Old and new works, and Tut’s treasures

Summer starts on a high note at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits” (June 7-Aug. 28) brings together 16 half-length images painted in the late 1650s and 1660s, a traumatic time when the temperamental artist declared bankruptcy and endured the death of his second wife. In “Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape,” Rembrandt’s slightly younger contemporary turns up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 26-Sept. 18) with 70 paintings and drawings that turn images of natural decay into melancholic poetry.

The LACMA show coincides with “Tim Hawkinson” (June 26- Aug. 28), a midcareer survey of the L.A. sculptor known for wildly inventive tinkering, and joins a retrospective there of Hungarian photographer “Andre Kertesz” (June 12-Sept. 5). Also on the camera calendar is “The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993” (June 25-Oct. 16), a survey at the UCLA Hammer Museum of color prints by an influential artist for whom the American vernacular is a treasure trove.

The Museum of Contemporary Art unveils “The Blake Byrne Collection” (July 3-Oct. 10), a magnanimous gift to the museum from the L.A. collector of 123 works by 78 artists, as well as “Jean-Michel Basquiat” (July 17-Oct. 10), the second posthumous retrospective of a young painter who is the rare 1980s Neo-Expressionist whose star has not faded.

Hovering over all this is the dark cloud of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” (June 16-Nov. 15), an ethically dubious ode to the cash register that gives new meaning to “golden age.” LACMA, alone among major American art museums, was happy to turn over its galleries to a profit-sharing arrangement with a commercial entertainment company. Let’s see: If 1.25 million people came to see bits of King Tut’s burial trove at LACMA in 1979, then today, at an average ticket price of $20 -- well, you do the math.