Fall preview: Art

LOCAL

‘Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me, or the Art of Give and Take’

When Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto in Zurich in 1916, he elevated meaningless nonsense to a level of refinement rarely matched since then. His reason for doing so was twofold: to make clear the truly awful state of society, then dissolving into the disastrous chaos of the so-called War to End All Wars, and to demolish any lingering doubts that some monolithic truth was a road to salvation.

Allen Ruppersberg is one of those artists who, for roughly the last four decades, has been giving old Hugo a run for his money -- albeit in fully contemporary terms. In addition to earlier collages and drawings, this show promises two new large-scale installations, including one assembled from 15,000 pages of the artist’s extensive book collection. Read it and weep.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, just opened.

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‘Luis Melendez: Master of the Spanish Still Life’

Say “still life,” and thoughts turn almost immediately to Holland, where the genre achieved a high level of sumptuous articulation in the 17th century -- or maybe to France, where Rococo painters stripped it down again into eloquent simplicity.

But Spain? Not so much.

The name Luis Melendez might not ring a bell, but in 18th century Madrid he became the king’s still life painter thanks to a great success with a royal commission to depict “every species of food produced by the Spanish climate.” For this first-ever American survey, organized by the National Gallery of Art, Melendez will be represented by about 30 canvases, some never publicly shown before.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens Sept. 27.

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‘Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield’

The first solo exhibition organized after the Museum of Modern Art opened in Manhattan 80 years ago went not to a European giant like Matisse or Picasso, but to a 37-year-old American working in a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y. Charles Burchfield made his living there designing wallpaper -- which may be one reason his work appeals to Robert Gober, the marvelous contemporary artist whose own varied output has included wallpaper and who has co-organized (with the Hammer’s Cynthia Burlingame) this eagerly anticipated survey. Among the drawings, watercolors and voluminous journal entries will be a room of 27 works from the MoMA show, together with Burchfield’s correspondence with the museum’s director, Alfred Barr.

UCLA Hammer Museum, opens Oct. 4.

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‘Collection: MOCA’S First 30 Years’

To celebrate its anniversary, the Museum of Contemporary Art will turn over all 80,000 square feet of its gallery space on Grand Avenue and in Little Tokyo to a survey of some 500 diverse works chosen from the 6,000 it has acquired since the museum was conceived in 1979. Yes, those are a lot of numbers. But if, in light of last year’s near-collapse of the fiscally mismanaged institution, since struggling to stabilize, you note some wishful optimism in the title, that’s because the “first 30 years” means to suggest that the next 30 will be equally stellar in terms of the program.

We’ll have to wait and see about that. In the meantime, though, this exhibition ought to lay out just how remarkable MOCA’s permanent collection actually is.

Museum of Contemporary Art, opens Nov. 15.

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‘Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference’

Is that a Rembrandt?

The question has been asked many times over many decades -- and sometimes answered to the dissatisfaction of those for whom much-loved paintings have turned out, in the opinion of scholars, not to have been made by the painter from Delft at all. Contentious disputes about Rembrandt van Rijn’s work have long been a staple of art historical study.

Such is the difficulty of being one of the most influential artists of all time. Now, a major international loan exhibition at the Getty will zero in on the Dutch master’s drawings, juxtaposing specific Rembrandt works on paper with those of 14 students and followers. In addition to examining the role of drawing in 17th century Holland, this exercise in high-level connoisseurship, distilling three decades’ worth of scholarship, means to offer the best guide yet to distinguishing between Rembrandt and not-Rembrandt.

J. Paul Getty Museum, opens Dec. 8.

OUT OF TOWN

‘Luc Tuymans’

Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, 51, has managed to take the bleary, fuzzed style of German master Gerhard Richter’s melancholic figurative paintings and give it a distinctive look. Tuymans’ bleached imagery is like walking out into bright sunlight from a dark interior: Your eyes have trouble adjusting, your mind can’t quite wrap itself around the scene it witnesses.

Given the political subject matter Tuymans often broaches, the remarkably potent effect feels oddly dangerous. Opening in Ohio, his first American retrospective will travel to San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago before ending up at his hometown of Brussels.

Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, opens Thursday.

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‘Kandinsky’

Once upon a time, back when lush, sensual, gestural abstract painting was regarded as the most advanced art around, Wassily Kandinsky was king of the hill. Since then his star has followed that style of work into, if not eclipse (we’re talking the likes of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Willem de Kooning, after all), then certainly into the shade. Now, in honor of the 50th anniversary of its landmark spiral building, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is hosting a full-scale Kandinsky retrospective.

Makes sense: The museum’s founder bought more than 150 works by the visionary artist, whose purely abstract aesthetic became the institution’s early hallmark. Seen already in Europe, the show will have its only American presentation at the Guggenheim.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, opens Friday.

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‘Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection’

In a season typically short on in-depth studies of art made by women, the Hirshhorn’s much-needed retrospective of painted sculptures (or are they spatial paintings?) by Anne Truitt (1921-2004) stands out. Starting in the early 1960s, after abandoning an earlier career in psychology, the Maryland-born artist began to make columnar sculptures from plywood, which she painted in flat acrylic colors.

Direct observation and indirect memory interact in the work, which merges two and three dimensions with an awareness of time. Few knew quite what to make of it, since the work didn’t exactly fit either Minimalism or the so-called Washington Color School. Now we’ll have a thorough chance to find out.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., opens Oct. 8.

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‘Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place’

When Susan Rothenberg made a number of surprising paintings of horses in the mid-1970s, she was pegged as an initiator of a “return” to figurative art that was deeply informed by abstraction. Horses, a stereotypical subject for women ever since Rosa Bonheur became a major painter in 19th century France, also assumed a slyly feminist charge.

This exhibition of 25 carefully chosen canvases from the last 35 years means to shift the focus -- away from the specifics of Rothenberg’s figurative content and toward the complex organization of space in otherwise seemingly simple paintings. In the 1970s, her work was positioned as a rebellion against the domination of formalist issues in art; now, her work will be examined for its formal sophistication.

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, opens Oct. 18.

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‘Embrace!’

The Denver Art Museum got a distinctive new building by architect Daniel Libeskind in 2006, which has stood since then as a symbol of institutional adventurousness. But it also got some practical problems, which are to be expected from a structure whose thrusting, jutting, tilting perimeter walls -- often likened to an enormous crystal -- don’t always work with the needs of art objects and audiences used to standing upright.

“Embrace!” is an exhibition that accepts the architectural challenge, with new commissions from 17 artists who will make works specifically designed for sites in and around the crystalline building. The international roster of painters, sculptors and assorted media and installation artists chosen by curator Christoph Heinrich includes El Anatsui (Nigeria/Ghana), Tobias Rehberger (Germany), Zhong Biao (China) and Jessica Stockholder (U.S.), as well as Denver-based Rick Dula and Timothy Weaver.

Denver Art Museum, opens Nov. 14.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com