The Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, is something of an annual pilgrimage point for aficionados of modern sculpture, not to mention ordinary art lovers wanting a day in the country. Located in the Hudson Valley about two hours northwest of Manhattan, Storm King is a former private residence turned outdoor sculpture museum. A Norman-style building sits amid four hundred acres of gently undulating terrain. It’s a sort of Brobdingnagian version of MOMA’s sculpture garden, but with the Modern’s catholic taste exchanged for a concentration on constructed sculpture. Noguchi, Moore, and Hepworth may be in evidence, but they only highlight the preponderance of Smith, di Suvero, and, lately, Calder.

It is a splendid anomaly: a major museum positioned off the beaten track and devoted to exhibiting outdoors a form of art not known for its affinity with nature. Yet there’s a tightness about the place. Each piece of sculpture is so magnificently situated that it makes you overlook weaknesses you’d trip over anywhere else, and there’s no museum in the world that can make a visitor feel more at home. But there’s also an edge. Because of the size and drama of the setting, and the character of the sculpture on view, there’s a feeling of art and nature jockeying for position, each worried the other will get the upper hand. It requires a certain robustness for a sculpture to make itself felt at Storm King, and not every work on display there has what