10 best art shows across SoCal museums, in a year full of captivating moments

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There was no shortage of engrossing art with which to engage in Southern California museums during the past year, although the considerable majority of it had been made only within the past 50 years or so.Art’s global history before the Second World War continues to play a decided second fiddle to contemporary art in special exhibitions.Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.The chief exception: the Getty, where its Brentwood anchor and Pacific Palisades outpost accounted for three of the 10 most engrossing museum exhibitions in 2025, all 10 presented here in order of their opening dates.

(Four are still on view.) Art museums across the country continue to struggle in attendance and fundraising after the double-whammy of the lengthy COVID-19 pandemic shut-down followed by culture war attacks from the Trump administration.That may help explain the unusually lengthy, seven-to-14 month duration of half of these shows.An emphasis on men’s daily lives is very unusual in French Impressionist art.

Women are more prominent as subject matter in scores of paintings by marquee names like Monet, Cassatt and Degas.But homosocial life in late-19th century Paris was the fascinating focus of this show, the first Los Angeles museum survey of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings in 30 years.Vibrant Chicano youth subcultures of 1990s Los Angeles, during the fraught era of Rodney King and the AIDS epidemic, are embedded in the art of one of its enthusiastic participants.

Guadalupe Rosales layers her archival work onto pleasure and freedom today, as was seen in this vibrant exhibition, offering a welcome balm during another period of outsized social distress.The nearly 70-year retrospective of portrait drawings in pencil and paint by Los Angeles artist Don Bachardy revealed the works to be like performances: Both artist and sitter participated in putting on a pictorial show.

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