New season: Bay Area art museums

The Steins Collect, easily the best show of the year so far and one of the finest SFMOMA has mounted in the last decade, closes up shop and moves to Paris as of Sept. 6. So, procrastinators out there, there's no time to lose if you want to catch it. (Extended viewing hours have been added for its waning days.) Then there are musical chairs to report - most notably, the Contemporary Jewish Museum's dynamic director, Connie Wolf, is leaving at the end of the year to take the top job at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, a changing of the guard that may well shake up both institutions. Make sure that SF Open Studios is on your radar. The oldest and largest event of its kind is back Oct. 1-30, plus an additional fifth weekend. More than 900 artists participate in this roving neighborhood open house, which hits the Castro Oct. 1 & 2.

This year, the fall season doesn't really kick off in earnest until October, in part because the big shows like the Picasso at the de Young and Bali at the Asian don't close until mid-September or later. With a few exceptions, there don't seem to be any barnburners on the horizon, but here are a few exhibitions to be on the lookout for.

texttexttextS5, be sure to gaze skyward at the atrium, where you'll find Jim Campbell's new opus, "Exploded View," a suspended installation that dazzles with multitudes of flickering LED lights and shadowy three-dimensional figures that take shape and come into view.

SFMOMAArtists are tuning forks, registering, filtering and interpreting societal undercurrents, which is exactly what they do in The Air We Breathe (Nov. 5, 2011-Feb. 20, 2012), a show in which they respond to one of the most divisive civil rights issues of our time, the legalization of same-sex marriage. The exhibition, whose title is drawn from a poem by Langston Hughes ("Equality is in the air we breathe"), brings together 30 commissioned works by contemporary visual artists and eight poets. Francesca Woodman (Nov. 5, 2011-Feb. 20, 2012) reconsiders the brief but remarkable career of a photographer who has exerted a profound influence on other artists, especially women, some 30 years after she committed suicide at the tender age of 22. And, starting Nov. 5, be sure to gaze skyward at the atrium, where you'll find Jim Campbell's new opus, "Exploded View," a suspended installation that dazzles with multitudes of flickering LED lights and shadowy three-dimensional figures that take shape and come into view.

Contemporary Jewish Museum Houdini: Art and Magic (Oct. 2, 2011-Jan. 16, 2012) For a Jewish immigrant at the turn of the 20th century, being an escape artist would've proved particularly useful - and loaded with metaphor. The son of a rabbi, the Hungarian-born Houdini is the subject of a show that examines his life and legacy with over 160 indispensable objects for the magically inclined, including handcuffs, shackles, straitjackets, steamer trunks and the famous Water Torture Cell. Through the use of films and photographs, California Dreaming (Nov. 17, 2011-Oct. 16, 2012) explores the history and stories of Jewish life in the Bay Area, from the Gold Rush onward.

Legion of Honor Pissarro's People (Oct. 22, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012) focuses on the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and his lifelong interest in the human figure, with over 40 paintings and 60 works on paper from his early years in the Caribbean and Venezuela until his death in 1903. It also includes his late political drawings - did you know he was an anarchist? - and utopian landscapes. Artistic San Francisco (Oct. 22, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012), an installation of prints, drawings and photographs, captures the environs of the beloved and indisputably scenic Bay Area. Wayne Thiebaud, Eadweard Muybridge and David Park are among those represented.

de Young Museum Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Oct. 8-Feb. 26, 2012) Don't let the name scare you off. A Kentucky optician by day, in his last decade, Meatyard often returned to the tropes of dolls and masks, photographing children in abandoned houses and landscapes. Not exactly your parents' notion of family photography, perhaps, but fascinating nonetheless. Contrasting age and youth, childhood and mortality, intimacy and the unknown, the 60 pictures here examine dolls and masks across different bodies of work, offering a window on an enigmatic artist's psyche. Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Oct. 29, 2011-Feb. 12, 2012) showcases sumptuous 16th-century paintings once owned by assorted Archdukes and Emperors of the Hapsburg empire. Royalty has its privileges, and among them is the possession of works by Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgione, Veronese and others, who reveled in and expressed the sensuality of nature and the human body through lush color and atmospherics.

Asian Art Museum Maharaja: The Splendor of India's Royal Courts (Oct. 21, 2011-April 8, 2012), the Asian's big fall show, which rolls out 200 spectacular artworks related to the opulent reigns of India's princes, from the 1700s to the mid-20th-century, is from all indications worth waiting for. The recession is upon us, so bring on the bling, as nothing quite compares to Indian royalty in full regalia, an elite not known for restraint when it comes to displays of wealth. The exhibition features costumes, ornate weaponry, paintings, a golden throne, photographs by Man Ray, and a Cartier necklace, the designer's most extravagant commission on record.

OMCA1991: Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach (Oct. 15-Feb. 12, 2012) revisits the conflagration on its 20th anniversary via 40 images: 14 large-scale prints and 26 smaller ones. A similar show is on view during roughly the same period at the Berkeley Art Museum (Oct. 12- Feb. 5).

teCantor Arts Centert Two fall shows of note: Rodin and America: Influence and Adaptation, 1876-1936 (Oct. 5, 2011-Jan. 1, 2012), which explores the sculptor's impact on a generation of American artists, and includes 25 of his masterful works in bronze, plaster, marble and watercolor; and The Legend of Rex Slinkard (Nov. 9, 2011-Feb 26, 2012), an exhibition of paintings, charcoals and pen-and-watercolors by the early 20th-century California artist whose life was cut short by the 1918 influenza epidemic.