BEST OF 2009

In no particular order, these are the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year:

Roger Kuntz: Kuntz (1926-75) was not a major artist, but his fusion of traditional American Scene painting with Pop-inflected L.A. freeway imagery got wide notice in the early 1960s. The Laguna Art Museum’s “Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction,” the first full-scale retrospective of this artist, put those unusual paintings in revealing context.

“Two Germanys”: East met West in the bracing “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures,” and our understanding of Germany as a contemporary art powerhouse will never be the same. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a nice habit of doing that with 20th century German art.

“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese”: The astounding international loans of 16th century painting secured for “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts were mind-boggling. They also made it possible for the show to track “ambition” as an emerging new value in Western art.

Chinese “Treasures”: Wang Hui’s 50-foot-plus scroll, “Ten Thousand Li Up the Yangzi River,” which takes the eye on an unfolding journey up the great Chinese waterway, was but one extraordinary painting in “Treasures Through Six Generations: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy From the Weng Collection.” The show was an exceptional complement to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens’ new classical Chinese garden.

The Chimaera of Arezzo: The Chimaera is one amazing hunk of bronze -- an ancient Etruscan sculpture of a mythological fire-breathing lion with a serpent for a tail and a goat growing from its back. The Getty Villa’s small show added some illuminating contextual works to the Chimaera’s first-ever visit to the United States (from Florence, Italy), but this is one case where a single rare masterpiece made for a fully satisfying presentation.

Charles Burchfield: Who says watercolors are a minor art form? Not the UCLA Hammer Museum, where the absorbing “Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” reignited interest in the first American artist to have a solo show (in 1930) at New York’s then-new Museum of Modern Art.

MOCA’s first 30 years: The Museum of Contemporary Art was on the ropes a year ago. Now, the post-World War II rise of American art is paired with the simultaneous rise of Los Angeles, from shallow backwater to cultural dynamo, in the terrific 500-work permanent collection survey, “Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years.”

“Kandinsky”: Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was among the small handful of authentic revolutionaries in Modern art. New York’s Guggenheim Museum never looked more startlingly alive than it did with the great “Kandinsky” retrospective swirling around its spiral ramp.

“Latin American Abstraction”: “The Sites of Latin American Abstraction: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection” neatly dismantles any mistaken idea that geometric abstraction cannot have a profound political dimension. On view until Jan. 24, it’s also the most compelling show the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach has hosted.

“Rembrandt and His Pupils”: No artist is more beloved than Rembrandt, and no artist has more contested works attributed (or mistakenly attributed) to him. The J. Paul Getty Museum’s “Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference” (to Feb. 28) turns 30 years of scholarly detective work into a primer on connoisseurship for the Dutch master.