Valley museums display treasure-trove

Masterpieces, historic works grace region

By Laurie Hlavaty
Poughkeepsie Journal

You can find it all in the Hudson Valley.

From Egyptian art to contemporary sculpture, the region’s museums lay claim to treasures of worldwide and regional significance. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and artifacts fill large museums big and small galleries to teach us about history and life.

Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, with its Rembrandt prints and Van Gogh drawings, boasts the largest collection in the mid-Hudson Valley.

‘‘This college has been dedicated to presenting an overall view of art, primarily in the West,’’ said Francesca Consagra, the Loeb’s Philip and Lynn Straus curator of prints and drawings.

Vassar students and the public benefit from college founder Matthew Vassar’s philosophy of the importance of art in a well-rounded education.

The 400 pieces purchased from the Rev. Elias Lyman Magoon — a college trustee and Baptist minister from Albany — to start the Town of Poughkeepsie school’s collection in 1865 has grown to 15,000.

‘‘He was a quite a maverick collector,’’ Consagra said of Magoon.

Sketches and paintings from the works of Hudson River School painters, including Church and Asher Durand, give the collection a distinctly Hudson Valley flavor. Vassar purchased more than 100 small sketches from Magoon’s collection.

‘‘They are absolutely beautiful, rich outdoor images,’’ Consagra said.

In addition to the expansive permanent collection, the college is staging ‘‘Refining the Imagination: Tradition, Collecting and the Vassar Education’’ through September, featuring works from alumni collections.

‘‘These come from private homes and are rarely seen anywhere. So it’s an incredible opportunity for art lovers,’’ Consagra said.

The diverse 150-piece exhibit stretches as far back as China’s Western Han period, beginning in 206 B.C.

‘‘There’s incredible sculptures from the Mexican Jalisco period (200 B.C. to 250 A.D),’’ Consagra said.

‘‘Marriage Pair’’ is a terracotta tomb sculpture of a couple engaged in a celebration or ritual, with food and drink.

The exhibit also includes works by Picasso, expressionist Munch, impressionist Edgar Degas, American painters Edward Hopper and Martin Johnson Heade, photographers Alfred Eisenstadt and Sally Mann, sculptors Isamu Noguchi and Auguste Rodin.

‘‘We’re really very fortunate to have the Lehman Loeb,’’ said Sherre Wesley, director of the Dutchess County Arts Council. ‘‘It’s a wonderful facility that gives access to world-class art.’’

But embellished sabers and bronze daggers, flintlock pistols and 18th-century rifles belonging to the famous and the infamous also have a place in valley museums.

Such a rich history is represented at the West Point Museum at the U.S. Military Academy in Orange County.

‘‘(The museum) provides and protects long-term care for historical artifacts that date all the way back to ancient civilizations,’’ said museum Director Michael Moss.

Its four floors of artifacts include weapons, paintings, photographs and uniforms. There’s a pair of pistols once owned by George Washington, a British military kettle captured from troops at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, even a model of the atomic bomb that was dropped over Japan during World War II.

Among the treasures are a silver-mounted sword belonging to Napoleon given to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of World War II and drawings done by Civil War Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman when they were academy cadets, Moss said.

Not too far from West Point, massive steel sculptures rise as if from the ground, a testament to nature’s strength as a canvas.

At Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, art and nature are wedded. More than 120 sculptures from world-renowned artists, including commercial welder turned sculptor David Smith, are set among 500 acres of lawns, fields and woodlands.

‘‘We’re a museum that emphasizes outdoor sculpture in a beautiful landscape that we’ve been working on for years,’’ said center Director David Collens.

And, soon, the valley will have even more sites to display art.

A riverfront plant in Beacon that once made boxes for Nabisco cookies will house the contemporary Dia Center for the Arts by 2001.

‘‘What’s exciting about Dia in particular is that it really is adding a more cutting-edge view of art, and it balances some of the more traditional things in the area like the landscape paintings,’’ said Wesley.

Dia, which has several galleries in New York City, is noted for its huge art displays, like Walter DeMaria’s ‘‘The Broken Kilometer’’ exhibited at 393 West Broadway. The sculpture, comprising 500 polished solid brass rods, weighs 18 3/4 tons.

Wesley sees the cavernous 292,000-square-foot Beacon site as perfect for such works.

‘‘It’s large enough to really house art installations that are huge,’’ she said.

There are plans to bring Andy Warhol’s 1979 ‘‘Shadows,’’ an installation of 102 paintings spanning 454 feet, to Dia’s Beacon site.

And at the century’s threshold, the State University of New York at New Paltz is growing, too.

The college’s extensive permanent collection, which began in 1939 with works displayed in the College Union hallways, will find a spacious home in the Samuel Dorsky Museum, due to open in February 2000. A philanthropist and art lover, Dorsky gave the state college the seed money for the project in 1994. He died shortly after making the donation.

The nearly 9,000 square feet of gallery space will allow the college to more than double its number of exhibitions, said museum Director Neil Trager.

The permanent collection, which boasts 3,500 pieces spanning 4,000 years — from Pre-Colombian artifacts and Asian prints to 19th- and 20th-century European works of art on paper, photography and decorative arts — will be displayed in the Dorsky’s four galleries. Rotating exhibits will be showcased in the former College Art Gallery, joined to the Dorsky.

An emphasis of the college’s growing collection will be on works of the Hudson Valley and Catskills.

‘‘A significant part of our collecting will address the cultural legacy of the region,’’ Trager said.

Bard College in Annandale rounds out the region’s major college art galleries with its contemporary art collection at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art.

The college’s collection includes nearly 1,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and videos from the mid-1960 to the present. More than 300 artists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and the United States are represented in the collection, according to the college’s Web site.

The works of Brazilian sculptor Tunga, Cuban photographer Arturo Cuenca and Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov have all been showcased at Bard.

Small museums have role

But the big museums aren’t the only ones who have something to brag about. Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie is among the many smaller galleries feeding an appetite to view art — and to learn about it.

‘‘Our mission is to really perpetuate this feeling and this appreciation of art in the Hudson Valley,’’ said Steven Petruccio, president of Barrett’s board of directors.

Barrett hosts three major national and numerous local exhibitions each year. It also has a school of art for adults and children and a lecture series.

Expect the unusual at Barrett’s national juried shows like New Directions, Petruccio said. ‘‘You will be pleased and even shocked at what you see.’’

Last year’s exhibit, for example, featured a California artist’s work made out of Styrofoam balls and bamboo sticks that took up almost a quarter of one of the galleries.

In fragile glass jars from the 2nd century and ancient mystical tomb sculptures or in the isolation of Edward Hopper’s paintings and the perfected beauty of Frederic Church’s landscape, the valley in its museums and galleries lays out a banquet of art.

As Wesley said, ‘‘There are wonderful little gems all over.’’