Crowd-pleasers and some surprises

THE burning art question this summer is whether one unparalleled and popular temporary exhibition will become permanent. “Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer” ends a three-month run June 30 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it has seen an average of 1,700 daily visitors. The possibility that the museum might acquire this storied group of early Modern masterworks looms large.

LACMA will be hosting another certifiable crowd-pleaser -- “David Hockney Portraits,” June 11 to Sept. 4 -- the museum’s third major show of the perennially popular British expatriate. With “Richard Pousette-Dart: Works on Paper, 1940-1992,” (June 29 to Sept. 17) LACMA might also have a sleeper on its hands, since the late, enigmatic New York School painter has a cultish following.

Photographs by Catherine Opie at the Orange County Museum of Art (June 4 to Sept. 3) are another sure bet for contemporary work. So is a show of 84 works by late architects-turned-artists Roberto Matta, the Chilean Surrealist, and his son, Conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark, at the San Diego Museum of Art (Aug. 19 to Nov. 12). For likely surprises of an earlier vintage, look to the Long Beach Museum of Art, where “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century” (Aug. 25 to Nov. 26) begins in the awful era of slavery and ends with failed Reconstruction.

The summer’s biggest, most anticipated art event poses a logistical problem. The newly refurbished Getty Villa presents “The Colors of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases” (June 8 to Sept. 4), a large, and rare, exhibition of Archaic and Classical Greek vase decoration. About 100 vases will survey the usual red- and-black-figure motifs familiar to most museum visitors, here side by side with a variety of experimental ceramic techniques, including molding and gilding. The catch: Parking reservations are a must, and the Villa is already fully booked through July.

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-- Christopher Knight