Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art isn’t imposing from the outside–arriving by taxi it was hardly apparent where the entrance was, the opposite of the grand entries of America’s other great museums: the Met, the National Gallery, the BMFA, Mia, etc. Instead, the statement comes inside, where Rafael Vinoly has created a vast glass-covered plaza that fronts the facade of the original 1916 building and serves as a setting for concerts, weddings and other public and private events. It’s unclear to the first-time visitor, though, how to get to the art.
Once you get inside the galleries the first thing you notice is how spaced out the works are. This is true for the objects on the first floor as well as the paintings on the second. Every piece is given its due, and almost every piece seems worth it. My point of comparison is the Met, where every inch of real estate houses art and you have to figure out for yourself what is important, or at least worth your time. The Cleveland approach is especially useful with bronzes, ivories and the kind of kunstkammer object that I am not overly familiar with, and I was pleased to see that Cleveland is still using its huge acquisition resources to add these kinds of treasures. The example of the Met’s quantity-over-quality approach I always cite is the entire gallery of not-terribly-different paintings by Camille Pissarro. Except, perhaps, for a superfluous Poussin, every picture at Cleveland told a story.
We spent most of our time in the upstairs suite of Western art. My recollection of my only other visit to Cleveland, 50 years ago, was its emphasis on Asian, particularly Chinese, art. I’m sure this collection is just as good, although adding has become harder in recent years, but the current layout shunts the Asian art off to the side, and, as with the African, Egyptian, Roman and Greek galleries, it’s easy to skip or pass through them if your interest lies elsewhere.
The paintings collection is a pleasure: all the familiar schools and artists are there, most with representative examples and plenty of textbook stars as well. Not having taken notes and being several days removed, I can only rely on faulty memory to recount the art highlights of our visit:
A tabletop fountain, the only one to survive intact (it dates to c. 1330),  was the most remarkable of the treasures on the lower floor. A video on the website even shows it working!
A grand hall boasted a series of large paintings, all first-class, by the stars of 17th-century Spain: Velazquez, Zurbaran, Ribera, Murillo, El Greco. While each was typical, they were also sufficiently unusual to stick in my memory.
The American galleries had four works I know well and was thrilled to see in person: Church’s “Twilight in the Wilderness,” Mount’s “The Power of Music,” Ryder’s “Death on a Pale Horse” and Chase’s “Portrait of Dora Wheeler.” There were fine examples, as well, by other favorites like Gifford and Lane, and only a slightly disappointing Kensett.
I am almost always thrilled when I run into a Caillebotte, and here was no exception. His portrait of a man by a window was thrillingly painted, and his still life of drying fowl was, again, something only Caillebotte would paint.
I am not a Picasso fan, but  a wall of five small works formed a useful primer on his early styles and underlay the majesty of the important Blue Period work, “La Vie” (1903).
And for familiar works, nothing surpassed “The Red Kerchief,” an early work by Monet that has graced Christmas cards for years. A cliche for Impressionism, the painting sung from across the gallery but appeared as a mess of paint up close.
A typically other-worldly Hammershoi was perfect, so much better than than example recently purchased by the SBMA. And another of my personal favorites, James Tissot, was there with one painting I knew and a second that was new.
Looking back at the photos I took I was struck by the similarity in the faces, especially the eyes, of Rembrandt’s “Portrait of A Woman” and Rubens’s “Portrait of Isabella Brandt,” painted maybe ten years earlier.
The modern galleries were similarly representative, not overly heavy on anything, but without famous masterworks. I did like the juxtaposition of similarly sized abstract pieces where paint filled the entire canvas by Jackson Pollock and Beauford Delaney. And geometric pieces by Al Loving and Al Held (1969 and 1976, respectively) paired well in the other direction.
If I have to make one negative comment, just to show I haven’t abandoned my critical faculties, I thought the gallery of German Expressionism and Surrealism was rather perfunctory.
But when all is said and done, the one painting that stopped me in my tracks and made me want to stop and look, and look and look, was Anselm Kiefer’s “Lot’s Wife” (1989). I’ve seen a lot of Kiefer before, including the huge room in Venice two years ago, so this wasn’t new. It was, however, a reminder of Kiefer’s power, and it made so much of the other modern art hanging around it seem trivial.
Eakins, De la Tour, Fillipino Lippi, Lotto, Grant Wood, Corot, Turner, Burgundian Mourners–these are but a handful of the remarkable images I’ve taken with me. And I think the less-is-more approach to the hang is a main reason, along with the quality of collecting, that so much of the art has stuck with me. Bravo!