Finding a Globe’s Worth of Art Treasures Close to Home

It took a pandemic to get our critic to explore the exquisite art in his own backyard. Here’s what he discovered.

There are many flavors of obnoxious New Yorkers. My own: the well-traveled provincial. Before the pandemic I tallied up alarming carbon emissions in search of art, thought nothing of jetting to East Asia or South Africa for a single exhibition or performance — and then neglected institutions just a time zone or two away. When the lockdown came and my passport’s power shriveled, I made the embarrassing calculation that I’d been to four times as many foreign countries as I have U.S. states. Go west, young Manhattanite! My post-pandemic resolution (“post”-pandemic: it was wishful thinking) has been to take in the extraordinary museums in the country of my birth — especially the grand institutions of the Midwest founded at the start of the last century, where all the world’s cultures converge. Equipped with a few KN95 masks and a Japanese-made compact car, this delinquent finally suited up for a Cleveland-to-Detroit road trip — en route to four museums, linked in a three-hour curve around Lake Erie. Together they make a fine Labor Day weekend excursion (though all four are closed on Monday, as usual), but each contains a whole globe’s worth of treasures. For almost a decade I’ve been meaning to get to Ohio to see the expansion and renovation project that affirmed this museum’s place as one of the nation’s most important art institutions. What finally got me to brave LaGuardia was a shrewd, surprising exhibition on French painting at the turn of the last century. “Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis” admits us into the salons, bedrooms and winter gardens of Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton and the show’s true star, Édouard Vuillard: four Parisians who gave domestic scenes the psychological intensity of crime fiction. Vuillard’s dense and fraught patterning, especially — a bedspread congested with hundreds of colored daubs, a dress crosshatched like the bars of a jailhouse — invite a reappraisal of what an artist can do when he stays indoors: good lesson for the 2020 plague year, though one I’d have hoped was no longer needed in vaccinated 2021.