Art

Put away your crystal ball. You won’t need it to predict that the most talked about show of the fall museum season will be the first-ever attempt to chronicle the contemporary history of painting and sculpture in Los Angeles, “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997.” Organized in Europe, the show concludes its international tour at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center (Oct. 7-Jan. 3), where it will be endlessly debated for what’s included, what’s been left out and what it all means.

The Museum of Contemporary Art has organized two shows by very different sculptors: the dynamic steel abstractions of Richard Serra (Sept. 20-Jan. 3) and the psychologically destabilizing oddities of Charles Ray (Nov. 15-March 14).

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art plays host to the first retrospective in nearly a half-century of Russian-born Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (Sept. 20-Jan. 4) and to a 50-year retrospective of often autobiographical prints by June Wayne (Nov. 19-Feb. 8), founder of L.A.’s crucial Tamarind Lithography Workshop. The modern Russian graphic-design genius El Lissitzky is the subject of a show (Nov. 21-Feb. 21) of books, photographs and architectural and exhibition designs in the gallery at the Getty Research Institute.