Cezanne to Scully: A Rich Palette of Possibility

There are lots of different kinds of museum-goers, and lots of different reasons why one might want to head to a museum.

This fall and winter, there's such a variety of promising shows that almost any and every artistic need should be met. To help make sure they are, we've sorted our fall art highlights into a few handy categories.

Easy on the Eyes

The show that already has this critic drooling will be at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in late October. "Style and Status: Imperial Costumes From Ottoman Turkey" will bring together some of the world's most exquisitely woven silks.

There ought to be similar visual pleasure, if maybe in a more modest and mellow mode, in the abstract paintings in "Sean Scully: Wall of Light," also in late October, at the Phillips Collection. The Phillips will present one of Scully's most recent and most ambitious series, inspired by the light and Mayan ruins of the Yucatan.

Vik Muniz is another artist who makes art that's fun to look at, but the easy pleasure that he gives appeals to the mind as much as to the eyes. He takes found images such as news photographs and re-creates them in another medium: He's known to Washingtonians from the 2000 Corcoran Biennial, for which he re-created well-known images of famous Americans using shiny pools and blobs of ink. The work he's showing this month at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts will survey all of the many images he's made that riff on great works of art: a Cezanne remade from dots punched out of glossy magazines or Warhol's famous "Marilyn" done in drops of blood.

Sure Things

Museum-goers who want a guarantee of quality have plenty to choose from this season.

Curators at the National Gallery are bringing in a stunning assortment of certified masterpieces. They start the season with three of the greatest sculptures of the earlier Italian Renaissance, which have recently been restored. They move on to 47 hand-colored etchings of birds by John James Audubon. In the new year, they launch the much-anticipated "Cezanne in Provence" show, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of the artist's death by looking at the art he made about his place of birth.

More early Renaissance masterpieces will be on show in New York in October, with the Metropolitan Museum's landmark exhibition of paintings by Fra Angelico. This will be this country's first survey of the Florentine friar. Also in October, the nearby Frick Collection will present a major survey of the portraits of Hans Memling, who was a Netherlandish art star of the later 15th century.

The most exciting Old Master show this year must be the Francisco Goya survey coming in October to Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum in Vienna. It will be the largest exhibition of the artist's works ever held outside Spain.

Those who like more recent blue-chip work can head to the Corcoran in September, for an overview of Andy Warhol's pictures borrowed from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Even more contentious "masterpieces," again native to this country, will be on show in November at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibition called "Masters of American Comics." Featured artists include Chester Gould (creator of "Dick Tracy"), Jack Kirby ("Captain America," "The Fantastic Four") and Charles Schulz ("Peanuts").

If you think the curators must be on something to mount a show of comics, you could be right. Note their drug-themed October show called "Ecstasy," in which 31 artists explore "altered states and alternative modes of perception." I am told no Kool-Aid nor brownies of any kind will be supplied to visitors.