I didn't expect to like Storm King Art Center, a 500 acre outdoor sculpture "gallery", as much as I did. But now that I've been there, I urge anyone within a three hour drive to pay it a visit.

Most of us are accustomed to viewing sculpture in manmade surroundings: in a museum, on a pedestal, in a wall niche, in a public square, in a corporate lobby, plaza, or reception area. The most wonderful thing about Storm King is how these modern sculptures, many of them massively large, are integrated with the natural landscape. They jut out from the earth, perch on hilltops, or just sit in the grass. The juxtaposition of the hardness and brutalism of many of them and the lush, green slopes is very arresting. Alexander Calder's looming black Arch, which greets you at the park entrance, is one of many such examples.

The second most wonderful thing is the way the park is a constantly changing panorama. Most of the sculptures are set fairly far apart (although smaller sculptures tend to be grouped together), and as you leave one behind and traipse on to the next, an entirely new vista is created behind you as you now view the original sculpture from a distance. This sounds self-evident, but at Storm King it makes a difference, and the more area you cover the more you realize how the park was designed with vistas in mind. The hills and valleys are natural, but the "fairways" (for lack of a better term -- where the grass is cut low to provide a pedestrian approach to a sculpture) and some of the groves of trees have been laid out with care and precision for optimal sculpture viewing.

Here's just one example of an intentional vista. As you stand next to Isamu Noguchi's Momo Taro, a grouping of carved boulders with some surfaces left rough and others polished smooth, your eye leads you a good 200 yards away, across a valley, to Alice Aycock's Three-fold Manifestation II, a tower constructed of three large white metal disks or dishes. What are they? Well, you can't tell from 200 yards, but they sure look good. Meanwhile, the Noguchi seems a little ordinary and unremarkable up close, so you saunter down one hill and up another to the Aycock. The Aycock looked a lot better from afar; you turn back to survey the Noguchi from 200 yards, and suddenly it looks enchanting, like a handful of pebbles tossed there by some giant hand. And now, standing on top of a hill, you turn to your right because two curving silvery asps, suspended in mid-air, catch your eye 75 yards away in a small clearing, down another hill. Are they motorized, or moved by the wind?

Just as some sculptures benefit from up-close or far away viewing, others need to be viewed from several angles. Tal Streeter's Endless Column is a tall red zigzag viewed head-on; from the side it's a striped column. Ursula von Rydingsvard's For Paul, made of hundreds of stacked layers of burned, distressed wood, needs to be seen from above so that you can see the holes on top (like a "retarded muffin pan," to paraphrase one of my companions), but also from earth level so you can sense how massive it is and see its texture.

The park covers 500 acres. The more hilly northern half is lush, green grass and groves of naturally existing deciduous trees and planted conifers. The southern half is a patchwork of carefully planned swaths of mowed and unmowed grass; the tall grasses include oats and alfalfa, and are periodically harvested by a local farmer, while the lower grasses create pedestrian approaches to the sculptures. There are several parking areas from which you can set out on foot, either on paved footpaths that tend to end abruptly or on the grass. Guided mini-bus tours also depart from the Museum, but cover primarily the southern half of the park where most of the roads are.

Touching the sculptures is strongly discouraged (although we observed a guided tour languishing all over the Noguchi), but authority figures (the elderly male docents are discernible by their blue windbreakers) are sparse and tend to hover close to the Museum. Robert Grosvenor's Untitled in particular practically begs to be climbed, a 1-foot wide ramp on either side slowly sloping up to a story-high metal slab. Balance beam enthusiasts will be tempted.

One of my favorite pieces is Mark di Suvero's 65 foot high Pyramidian. Di Suvero's works are monumentally scaled and rather breathtaking, made of industrial I-beams welded or bolted together. Pyramidian features a 60 foot long beam horizontally suspended inside the pyramid that moves freely with wind gusts. Although constructed of modern materials, it has an atavistic feel, somehow combining the prehistorical massiveness and mysticism of something like Stonehenge with the premodern flavor of a medieval catapult.

Andy Goldsworthy's lovely Wall that Went for a Walk was commissioned specifically for its site. It's a serpentine, 2,278-foot long dry wall (constructed without mortar) made of stones found on the property. It follows a dirt road, stops, then continues into the woods and down a hill until it meanders into a pond, following the path of a previously existing wall since decayed.

If you've stuck with me this far, you're probably either already familiar with Richard Serra or unemployed and living out of your Gremlin. Serra's Schunnemunk Fork, another of my favorites, was also designed for its site. Four thin, rectangular steel plates (8 feet high, 2.5 inches wide, between 35 and 54 inches long) are sunk into gently sloping hillsides over a ten acre area so that only a triangular portion of each is visible above the grass. I think what I like most about this work is how pure and elemental it is. There's not a single nut, bolt, or coat of paint on it. The materials haven't been manipulated in any way. It's a simple symbiosis of earth, metal, and the effects of the weather, the most perfect integration of the natural and the manmade.

It wasn't until I had almost finished writing this review that I realized another reason Storm King resonated so much with me. On a completely subconscious level it reminded me of the locus of some of my fondest childhood memories, my grandparents' 600 acre farm. Like Storm King, the farm was part forest, part arable land, part stream. A couple hundred yards from the house was the large barn, basically a metal shingled roof on four posts. Over the years the roof rusted and finally collapsed onto the bales of hay underneath. The grass and weeds grew high around it, and around the 1957 Studebaker down by the well. Mice and rabbits lived under the barn roof and snakes slept in the pools of sun in the backseat of the Studebaker. As children, we never questioned why the car or the barn roof were left in the weeds to gradually advance into a state of entropy. It seemed like the most natural state in the world to us: a slow, inexorable merging of the organic and the inorganic, as romantic and mysterious as a castle ruin or a crumbling Roman wall.

76 artists are represented at Storm King. Among the more well known I haven't already mentioned are Sol Lewitt, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, and David Smith.

Storm King Art Center is in Mountainville, New York, 55 miles north of Manhattan (1 hour from the George Washington Bridge) and 7 miles south of Newburgh. It was founded in 1960 with the initial gift of the mansion (now the Museum building) and surrounding property.

Storm King is open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., April 1 through October 27 and noon to 5:00 p.m. from October 28 to November 15. On Saturdays hours are extended to 8:00 p.m., with free admission after 5:00 p.m. Admission is $9 for adults, $7 for senior citizens, $5 for students, and free to members and chilluns under 5. Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more. For driving directions, call (845) 534-3115.








Recommended: Yes

Best time to go: June-August
Recommended for: Fishermen-hunters
Review Topic: Overview