NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W ith a nod to lyrics by Comden and Green, music by Leonard Bernstein, and, of course, Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams, who sang “Ohio” in the Broadway production of Wonderful Town in 1953 — it’s a homesick hymn from two sisters, new to Greenwich Village, who want to go back to safe and sure, quiet and quaint, boring Columbus. Hell, I’d stay in Ohio just for the art. I took a swing that covered only northeast Ohio and visited wonderful towns with wonderful museums. Next time, it’s Columbus and Cincinnati.

Sentiment ruled my visit, too. Though I’ve lived in Vermont for years, I’m a Connecticut Yankee. Northeast Ohio was once called the Western Reserve. To whom, you might ask, was it reserved? To Connecticut, in case the Land of Steady Habits ever decided to live large and have itself a colony.

All of this is ancient times, I know. I hadn’t been to Cleveland and Toledo for years and never to Oberlin, Youngstown, and Canton. How were things? Circa 1800, no one in Connecticut seemed keen on the place. Cleveland’s named after Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer, politician, and Revolutionary War general from eastern Connecticut. Sent by Connecticut authorities to survey the Western Reserve, he decided there’s no place like home. He sang, “Ohio’s filled with primitive huts . . . Why did I ever leave Connecticut?” A very early local newspaper dropped the first “a” in his name so it would fit in its masthead. Thus Cleveland was christened.

I knew that the Cleveland Museum of Art was one of America’s great museums, but what a place, and what a collection. I’ll write today about the building, collection, leadership, and new strategic plan. Next week, I’ll write about its sublime, scholarly show on royal painting in Udaipur in northern India and the CMA’s extraordinary collection of Asian art, built from scratch starting in the 1950s.

I spent most of two days in the museum. My last visit there was around 1990, when I was in graduate school. A chatty guard asked why I wasn’t at the amusement park in Sandusky. “Ya gotta go . ; . better than this place.” No accounting for taste, and he meant well. How, though, to compete with perfection? The art at the CMA is as close to perfection — in quality and arrangement — as we can find in this troubled world.

The collection’s about 100,000 objects, with an emphasis from its early years on masterpieces. The CMA opened in 1916 in a new, neoclassical building. Like lots of civic museums in that era, it’s a garden museum, located in a park rather than in the center of the city. Though Cleveland was already a prosperous, important city, for years the museum built its collection mostly through acquisitions in New York and Europe rather than what the locals had. It bought iconic works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyke, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, and many others.

The museum has a ton of money for acquisitions thanks to donors who established restricted funds. Poussin’s Holy Family on the Steps, from 1648, and Zurbarán’s Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth, from 1640, are there. Both are staples in every survey of Western art, but I’d never seen them. David’s Cupid and Psyche, from 1817, is a destination picture. There’s a big-ticket Warhol, Marilyn x 100, from 1962 — peak Warhol — and an 8-by-170-inch late Monet water-lily picture. No. 2 (Red Maroons) is the CMA’s iconic Rothko, bought in 1962, the year he painted it. It’s dark, forecasting the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Picasso’s La Vie, from 1903, his zenith before Cubism, came to the collection in 1945.

The museum’s comfortable and serene enough for visitors to spot small things. I found a monkey-shaped ceramic perfume flask made in eastern Greece around 580 b.c. Its owner would have suspended it around his wrist or neck by a cord and carried it to the public baths. It’s a tiny thing with lots of presence. A gold pendant made in the Tolima region of Colombia between a.d. 100 and 800 is fiercely abstract. It could be an animal, an insect, or a human.

In the armor court, I found a portrait by the weird, wonderful Tanzio da Varallo. He was from Lombardy and a freaky follower of Caravaggio. A small portrait of Renoir from 1867 by Frédéric Bazille is enchanting. Renoir was only 26. Bazille was a great artist who never was, having died in battle at age 28, in the Franco-Prussian War.

The art museum is similar to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which I reviewed two weeks ago, but also very different from it. Both started with Beaux Arts buildings, and both have substantial, modern additions, Pittsburgh’s is by Edward Larrabee Barnes, from 1974, and Cleveland’s is by Marcel Breuer in 1974 and Rafael Viñoly in 2014. Both museums are in what were once industrial powerhouse cities.

I would say that the Carnegie feels more like a start-up. It has its share of masterpieces, but overall, its collection is eccentric, even quirky, with art from different periods mixed together. Pittsburgh has Art Deco fittings from the Normandie, a Pre-Raphaelite room, and lots of contemporary art. Smack in the center of the city, it has an edgy vibe.

The CMA is stately, elegant, and well paced. It’s an encyclopedic museum covering 5,000 years, with mummy cases, ancient bronzes, Indian, Chinese, and Korean masterpieces, and plenty of Old Masters. Pittsburgh’s museum is mostly American art, and lots of it came fresh from the Carnegie International contemporary art exhibition. The CMA’s in a park — Cleveland’s country-club set was probably more involved in the museum’s trajectory. This isn’t a nick on the museum. The path through its galleries feels processional and spiritual, which is good.

Frederic Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, from 1860, is there. The American collection’s good but not great. There are two very good Homer paintings and three Eakinses as well as a powerful Rockwell Kent painting of Maine’s Monhegan Island, from 1907. The only irritant in the American galleries is the museum’s collaboration with the Cleveland Symphony on a project called Community Voices. This means that an “enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe” got a platform to bitch about Sanford Gifford’s Home in the Wilderness.

The picture’s “hurtful . . . because it shows the encroachment of the white man,” she says. “They cut down all those beautiful trees to build themselves a home.” She grew up on a South Dakota reservation, which she described as “desolate and bleak.”

Blah, blah, blah. Darlin’,  methought, that might be so, but don’t take it out on Gifford, and it’s a New Hampshire scene. I abhor “community voices” programs, and why do they almost always spout grievances about American history? How about the French, the Chinese, the Germans, and the Russians? Ask their locals about their epochs of murder and mayhem, which outstrip ours by multiples. Cleveland’s program isn’t as bad as in other museums since the topic is the American dream. Still, in community-voices programs, I rarely read something that’s not banal and predictable.

The CMA’s 2022 strategic plan is meaty and packed with measurables and deliverables. Very little is squishy or airy-fairy. Targets such as “95 percent visitor satisfaction” seem unattainable, given that far more than 5 percent of the public is chronically miserable. Doubling earned revenue puts pressure on some of the staff, which is fine, and one blockbuster show a year is a good goal. The plan also provides for the digitization of 100 percent of the collection, a million visitors per year, 25 million virtual visitors, and that’s a useless scramble, a 50 percent increase in contributed revenue, and endowment growth that beats benchmarks.

“Prioritizing audience research in making decisions on program content” is a crazy goal. This means that the marketing people push content. The CMA’s an art museum, not a toothpaste company.

The strategic plan mandates hiring a new “chief diversity officer,” who will, in addition to making a fat-cat salary, serve on the staff executive committee. Chief diversity officers are in the business of facilitating and promoting racial and gender discord, not easing them. Businesses are shedding them. They push quotas and are anti-merit and pro-mediocrity.

Quibbles aside, though, I think the plan signals a leadership that believes the details are important and that art is the top priority.

I don’t know any of the CMA’s trustees, but I’ve known all its directors starting with Sherman Lee, whose long reign began in 1958. They’ve all been memorable. Sherman was the giant who made Cleveland a powerhouse in Asian art. He was also the most old-school of directors, believing as he did that children shouldn’t be allowed in museums. The experience is lost on them, he told me years ago, and they’re too noisy. I doubt that Sherman was deeply interested in American art.

Evan Turner pushed the CMA into the realm of contemporary art. Bob Bergman was both a visionary and a hard driver, charismatic and forceful, and a savant in all fields of art. He conceived of the massive overhaul of the museum building. Bergman struck me at the time as the type of director who’s determined to turn his museum upside down and remake it entirely. I worked for a director like that for years. It can be very good and very bad and always leaves lots of debt.

Sherman’s daughter, Katharine Lee Reid, followed Bob after his sudden death. Timothy Rub, whom I admire, was the director for three years before leaving for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. David Franklin, a big personality and intellect, also lasted for three years, his rule snuffed by a sex scandal. Katharine, Timothy, and David served during most of the building’s transformation and its fundraising. Their short tenures complicated and confused things — a lot — and empowered the trustees.

Bill Griswold has been director for the past ten years. He and I were both young curators, Bill at the Morgan Library while I was at the Clark. Bill was the director of the Morgan Library when Cleveland hired him. He’s a specialist in drawings — a quiet, rarified world — and I didn’t see him as head of a big civic museum and, thus, a cultural celebrity. He presents well and, after ten years, seems to be a success. He’s a reassuring, soothing figure, which is what the museum needed after so much turnover at the top. A few years ago, I saw a video of him playing Art Twister with young children visiting the museum. Sherman would be appalled, I thought, as well as Bill seems to be enjoying it.

In 2020, the museum got a princely gift of Post-Impressionist paintings from Joseph and Nancy Keithley, Clevelanders who’ve supported the museum for years. Lovely paintings by Vuillard, Boudin, and Bonnard top what was the biggest donation of art in 60 years. Chicken, Game Birds, and Hares, by Caillebotte, from 1882, is splendid, though the creatures are all dead. Last year, the CMA bought The Proposal, by Tissot, an 1872 picture showing a young woman deep in thought while a young man looms behind her. Both are standing by an open door, she just inside and he just outside. “Yes or no,” he seems to have just been asked. She’s tallying his pluses and, since he looks like a bastard, his flaws.

Amy Sherald’s 2022 portrait of her nephew is a good purchase. “My eyes search for people who have the kind of light to provide the present and the future with hope,” Sherald said, and she found one. The subject’s a young man wearing his lacrosse-team jacket. The museum even bought an ancient Greek pot, made around 430 b.c. and depicting well-boozed young men. The figures owe much to the athletic nude sculptures of the Parthenon, which had just opened. Curators in America fear the antiquities market as much as they fear an eternity in Hades. This pot’s whereabouts over 2,500 years must be very clean indeed.

In the past few years, Cleveland has bought a pair of Chippendale torchères, Nigerian dance staffs, Korean painted scrolls, and a painting from 1623 by Dirck van Baburen depicting a smiling violinist, wine glass in hand and toasting the viewer. All great things. Together they show catholic taste and lots to spend. Its 2022 strategic plan commits it to focus on women, black, and indigenous artists, which it doesn’t seem to be doing, Judaica, a good field, and colonial Spanish art, a waste of time and money. It’s derivative and a project for museums in the Southwest.

Starting in 2022 and running to 2027, the CMA has set a target of $1 billion worth of new acquisitions, either through purchases, gifts promised gifts, or bequests. I’ve never seen a museum set a dollar-value target like this. If I had an art bequest in my will, I’d start looking for a food taster before too long.

In 2014, the museum finished renovating its 1916 building and adding to it, using Viñoly as the architect. The project was notoriously fraught, given the length of construction — off and on for seven years — and the extent of the intervention, which involved the demolition of two old additions. Its centerpiece is a 39,000-square-foot, glass-roofed atrium uniting the original neoclassical pile with a 1971 Breuer addition. It’s a gorgeous, sun-filled space. The glass roof is gently curved, making for a space that’s regal and lively. The museum calls it “the city’s living room,” which means it’s a big reception space.

In the 1916 building, gallery laylights, stone wainscots, bronze handrails, and plaster moldings destroyed in previous renovations and additions were restored. They’re handsome, elegant spaces.

Reconciling Breuer’s Brutalist, light-and-dark banded, granite building with the 1916 Beaux Arts, marble beauty was a feat the museum accomplished.

The project cost $320 million. Starting in 2010, an Ohio court has allowed the CMA to raid $75 million over ten years from trusts reserved by dead donors for acquisitions. The museum will use the money to pay for its building expansion. Following the financial crisis, its capital fundraising tanked. The trustees, feeling fully tapped, enlisted Ohio’s attorney general to join them in channeling those who couldn’t take it with them — all, by the way, buried in Cleveland’s resplendent Lake View cemetery.

Despite wills that said “no way,” the Ouija board proclaimed “go for it.” It was a scandal at the time. Cleveland, despite having some really rich people, is a city where those with the biggest bucks sit on the same boards. As rich as the museum expansion’s biggest donors — such as the Gund family — are, many don’t live in Cleveland anymore. And size matters. The CMA had clout. A smaller museum or a museum outside a big city wouldn’t have gotten deluxe attention from pols in Columbus. That $75 million would have been spent on art. The trustees felt that they couldn’t complete the building project without it, which is not a mere sign but a big neon billboard reading “overreach.”

The museum’s endowment is a smidgen under $900 million, of which about $350 million is restricted to acquisitions.

It’s a fantastic place and essential to see in a Cleveland visit. In the next week or so, I’ll write about its exhibition on Udaipur, India, its upcoming exhibitions, its Asian art collection, and its antiquities collection.