That was the Storm King Art Center Luncheon at the Metropolitan Club honoring Cynthia Hazen Polsky. Jill Spalding invited me to this a couple of weeks ago, telling me I would find it very interesting. I’d heard of Storm King, the mountain up the Hudson, but I’d never heard of the Art Center. Just an hour north of the George Washington Bridge, in Mountainville, New York, it is, in the official description, a museum that celebrates the relationship between sculpture and nature.

500 acres of landscaped lawns, fields and woodlands provide the site for postwar sculptures by internationally renowned artists. No walls, just land and a “subtly created flow of space that is punctuated by modern sculpture” and all surrounded by the “undulating profiles of the Hudson Highlands.” Changes in light and changes in the weather, from season to season, make each visit unique.

If I had read that previous description, it might have interested me, but almost maybe not. I am not intensely interested in modern sculpture. In the great dining room of the Metropolitan Club today, (there were several hundred lunching), there were two large screens at either end of the room with constantly changing images of vistas at the Storm King Art Center, in all four seasons. I wished I were there. It is so beautiful that just the photographs fill you with reverie and the desire to experience this “king of the sculpture parks.”

It was created in 1960 by businessmen Ralph Ogden and Peter Stern who purchased the land along with a 1935 mansion which they planned to turn into an art gallery featuring painters from the region. Then Ogden happened upon some oversized sculptures in fields surrounding the home of artist David Smith in nearby Bolton Landing. That changed everything. The new concept was, rather than a typical gallery, a monumental setting for large outdoor sculptures.

The permanent collection contains works by Alex Kosta, Carl Andre, David Smith, Goerge Ricky, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Kenneth Snelson, Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Liberman, Mark di Suvero, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Richard Serro, Andy Goldsworthy and Alice Aycock, to name only a few.

We were welcomed by Mr. Stern, who is chairman and president of the Art Center. Then we had a few words from Michael Sovern, President Emeritus of Columbia University who introduced Mrs. Polsky, the honoree.

Mrs. Polsky, whose mother was a sister of Walter Annenberg, is the daughter of collectors – both her mother and father collected individually. From the early 60s through the mid 70s, she was active as a painter. In 1977 she became a trustee and vice chair of the Art Center. She is also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum and the Morgan Library. She introduced a short video about the Storm King Art Center and some of its work. All I could think about was when and how soon I should go there. Jill Spalding told me her favorite times were in the spring and the fall. I could see from the photographs that both summer and winter had their own allure. The modern sculptures on “exhibition” there seem best understood to this amateur eye in that environment with the sweep of the landscape and the sky.

The room today was filled with prominent people from the world of art and society, including Ann and Steven Ames, Peter Bienstock, Randy Bourscheidt, Charles Cowles and his mother Jan Cowles, Micky Wolfson, Mary Sharp Cronson, Dorothy and Lewis Cullman, Joan Davidson, Philippe de Montebello, Mark di Suvereo, Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Elizabeth Fekkai, Barbara Gimbel, Betsy Gotbaum, Aggie Gund, Bea Guthrie, John Iselin, Libby Kabler, Margo Langenberg, Helen Milonas, Shelby White, John Newman, Richard and Mary Ellen Oldenburg, Nicholas Platt, Leon Polsky (husband of the honoree), Andrew and Denise Saul, Elaine Sargent, Anne Sidamon-Eristoff, Jill and Nan Swid, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Eugene Thaw, Gary Tinterow, Barbara Tober, Elizabeth and Dr. James Watson, and Marie-Helen Weill.

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