MUSEUMS

Boston: The best museum building in Boston is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, behind the Museum of Fine Arts on the Fenway. The magical effect of the interior is actually enhanced by the blandness of the brick exterior. Inside, the building stimulates our delight in the visual play between near and far, salon and courtyard, which produces truly Jamesian adventures in shadow and light. (Henry James was a friend of Isabella Gardner.) We are submerged in luxurious excess of space, light, amenity, texture that expresses the taste of a great patroness. Perhaps it is the multiplied intimacies of retreat (alcoves, corners, passages), or perhaps simply an identification with the collector, but we are somehow moved to think of this exotic building as ours, as if it were designed expressly for our pleasure.

New York: Many people already love the Frick Collection, that perfect little museum at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street filled with the best art per square inch anywhere and enhanced by a preternaturally serene fountain courtyard at its center. Another New York refuge is the Cooper-HewittMuseum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design. Housed in a 64-room mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street built for Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the century, this museum is known for the intelligence and verve of its installations. In 1984 I saw a traveling exhibition of Native American art there. One dark-panelled room was completely filled by a tipi so tall that to accommodate it the staff had drilled a hole into the exquisite decorated plaster ceiling, right next to the crystal chandelier. Bird songs peeped mysteriously from somewhere near the fireplace. Fabulous.

Washington, D.C.: The quality of the art at the Phillips Collection is belied by the apparent modesty of the building. Renoir's "Boating Party" perhaps his best work is its most famous painting, but there are also roomfuls of Klees and Arthur Doves, a great Cezanne "Mont Sainte Victoire," a perfect Matisse ...the pleasures are endless. All are immeasurably enhanced by the modest, slightly tatty, domestic feel of the galleries. The museum is a former residence, and it shows, right down to the white rings on the furniture under the overwatered plants. Those slender intellectuals reading books on the couches are guards. Wonderful concerts on Sundays.

Fort Worth: The Kimbell Art Museum, designed by the great American architect Louis Kahn, may just be the best museum in the world. The care lavished upon perfection of proportion, texture, color, and the play of light is so palpable it is exhilarating. We walk past expanses of bright green grass, alongside dark, serene pools of water, through a Japanese portico composed of carefully trimmed trees, and enter the long building at its center. Moving beneath skylit barrel vaults that sculpt the Texas daylight into softness, we know we're going to see really great art. And we do.There are superb collections of both Asian and European art. The museum tempts us to stay long enough to see the light change, freeing the masterpieces to reveal new sides of themselves. It doesn't get better than this.

Los Angeles: If the West Coast is emerging as a serious cultural contender with New York, it's mostly thanks to Los Angeles, with its wealth and its magical pink light that transforms even the most unlikely object into a visual thrill. High culture in L.A. has always had to fight an uphill battle against the city's outrageous popular culture. I was once stopped dead in my tracks by a vision: a brilliant star cradled by a crescent moon was hovering over a carwash shaped like a mosque. That's the problem the art museums in town have to contend with. Tremendously successful is the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art ("MOCA"), designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, and its sibling, the Temporary Contemporary, a former police garage in Little Tokyo renovated by the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry. The Temporary Contemporary is tough and huge. MOCA, on the other hand its exterior clad in red Indian sandstonand dark green enamel with pink pinstripes, its underground galleries toplit by glass pyramids is an absolute knock'em dead vamp of a building. Plus, it has the best food of any museum anywhere.