Fall Preview : Our User’s Guide: Still Friendly : Critic’s Picks: Art

Although it’s never wise to count out such smaller venues as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Lannan Foundation, LACE, assorted college galleries and other such spaces around town, it seems the Museum of Contemporary Art and the L.A. County Museum of Art have a lock on the fall art season--institutionally speaking.

Museum of Contemporary Art. The circus begins at MOCA on Sunday with the debut of--well, not exactly Barnum & Bailey, but “Rolywholyover A Circus,” the last full-scale, multidisciplinary project by the late master of musical silence and artistic ephemera John Cage. The season will draw to a close at MOCA beginning Dec. 19, when conceptually elastic, often extraordinary paintings, sculptures and drawings by Vija Celmins, dating from the 1960s to the present, will be the subject of a traveling retrospective.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In between, LACMA offers three intriguing shows that couldn’t be more radically different from one another. Politically and aesthetically powerful photomontages by the great German anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield (nee Helmut Herzfeld) arrive on Oct. 7. And if you didn’t know there was a “Golden Age of Danish Painting,” a show of that name opening Oct. 24 will attempt to point you toward landscapes, portraits and genre scenes from Denmark at the turn of the 19th Century.

Finally, on Nov. 11 “The Clay Art of Adrian Saxe” will provide a retrospective view of the L.A.-based artist, whose dazzlingly eccentric, technically astonishing and intellectually challenging work has made him the most important ceramist of his generation.