FALL PREVIEW : The Calendar Critics’ Best Bets for the Rest of ’90 : Art

How can you tell fall has arrived in eternally sunny Southern California? Well, one way is by the start of the autumn arts and entertainment season. This special fall preview section provides listings of events from today through the end of the year and our critics’ picks for the best bets in film, pop music, jazz, stage, music and dance and the visual arts. (Some box-office telephone numbers may not be in operation yet.)

As kids, some of us actually looked forward to the opening of school. For the art crowd the unfurling of the fall exhibition season has some of the same charm. This year the menu shows enticing helpings of early modern, international contemporary, photography and those slightly esoteric shows promising offbeat insight.

The County Museum of Art launches the season today with “American Arts and Crafts: Virtue in Design.” The A&C; movement set the stage for modern aesthetics.

The season’s most eagerly-awaited painting exhibition is LACMA’s 175-piece “The Fauve Landscape” (Oct. 4-Dec. 30). The work seemed so shocking in 1904 its artists were dubbed “wild beasts.” In fact they were such domesticated animals as Henri Matisse and Raoul Dufy.

Norwegian Edvard Munch made art a confessional for spiritual anguish and obsession. He became one of art’s greatest printmakers as will be seen at LACMA (Nov. 22-Jan. 6) in some 100 sheets from the Epstein family collection.

The museum’s 25th anniversary show will unveil gifts and promised gifts (Oct. 14-Dec. 30). Connoiseurs will not want to miss “Masterpieces in Focus” a scholarly comparison of three versions of Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin’s endearing, “Soap Bubbles”(Oct. 18-Jan. 20).

Appropriately, contemporary exhibitions will reflect the prevailing internationalism of the scene. Homeboy Ed Ruscha is an influential part of it as will be seen when the Museum of Contemporary Art hosts a retrospective (Dec. 9-March 24).

Like Ruscha, the Brits had a hand in Pop and Conceptual art, too. In 1950s London, a covey of artists made installations inspired by popular culture. Several will be recreated for MOCA’s “The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty” (Nov. 4-Jan. 13).

Equally compelling are MOCA’s upcoming local introduction of German artist and filmmaker Rebecca Horn (Oct. 22-Mar 24), British sculptor Tony Cragg at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (Oct. 14-Dec. 30) and USC’s “Keepers of the Flame,” which will look at 20 Soviet dissident artist from Leningrad (Nov. 15-Jan. 13).

The roster of photography choices ranges from Ansel Adams’ classic landscapes at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Dec. 1-Feb.10), to the fey, conceptual fantasies of Duane Michals at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts (Dec. 12-Feb. 10).

One has delicious hunches about some shows. Poets can anticipate “Yoshitoshi: One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Oct. 29-Jan 27). The series uses aspects of the moon as metaphor for human moods.

Art collected by the man who looked most deeply at those moods will appear in “Sigmund Freud and Art”--UC Irvine’s show of his personal collection of antiquities (Nov. 10-Dec. 3).