The Hidden Splendors of Cleveland’s Museums

In the depths of summer, while other art lovers in New York are catching the B train to Brighton Beach or busy with parties in the Hamptons, I like to enjoy a week or two of lake weather in Cleveland, where my in-laws live, where the ice cream is fabulous — and where there’s no shortage of art to see. In years past I’ve visited Praxis Fiber Workshop and the Sculpture Center — both of which make ingenious use of the huge spaces that a postindustrial city can offer — as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. But these are the places that caught me this time.

Cleveland Museum of Art

Imagine the Metropolitan Museum with free admission and not more than a comfortable sprinkling of other visitors, and you’ll get a sense of the CMA. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 65,000 objects housed in a snazzy neo-Classical palace, it’s always a great place to pass a few leisurely hours. But the Cleveland Museum of Art also hosts a constant stream of excellent temporary exhibitions. Just at the moment, they’ve got shows on Korean couture and the history of Korea’s so-called Seven Jeweled Mountain; an installation by Rose B. Simpson; and a fascinating show of photos from East Los Angeles and the U.S.-Mexico border.

The real knockout, though, is “Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art.” In just two modest rooms and a hallway, it covers a thrilling range of artistic styles and tones, with prints and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Marc Chagall and dozens of others. Picasso’s exhilarating illustrations of “Lysistrata,” the mind-bending details of Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s Sleeping Beauty prints, and Édouard Manet’s inky, self-conscious raven, made for Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, could all anchor exhibitions in their own right. But I was most struck by four wood engravings that Clare Leighton made to illustrate Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” I’ve never seen such depth and density wrung out of black and white, such virtuosic delicacy of engraving.

Museum of American Porcelain Art

A few years ago, Richard A. Barone, a retired asset manager, found himself reminiscing about the porcelain collectibles he’d once dabbled in trading, pieces made in a complex, uniquely American process in five factories in New Jersey. Shocked to discover that the factories were all closed or closing, and that there was no museum dedicated to American porcelain, he became a serious collector — buying up the remnants and archives of Edward Marshall Boehm Studio and the Cybis Studio in Trenton, along with hundreds of pieces — and opened his own.