries of the Santa Monica/Venice Art Dealers Assn. will host an open house 6-9 p.m. on Sept. 14.

Santa Monica, the site of a gallery boom in the last four years, remains a stronghold for contemporary art galleries and a magnet for new ones. The Marc Richards Gallery, for example, has moved from Jefferson Boulevard into the back section of Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, at 2114 Broadway. It’s a money-saving move, but Richards and Krygier/Landau have not merged, the dealers emphasize, and they will not reduce their activity. The two galleries will conduct completely independent businesses, staging simultaneous exhibitions in separate galleries and alternating use of a central show space.

Richards, who is looking forward to increased traffic on Broadway’s gallery row, will open this weekend with a group exhibition, appropriately titled “Opening, Creating a Context.” He plans to conduct “a wide, eclectic program” of exhibitions and continue the series of “Art Matters” symposiums that he began in his former gallery. Krygier/Landau’s fall opening event is “D.E.M.: Accretion,” a collaboration between CalArts graduates Erik Otsea and Jan Tumlir that features a painting the team has worked on continuously for more than two years.

The Sherry Frumkin Gallery, also new on the Santa Monica scene, recently opened at 1440 9th St., in a building inaugurated in June by the Koplin Gallery, which relocated from West Hollywood. Frumkin’s first solo show, opening today, features John Wilson’s small sculptural scenarios, collectively titled “The Reagan Years Plus Two and Other Ethical Issues.” Randye Sandel, James Strombotne and Ron Pippin are also on Frumkin’s schedule.

New York’s Bess Cutler Gallery plans to open a Santa Monica branch in December, in conjunction with Los Angeles’ fifth annual international art fair. The SoHo gallery, which represents emerging New York artists, will take over a 6,000-square-foot warehouse on 9th Street, according to a gallery spokesman.

The lure of the beach, clean air, easy parking and the company of other dealers continue to boost the population of Santa Monica’s young community of galleries, but the seaside city isn’t the only site of gallery action.

Rosamund Felsen has ended her search for more space at 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., a few blocks north of her 12-year-old gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. Closing the space at 669 N. La Cienega Blvd. was a historic moment in Los Angeles art history, Felsen observed, because the building in West Hollywood has housed a notable sequence of dealers since the mid-’60s. The list includes Rolf Nelson, Paula Cooper, Eugenia Butler, Riko Mizuno, Larry Gagosian and Timothea Stewart.

Felsen’s new home, due to open Oct. 6 with a show of Mike Kelley’s work, also has a few historical credits. The 4,400-square-foot space (about twice as big as Felsen’s old gallery) formerly housed the Tom Kelly photography studios, where some of Marilyn Monroe’s calendar photographs were taken.

The biggest surprise of the season is the arrival of two galleries in Beverly Hills, which has been better known for glittering, commercial showcases along Rodeo Drive than for the more restrained, scholarly style that attracts the cognoscenti. “I wouldn’t have taken a spot there (on Rodeo Drive) if the rent was free,” said dealer Louis Stern. Instead, the Louis Stern Galleries opened around the corner, at 9528 Brighton Way, and packed in 200 people last week at a reception for the inaugural exhibition of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and modern artworks.

Stern, who has been affiliated with the Wally Findlay Galleries and worked as a private dealer in Los Angeles, said that there are “great contemporary galleries” here, but the area has had few places to see and buy Impressionist and modern art. After working with European galleries, Stern said he wanted to “integrate the quietly elegant sensibilities of a Paris gallery” into Beverly Hills.

“It is very difficult to get fine Impressionist and modern material,” Stern said, but he is confident that collectors are interested. As for choosing Beverly Hills, Stern said his gallery was likely to attract a different audience than the contemporary galleries in Santa Monica, so it wouldn’t be a great advantage to be near them. Tourist trade and Asian collectors who do business in Beverly Hills were other factors in his decision.

Stern will have prestigious company in Salander-O’Reilly, a major New York gallery that will open a West Coast branch at 456 N. Camden Drive, formerly occupied by Parachute, Inc. The first exhibition, a 1958-1990 retrospective of Kenneth Noland’s paintings, will run from Oct. 9 to Nov. 17. The second event, from Nov. 20 to Dec. 29, will be one of five roughly simultaneous exhibitions of Jules Olitski’s paintings planned for New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Los Angeles.

Gallery owner Larry Salander said the Beverly Hills exhibition program will parallel that of his Madison Avenue gallery. Exhibitions will generally feature major figures in contemporary art and catalogues will be published for the shows. Some exhibitions will open in Beverly Hills and others in New York, but most will be seen in both locations.

“I am opening the gallery in Beverly Hills out of respect for people who are involved in art in Los Angeles. It’s a very sophisticated place. Once I became aware of that, I thought I should act on it. I have no financial expectations, but it can’t be a bad thing for us,” Salander said.

Why Beverly Hills? “I found a beautiful space, and that was my prime concern,” he said. “I believe that when you put the right art up, people will come.”