Museums

London's National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, which are campaigning to buy a $73.7-million Titian painting for the U.K. national collections, said they would announce the outcome in January. "There has been very good progress in both fundraising and the negotiation of terms for this important acquisition," the museums said in a press release Tuesday. "Our efforts to bring the campaign to a successful conclusion continue, and we will not be making any further announcements until January."

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

Call it the accidental road trip. Looking for a less monotonous route home from Northern California last summer, my family and I took California 99 south from Sacramento to Bakersfield and picked up Interstate 5 from there. It took a little longer, but the four-lane road's calming landscape and quirky attractions left us pleasantly surprised and prolonged our vacation buzz. California 99 is easy to overlook as a route to San Francisco and points north. It's not as scenic as the coastal highway or as fast as Interstate 5, and it has more than its share of cows and dirt pastures.

If you're headed anywhere near Jackson , Wyo., this summer, leave open a few hours for the National Museum of Wildlife Art , which turns 25 this month. The museum sits on a butte at the edge of Jackson, overlooking an elk refuge, and its collection includes paintings, sculpture and photography - a great way to glimpse nature in all four seasons, no matter when you're there. I was introduced to the place two years ago. Besides beholding many great images of critters, I learned that the folk artist behind the “Peaceable Kingdom” image (lion, lamb, etc.,  gathered in an idyllic rural setting)

Is it a zoo or a museum? Yes to both. The San Diego Zoo and its Safari Park long ago shattered the mold for the cat-in-a-cage attraction. Now other visionary organizations are pushing the limits, putting nature on display more naturally, then adding a pinch of Smithsonian. If you're traveling the West this spring or summer, treat yourself and the kids to a genuine close encounter of the critter kind — educational benefits no extra charge. -- Ken Van Vechten Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, 2021 N. Kinney Road, Tucson; (520)

Like almost everything else, the cost of attending Los Angeles County museums or parking at a state or county beach is going up. Effective April 1, the Board of Supervisors has decided, it will cost most adults $3 rather than $1.50 to visit the County Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits, the county Arboretum and the Botanic Gardens. Parking at county beaches (and at state beaches operated by Los Angeles County) will go from $3 to $4 a day.

Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor. The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of tradition and established a republic. "Our boy has suffered for nothing," his father said, weeping and beating his breast, when he learned that the emperor had been overthrown. "They don't need eunuchs anymore!" Little did he know that the child nevertheless would earn a place in Chinese history.

In a crumbling brick building on the edge of the city's downtown arts and culture center, Rabbi Brian Lurie dreams of creating an institution that will help define an American Jewish identity for the 21st century. He talks of filling his new Jewish Center with a kaleidoscope of interactive, ever-changing exhibits aimed at introducing visitors to Judaism and challenging them to reshape it.

Army Capt. Claudio Montane wants one thing clear from the start: This place is not a narco-museum. The point is not to glorify drug traffickers. "Its purpose is to show Mexico and the world the efforts and the good results that we have achieved," Montane said, opening a tour of a military collection officially called the Museum of Drugs.

If you go West Kern Oil Museum, 1168 Wood St., Taft; (661) 765-6664, http://www.westkern-oilmuseum.org. Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 1-4 p.m. Sundays. Admission is free. Kern County Museum , 3801 Chester Ave., Bakersfield; (661) 868-8400, http://www.kcmuseum.org. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays. Admission is $10 for adults; students are $8 and $9, depending on age.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

The battleship Iowa, a storied vessel that languished for years in the U.S. Navy's mothball fleet, is about to start its final journey, from San Francisco to its permanent home as a museum in the Port of Los Angeles. Next Sunday, four tugboats will guide the Iowa, among the biggest U.S. battleships ever built, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of the San Francisco Bay. One of them, the 7,200-horsepower Warrior, will chug down the coast with the massive ship in tow, taking three or four days to reach Southern California.

The pace is picking up on the massive conservation project in process at the Southwest Museum in Mount Washington. The end is almost in sight: Only 36,000 objects to go! In 2003, when the poverty-stricken institution merged with the more affluent Museum of the American West under the umbrella of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park, the first priority was to save the Southwest's collection of about 250,000 Native American artworks and artifacts. Second only to the holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian inWashington, D.C., the collection had been inadequately housed for decades and further damaged by earthquakes, water and insects.

What an appealing slice-of-life California town, an easy day trip by car or train. Come for the history, stay for the food. This restaurant-intensive ranch town is the oldest community in Orange County. If San Juan Capistrano - or SJC - had a dating profile it would say: "Self-deprecating, authentic, still likes a good time. " The bed. Choices here are limited, though a new hotel is on the way. Till then, you have the Residence Inn Marriott, with one- and two-bedroom suites starting at $179 (33711 Camino Capistrano; [949]

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

John Gray, who rode off into retirement about 16 months ago after 11 years as president of the Autry National Center of the American West, is making an unexpected return astride one of the world's most-visited cultural institutions: He's been named director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C. "His passion for American history and scholarship is obvious, and it's what will make him a great leader...

It's been said that there's no such thing as a free lunch -- but a free feast for the eyes is within reach at an L.A.-area museum. The tally hereabout, not counting special exhibitions, can get as high as the $20 weekend adult admission at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. But savvy people can get comped even at the Huntington, where the first Thursday of every month is free, although you have to reserve tickets in advance. There's no parking charge.

What they'll leave in and what they'll leave out -- that question haunts Margarita Iglesias as she considers next month's opening of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. That Chile is recognizing victims of its military dictatorship in a striking new "monument to memories" is positive, said Iglesias, both a victim and a historian of Augusto Pinochet's bloody 17-year rule. As a high school student activist in Santiago in 1975, she was tortured before fleeing with her family to France.

Dragons, graffiti, cartoon heroes. Gajin Fujita is known for mixing Japanese art with L.A. street and pop culture in paintings fueled by his eclectic imagination and experiences as a Japanese American from Boyle Heights. The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena is spotlighting a major influence on these East-meets-Eastside creations: Fujita's passion for ukiyo-e , the woodblock prints that flourished in 17th- to 19th-century Japan. "Gajin Fujita: Ukiyo-e in Contemporary Painting," which opened in April, is what curator Bridget Bray calls "a focused solo exhibition of five pieces in which you see parallels to the print tradition such as dynamic compositions, martial figures, attention to surface detail and dramatization of the natural and supernatural worlds.

Is a strain of recent abstract painting obsessed with revitalizing the celebrated tradition of the 1950s New York School? A peculiar new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art says yes, proposing that a vigorous revival of Jackson Pollock's drips, Mark Rothko's luminous clouds of color, Franz Kline's muscularity of forms and other painterly concerns from a half-century ago is underway - albeit with a notable twist. The old abstraction recorded the singular hand of the artist at work in the studio.