May 7, 1994

“At the moment there are two good reasons for anyone interested in art to visit Vassar College,” said New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in a review richly praising the second good reason, a traveling exhibit, The Golden Age of Florentine Drawing, from the National Institute for Graphic Art at the Villa Farnesina in Rome at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Her first reason was the center itself. “The show,” Smith wrote, “provides an especially apt occasion to get to know Mr. Pelli’s beautiful building. Nestled discretely next to the neo-Gothic Van Ingen-Taylor Hall, which previously housed both Vassar’s collection and its art history department, the Loeb Art Center’s materials echo the limestone-and-redstone exterior of its elder. But its restrained post-modernism moves past Gothic, to the Renaissance…. Inside the Loeb Art Center, the high ceilings of the central hallway and the main galleries have cathedral-like clerestories that bathe nearly 500 artworks, from Chinese ceramics and Egyptian sculptures to paintings by Joan Miró, Jackson Pollack, Arthur Dove and Mark Rothko, in soft natural light.”

“Vassar’s collection,” Smith added, “is especially strong in works on paper and there are three small wood-paneled galleries designed for their display…. The intimacy of these rooms makes the already compressed power of great drawings even more palpable.” The New York Times