Westchester’s Neuberger Museum at 50: Classy, Sleek, and Modern

It’s the best of American modern art, on a period-piece 1960s college setting.

L ast week I went to Westchester County, N.Y., to conduct interviews for my biography of the dynamic, idiosyncratic art dealer Allan Stone. Along the way, I visited the must-see gem in Purchase, the Neuberger Museum of Art, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Its foundation is the finance titan Roy Neuberger’s collection of American modern art, stretching more or less from 1920 to the ’70s. The collection began with Neuberger’s gift of 300 objects in 1969 and the opening of the museum in 1974. It now holds more than 6,500 works of art. The collection is the best of its kind.

I can’t say there’s a single star, but Jackson Pollock’s Number 8, from 1949, is fabulous and on view in a small but precise and illuminating anniversary show explaining how the Neuberger came to be. The Promised Gift is the first of four anniversary shows focused on pivotal moments in the Neuberger’s history. It’s about the Neuberger specifically but also about the zeitgeist of each moment.

The Neuberger is in an elegant, sleek building designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee on the campus of the State University of New York’s Purchase campus. SUNY Purchase is the love child of Nelson Rockefeller, then New York’s governor, and the spirit of cutting-edge, modern architecture. The campus was developed in the late ’60s from 500 acres of open fields to cater to Westchester’s Baby Boomers but also to make a greenhouse for the best architects to build an ideal, unified scholarly community from scratch.

Rockefeller, dead now for decades, was a mover and a shaker on so many fronts and a giant among the crew of New York governors best called pygmies. High-end culture was his strong suit.

Edward Larrabee Barnes created the campus master plan. A 3-D modello of it is on display at the Neuberger. Paul Rudolph, Robert Gwathmey, Gunnar Birkerts, the Architects Collaborative, Robert Venturi, and, of course, Johnson and Burgee designed buildings for a campus that’s now a Modernist period piece. It’s got none of the irony and cheap stunts of ’80s and ’90s architecture.

The campus and especially the Neuberger have a look that I find serene and bracing, radically skeptical as I am of ’60s architecture that meant to change the world. The place clears the mind for serious thinking. The museum, at the heart of the campus, is made from purple-brown brick with a formal severity inside and out. Basically, the Neuberger is five stark, brick boxes. The galleries aren’t symmetrical, and they vary in size but feel graciously proportioned. The burnt-sienna brick floors are handsome. Johnson was a design minimalist, but he was no slouch when it came to high-end finishes.

Rockefeller put the arts at the top of Suny Purchase’s architectural agenda. The college has an opera house, a theater-in-the-round, a theater for dance, and visual-studies space galore, all conceived in Barnes’s master plan. Those 500 acres of fields are a work of art, too. Stately trees, open spaces, and good outdoor sculpture suggest to students that they’re in a profoundly sensual zone rather than suburbia. I don’t know whether the abundance of arts spaces attracted Neuberger, or whether Neuberger’s 1969 gift stimulated the arts focus of the school, but Rockefeller himself persuaded him to give and, ultimately, to give it all.

I liked Neuberger (1903–2010) a lot, and, yes, he was 107 when he died. Collectors of American Modernism can, and I’m not tarring the entire cohort, be full-moon crazy. American Modernism is a movement about agitation, anxiety, and visual abracadabra. Neuberger and many collectors I knew when I was younger themselves knew the artists. Many absorbed their neurotic, typically artistic temperaments. Neuberger seemed more settled and circumspect, though, as a self-made New York gazillionaire, he might have been a master of the universe in his earlier days.

I haven’t been to the Neuberger since the opening of American Vanguards, an exhibition on the circle of John Graham that I organized with Irving Sandler, Karen Wilkin, and Bill Agee in 2012. That’s a long time ago, so what I saw last week seemed fresh.

Neuberger believed that the city had too many museums while Westchester County, though packed with erudite, inquisitive people, didn’t have much local culture. Purchase was close to Greenwich and other chichi Connecticut suburbs of New York. An underserved though affluent audience was there. Why give his collection to the Met or the Whitney, Neuberger thought, and see it blended with hundreds of other works of art when he could have his own boutique and bespoke museum?

That’s the pitch Rockefeller made, and smart he was. Neuberger was on the board of the Whitney and the Met and was close to MoMA’s rulers as well. In his late 60s and thinking about where his art would go, Neuberger could have given it to one of the Manhattan biggies.

Neuberger started working in the financial-services industry a few weeks before the 1929 stock-market crash. Inauspicious, you say? No. During the Depression, stocks were a dime a dozen, sometimes literally. Neuberger got rich quickly and just as quickly focused on American contemporary art, inspired in part by time he spent in Paris in the 1920s. There, he met enough young American artists to find his calling.

Once back in New York and making serious bucks when few others were, he bought great things by rising artists. Edward Hopper’s Barber Shop, from 1931, is exemplary. Fishermen’s Last Supper, from 1940 by Marsden Hartley, is at the museum, and Pollock’s Number 8 is as good as he gets. The perfect de Kooning Marilyn Monroe, from 1954, is a dazzler and has to be de Kooning’s icon.

The art is human-scale, which works well for an academic art museum. It’s easier for students to digest, bolsters an intimate, personal experience, and promotes comparisons. The permanent-collection spaces are sensitively arranged. The curators at the Neuberger are so deft, so thoughtful that groupings of art seem made by nature rather than choice. Hartley’s painting hangs in a group of three with small but sublime pictures by Jack Levine and Horace Pippin. They’re different, so there’s frisson, but they like one another and charm and grow in relation to one another.

Another group of three — paintings by Niles Spencer, Charles Sheeler, and Ralston Crawford — are all Precisionist and geometric, so they look of a piece not only because they’re from the same movement but because the geometric forms of each subtly connect the three.

Rothko’s Old Gold Over White, from 1956, looks like an apparition, like a ghost of a sublime feeling. It’s beautiful. I was happy to see a forceful, eccentric painting by Jon Schueler near it. Schueler is a second-generation Abstract Expressionist whom more people should know.

Threnody, by Cleve Gray (1918–2004), fills a 100-by-60-foot gallery with a 22-foot-tall ceiling. The Connecticut artist painted it for the Neuberger in 1972 and 1973. Fourteen vertical and flamelike passages of rich, earth-colored paint represent dancers. It’s certainly dramatic. Gray said he did it during what he considered a tragic period for America. “Inequity, destruction, and futile death surrounded us,” he wrote of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and I can’t dispute him on that point. Those were wretched years.

A threnody is a song of woe, ideally accompanied by wailing. The vertical, flamelike figures are dancers. I thought of Dante’s Inferno as I looked at it. It was meant to put students in a sober, reflective state of mind and evokes the of ephemerality of life. It’s an effective, immersive space.

Gray worked virtually nonstop from the 1950s till his death. Had he produced less, he would have been more famous and, I think, more loved. Years ago, a couple of years after Gray died, in 2004, I visited his three art-storage barns near his home in Warren in Litchfield County in Connecticut. Rural northwestern Connecticut is the country retreat of hundreds of New York artists, writers, actors, and musicians. Gray’s widow, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray, wanted me to do a Gray retrospective at the Addison Gallery, where I was the director. Gray went to the Addison’s parent institution, Phillips Academy, class of 1936.

I was tempted and courted and flattered and cajoled. Francine, like most widows of artists, was as assiduous keeper of the flame. Jasper Johns, her neighbor, came calling to help with the pitch.

Most of Gray’s work is ambiguous and corporate. Fortune 500 companies often decorated the atriums of their corporate headquarters with Gray paintings. Since they were abstract, they looked oh-so-modern, and as cryptic as they are, or indecipherable, they were unlikely to offend. I thought a focus show would be nice, but Francine wanted a life-career survey. She was selling Gray’s work to pay the bills and needed to raise interest in him. An exhibition focusing on a narrow aspect of his career wouldn’t do. The Neuberger eventually did something big, putting Threnody in context, but not a retrospective. It’s Gray’s opus and a startling, good work of art.

Romuald Hazoumè: The Fâ Series is a one-big-gallery temporary exhibition of paintings on view, most made in the mid 1990s by Hazoumè, who lives in Benin in West Africa. Fa, or Ifa, is a system of symbols used in Yoruba religion to access divine guidance on an infinite range of human experiences. I’m certain I don’t understand it, but I’m also certain the exhibition is too esoteric for college students — the Neuberger’s primary audience — and for almost everyone else.

The exhibition describes Fa as “a divination system” and goes from there. This is a puzzlement to young people, very few of whom have any knowledge of religion, even their own, if they have one. I taught “El Greco to Goya” to college students a few times — a standard art-history look at Spanish Golden Age art, much of which concerns Christian themes. Most of my Christian students had gotten the memo about Jesus, the manger, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection but only in executive-summary form. Young people know next to nothing about the Bible. Jewish students at least know something about Old Testament prophets. No one under 40 has even seen Ben Hur.

As art, the 22 paintings on view, most around 4-by-6 feet, are attractive but one is enough. Twenty-two, even with the curator’s good stab at interpretation, make for a gallery that seems devoted to sameness and gibberish.

All academic museums are seekers after what used to be called exoticism but now is tagged as “diversity,” now a cliché to many and, I hope, a poison pill to more and more. I’m all for exploring a variety of subjects, but the Neuberger isn’t a specialized African-art museum. It owns a small collection of African tribal sculpture, but the Fâ Series doesn’t contextualize it, and temporary loan exhibitions ought to augment in some significant way parts of the permanent collection. At the Neuberger, this is American Modernism.

The Fâ Series isn’t a terrible show, though I doubt there’s a visitor who could explain it who’s not a priest, or at least a committed, attentive believer. It’s got a scholarly catalogue. During an anniversary year, a museum ought to salute its audiences and history but also imagine its future. The Fâ Series projects inscrutability, which isn’t what the Neuberger ought to want.

Since the museum owns 6,500 objects, a straight treasures show would’ve been a great start to the anniversary party. The museum could pack the galleries with great things the public loves but also great things the public might not know it owns.

From Your Collection: Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Voices is a permanent-collection show and a good way to highlight a new, post–Roy Neuberger slice of the museum. The 15 artists whose work I saw are from Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, and Argentina. Some are now American, but all look at themes with global significance.

About ten years ago, the Neuberger started to acquire art by Spanish-acculturated artists from south of the border, and that’s fine, though there’s so much good American art today. That said, this new direction suits the curriculum of the school, and students are the museum’s prime audience.

The exhibition looks good. The problem I have with it is simple. Nothing in the show is as good as anything Neuberger bought, or at least anything Neuberger bought that was on view when I visited.

The Neuberger is close to Route 287 and the Hutchinson River Parkway. For art lovers, it’s an essential visit. I’m always surprised and puzzled at the hesitation some people feel about going to a college or university museum, feeling as they do that they’re trespassing. It’s a college campus, not Los Alamos. Admission is free. It’s a wonderful museum and very gratifying.