Hollywood by Way of Scotland and Other Intersections

The fall art season in L.A.’s museums gets underway today with a merger between art and Hollywood movies: “Douglas Gordon,” a survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art (through Jan. 20), includes the Scottish artist’s video installations featuring digitalized manipulations of such classic films as “Psycho” and “Taxi Driver.” The show, which will travel to New York and Washington, D.C., next year, also includes text works and sculpture.

The Santa Monica Museum of Art brings “Freestyle” from the Studio Museum in Harlem (Sept. 28-Nov. 18). A survey of 28 younger African American artists, the show includes work by Kori Newkirk and Eric Wesley, who were featured at the Hammer Museum’s “Snapshot” exhibition in the spring.

MOCA collaborates with its counterpart in Chicago for “Matta in America” (Sept. 30-Jan. 6), a focused examination of Chilean-born painter Roberto Matta Echaurren. Matta, like many artists based in Paris at the start of World War II, fled fascism by emigrating to Manhattan, where his Surrealist paintings had a considerable effect on Jackson Pollock and other artists of the nascent New York School. The show will concentrate on Matta’s free-flowing work from 1939 to 1948.

Washington’s Smithsonian American Art Museum is closed for major renovation, so portions of its permanent collection of American painting, sculpture and works on paper have been divvied up into eight package shows touring the country.

One of those, “Lure of the West , “ comes to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens (Oct. 2-Dec. 16), and features an assortment of landscapes, portraits and Modernist abstractions from the 1820s through the 1940s by such artists as Charles Bird King, George Catlin, Edmonia Lewis, Albert Bierstadt and the Taos School.

A more contemporary selection of mostly American art is offered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in “Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art From the Broad Collections” (Oct. 7-Jan. 6.), on loan from LACMA trustee Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe.

LACMA also makes a relatively rare foray into European Old Master painting, having organized a much-anticipated survey of Neapolitan Baroque painter “Luca Giordano” (Nov. 4-Jan. 20). Giordano (1634-1705), who also studied and worked in Florence, Rome and Venice, was so prolific with the brush that he was nicknamed “Luca fa presto”--”paint-fast Luke.”

Two shows opening at the Getty Museum on Nov. 13 reflect the enormous effect of lenses on modern visual perception. “Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” (through Feb. 17) traces the evolution of the sometimes Surrealist, often magical photographs of the great Mexican artist on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

Evolving sensory technology from the 18th century to the 20 century is the subject of “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen” (through Feb. 3). The exhibition, which was several years in the making, includes everything from scientific instruments, fool-the-eye paintings, a Wunderschrank (a cabinet of wonders), panoramas and moving dioramas to contemporary works such as Lucas Samaras’ “Mirrored Room” and Cibachrome light-boxes by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall.