Rich offerings on display at Vassar's Loeb center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College is widely known for its encyclopedic history of art collection.

Designed by internationally-known architect Cesar Pelli, the Loeb center boasts 20,000 square feet of art galleries that include prints and drawings galleries, an 8,600-square-foot sculpture garden designed by Pelli's wife, Diana Balmori, as well as classrooms and office space.

The center's namesake, Frances Lehman Loeb, an alumna of the class of 1928 and a Vassar trustee since 1988, provided the leadership gift of $7.5 million.

The limestone and brick center is designed to meld with the Gothic-style architecture of the adjacent Taylor Hall at the main entrance to the college itself. Taylor Hall formerly housed Vassar's art gallery.

The main galleries in the center are sleek, high-ceilinged and airy, with wooden floors. The setting gives large works breathing space and perspective for viewing.

The entrance to the center's galleries is through a glass-framed pavilion, dedicated to Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller and funded by the Rockefeller family. This pavilion, which has two Pelli-designed benches and a modular information desk, leads to a glass walkway. The inside walkway wall faces a courtyard that features a sculpture by American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The outside wall faces the campus. At the end of the walkway, to the right, is a promenade. It leads to a landscaped sculpture garden.

You can follow the walkway straight ahead through a double doorway into the gallery's atrium, which features a vaulted ceiling. Wood doors on the right of the atrium lead to the main galleries and a selection of paintings and sculpture from Vassar's collection. Wood doors on the left lead to three prints and drawings galleries.

The main galleries are designed in a logical, art historic pattern. Upon entering the foyer of the main gallery, you can turn right to the Asian collection, walk straight ahead to the 20th-century European and American collections, or turn left to the Egyptian and Roman antiquities collections.

The Egyptian and Roman collections follow the perimeter of the building and lead to subsequent collections of 15th-century Italian works, Italian and French Baroque paintings, Northern European works from the 16th and 18th centuries, 19th-century European and American works, as well as a special gallery housing college founder Matthew Vassar's collection of Hudson River School paintings.

These perimeter galleries form a frame for Vassar's European and American 20th-century works, which are hung in a large center gallery.

The college's collection, established by Matthew Vassar in 1864, numbers 12,500 works. More than 400 are displayed, including 60 drawings and watercolors in the "Five Centuries of Master Drawings" exhibition in the prints and drawings galleries.

In the main galleries, the 20 or so Italian Baroque paintings are impressive. Jean Valentine De Boullogne's "The Four Ages of Man" is a particularly outstanding piece; in its depiction of child, youth, middle age and old age, one age foretells the next.

The three prints and drawings galleries show works from the 15th through the 20th centuries, including renderings by Picasso, Van Gogh, Philip Guston, Paul Klee and Giacomo Balla - a leader in the Futurist movement of the early 1900s, which depicted the sensation of motion on canvas. Unlike the main galleries, the prints and drawings galleries are carpeted, intimate spaces that give a warm, suitable atmosphere for the small-scale works.

True to the mission of the center, the galleries, in addition the Center's classrooms, are used as a multidisciplinary teaching resource by students.