Great Travel News Syndicate

By HEIDI WALESON

New York

The Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle by Robert Lepage has been an uneasy mix of cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned representational staging. With “Siegfried,” the third opera, which opened on Thursday, Mr. Lepage and his team have finally married those elements, thanks in part to new techniques in 3-D imagery. Fire, waterfalls, a rocky mountaintop, a dense forest, even an underground view with slithering worms and skittering bugs, came vividly to life through Pedro Pires’s video images projected against the 24 moving planks of set designer Carl Fillion’s “machine.” There are still some showy transformations (four changes of position and video during the opera’s prelude, for example), but the set is more integrated into the action than it was in “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.” With François St-Aubin’s medieval-looking costumes and long-haired wigs on everyone, Mr. Lepage seems to be trying to give us the kind of realism that Wagner would have put on stage if he had had the technology a century and a half ago.

With the aid of Fabio Luisi’s detailed, balance-sensitive and brisk conducting, and a stellar cast of singers, this “Siegfried” moved away from the static awkwardness of Mr. Lepage’s “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” and presented a lively, propulsive, even comic account of the young Siegfried’s coming of age. Jay Hunter Morris, who took over the punishing title role just a week before the premiere, has a bright, pliant tenor—not large, but ringing and energetic. He brought an appealing goofiness, youthful impulsivity and bumptious self-confidence to Siegfried. His clashes with Gerhard Siegel’s penetrating Mime, grotesquely hunchbacked and absurd in the extremity of his fawning and malevolence, took on a broad, cartoonish humor that worked. So did his quick conquest of Fafner the dragon, who emerged from his cave as a yellow eyed, snaggle-toothed serpent, a caricature of a monster. In this opera, Siegfried’s opponents are easily bested by a young superhero with a magic sword.

Siegfried is on his way up; his grandfather Wotan is on his way down, and the superb, powerful Bryn Terfel gave the Wanderer mercurial flashes of humor and danger as well as moments of grand existential despair. In one of the production’s finest moments, the Wanderer walked to the very edge of a plank, which jutted out over the void like a rocky promontory, and called for the goddess Erda with the desperate, last-ditch ferocity of Lear howling on the heath. His subsequent exchange with Erda, the voluptuous-voiced Patricia Bardon, in a costume of black mirrors and a long white wig, had a potent, intimate chemistry (Wotan and Erda have a history), unusual in a scene that often plays as yet another boring recounting of “Ring” backstory by two bellowing singers. And his encounter with Siegfried, who breaks his staff and knocks him down, felt shocking despite its inevitability.

The theatricality of this “Siegfried” faded somewhat in the final scene, when Siegfried, having passed through the magic fire and several hours of serious singing, awakens Brünnhilde. Deborah Voigt sang with a steely intensity, and not surprisingly, she sounded fresher than Mr. Morris, but her wide-eyed Bride-of-Frankenstein look and a lack of warmth in her sound made this underdirected love scene, which should be climactic, fall flat. Also, Etienne Boucher’s mostly sensitive lighting set their encounter against a dark sky, an odd choice considering that the brilliance of the sun is mentioned more than once.

Eric Owens, looking like a demented Rastafarian in overalls and a long wig, was a growling, frustrated Alberich; Mojca Erdmann was a luminous Forest Bird, more substantial and resonant than the flickering green video image that represented her on stage, and Hans-Peter König was suitably lugubrious as Fafner.

After the rather gray, industrial look of the first two “Ring” operas, it was nice to get some color and texture into the action. I liked the worms, the waterfall that ran red after the killing of Fafner, the shadows of birds that swept across the bleak mountaintop. The video gave nature an organic part in the opera, and nature is certainly present in the music, from the groaning horns of the prelude to the transparent Forest Murmurs. Yet, unlike Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” in San Francisco, in which the degradation of nature is the production’s central theme, Mr. Lepage uses nature as illustration. The theme of his production, if there is one, still seems to be those moving planks, which creak audibly as they turn. But at least they had more to offer the storytelling in this installment of the tetralogy.

***

The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who was a sizzling Siegmund in the Met’s “Die Walküre” last spring and will headline the new “Faust” on Nov. 29, sang a recital at the opera house on Sunday afternoon. A 4,000-seat house is not ideal for the intimacy of Lieder, and Mr. Kaufmann seemed most at home in the more extroverted and operatic moments of his songs by Liszt, Mahler, Duparc and Strauss. Restraint was tougher: He had to work hard to produce soft high notes in the Liszt and Mahler, and to create the French sensuality of line in the Duparc pieces. His rich middle and low ranges were beautifully on display, however, and he brought a contemplative expressivity to the Strauss, especially the heartrending “Befreit.” Mr. Kaufmann loosened up a lot in his encores—four additional Strauss songs and the Lehar chestnut “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”—giving the audience a taste of the total performer who is so breathtaking when in character. Helmut Deutsch was the supportive and thoughtful pianist.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

Having read many other people’s best-of fiction lists for 2011, I notice that my taste in novels is marching to its own drummer.

I’ve liked some of the overall favorites—Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding,” for example, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot” and Allan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child.” I understand why they were applauded, but they weren’t the books I liked most.

My favorites were… I’m struggling for adjectives to describe what the novels that moved me shared. Originality, confidence, respect for language and the reader, surprise, humor and perhaps a touch of humility—that’s the best I can come up with.

Maybe I read them when I was in a good mood or maybe I came to a book with a friendly bias because I’d liked one of the writer’s earlier books. There is so much subjectivity in judging fiction; there are so many variables in the compact between writer and reader. The only claim I stake for the following novels is they made me want to get up in the morning.

“The Inverted Forest” by John Dalton. The story: A young man with a disfigured face takes a job as a junior counselor at a summer camp for more than 100 mentally and physically disabled adults and finds himself the one person who can prevent a violent crime. What I liked: An isolated world, a captive population, people who live on the margins of society being governed by 20-year-olds—everything is inverted here, even the notion of normality.

“The Old Romantic” by Louise Dean. The story: The poster clan of dysfunctional families, the English Goodyews (divorced parents, prodigal children) have been largely estranged for well over a decade, but they will be briefly reunited if it kills them all. What I liked: obstreperous characters, class warfare and Ms. Dean’s signature mordant wit.

“Faith” by Jennifer Haigh. The story: Did Sheila McGann’s brother, a popular Catholic priest in Boston, molest a young boy? If there is no definitive proof, does she have faith in her brother? What I liked: There are no easy answers here, no angels or devils, just people trying to understand what happened to this man of God—if anything—and why.

“To Be Sung Underwater” by Tom McNeal. The story: A boy and girl fall in love, go their separate ways, find each other again years later. Can anyone make such an old story feel fresh and original again? Yes. What I liked: Sparkling prose, flinty dialogue, skillful pacing, equal parts wise and funny.

“State of Wonder” by Ann Patchett. The story: A medical researcher goes to the Amazon to find her former mentor, who has disappeared while testing a promising new drug. What I liked: A twisty plot, intriguing characters and writing that is so assured that you’ll follow the author anywhere, including the jungle, where anything not eaten by insects is quick to rot.

“Doc” by Mary Doria Russell. The story: Doc Holliday really was a doctor—a dentist—and his gambling and gun fighting in Dodge City were only a small part of what made him a folk hero. What I liked: In the tradition of the best historical fiction, Ms. Russell has transformed a legend into a complicated, vulnerable, compassionate man trying to keep peace in one the wildest towns in the wild West.

“Blueprints for Building Better Girls” by Elissa Schappell. The story: Eight linked short stories about modern women coming to terms with sexual freedom, the bonds of marriage and motherhood, infertility, anorexia and “battered party girl syndrome.” What I liked: Ms. Schappell’s unflinching dissection of the ambivalence women feel about their roles as lovers, sexual partners, mothers and daughters in the 21st century.

“Sex and Stravinsky” by Barbara Trapido. The story: Two mismatched couples and their adolescent daughters figure out what’s wrong (and what’s right) with their families against a backdrop of ballet and pantomime, England and South Africa, coincidence and masquerade. What I liked: Ms. Trapido has a light touch, a puckish wit and a gimlet eye, and she juggles characters and subplots with aplomb.

“The Submission” by Amy Waldman. The story: In a blind architectural contest to design the World Trade Center memorial in New York, a Muslim wins. What I liked: A large cast of characters, representing every shade of pride and prejudice on the subjects of immigration, religion, meritocracy and politics, all get to make their cases.

By STUART FERGUSON

Winter Park, Fla.

In the Morse Museum of American Art’s jaw-dropping 12,000-square-foot wing devoted to Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s huge estate on the North Shore of Long Island, there are layers and layers—of materials, of meaning, of history. A walk through the first-floor galleries (upstairs are offices and an expanded library) with museum curator Jennifer Perry Thalheimer made clear how Tiffany’s blue-and-white dining room—the original seated 150—with its marble mantle, unadorned except for its three built-in clocks telling the hour, day and month, related to the outdoor Daffodil Terrace, which in turn connected the house with its gardens, whose pond, pools and streams were fed by water from inside the house.

Laurelton’s three-story reception hall was the fountain court, seemingly right out of the Alhambra. Liquid pouring from the mouth of a tall, narrow vase into its basin—continually changing hues thanks to the rotations of an underwater pair of lead, brass and glass color wheels—was the source for elaborate hydraulics that sent a stream flowing through a rill that pierced the exterior wall to feed outside water features of the 580-acre estate, itself overlooking Cold Spring Harbor. The main house was built from 1902 to 1905 and had 84 rooms, including a smoking room where Tiffany could puff away under a mural depicting an opium dream. There also were accommodations for student artists; greenhouses; a bowling alley; a working farm; and a lighted, cork-lined tunnel leading to the beach on Long Island Sound.

Tiffany (1848-1933), son of the founder of the famous jewelry store, began his career as an Orientalist painter. His travels in North Africa inspired the smokestack-disguised-as-minaret at Laurelton Hall, the detailed architect’s model of which survived the 1957 fire that gutted the mansion, as did those color wheels in the fountain. So, too, did an elaborately carved pair of massive teakwood doors that granted entrance to the estate’s art gallery. They came from India, and were imported by the decorating firm Tiffany operated with the artist and furniture designer Lockwood de Forest. In all, more than 250 art and architectural objects associated with the estate are on view in the Morse’s new wing.

Having already designed the interiors of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Conn., and Chester A. Arthur’s White House (not to mention his own residences in New York City), Tiffany knew the effects he wanted inside Laurelton Hall. Of course, Louis Comfort Tiffany is most famous for the stained-glass windows and lighting featuring his patented opalescent glassmaking techniques. Among the examples here from Laurelton Hall are the wisteria transoms in the dining room; the living room’s “Maiden feeding flamingoes in the court of a Roman house” window; and the earthy “Pumpkin and beets,” depicting those humble root vegetables with a rich, jewel-like intensity. While the show includes lampshades and chandeliers galore, along with vases, furniture and architectural drawings, it’s the 1898 glass-and-bronze, scarab-shaped reading lamp, green and glowing on Tiffany’s living-room work table, that would have tempted Salvador Dalí to larceny.

Period photographs and watercolors executed by Laurelton Hall’s visiting artists evoke the place in its heyday. “We tried for enough context so the galleries help interpret the material but aren’t period rooms,” said the Morse’s director, Laurence J. Ruggiero, who explained how Winter Park ended up with the world’s most comprehensive collection of Tiffany works.

The museum is named for Charles Hosmer Morse (1833-1921), a Chicago industrialist who first spent winters here in the 1880s. Morse’s granddaughter Jeannette Genius and her husband, Hugh McKean, were both talented painters who had attended nearby Rollins College. In 1930, McKean won a fellowship to stay at Laurelton Hall with Tiffany and then returned to Rollins to teach art, later becoming the college’s president. In 1942, Genius (who was a professional interior designer) had founded the Morse Gallery of Art on the Rollins campus and made McKean its director. The couple, who married in 1945, had the vision and means to collect Tiffany when he was very much out of style. In 1955, Genius curated the first museum exhibition devoted solely to Tiffany, but that was just the beginning.

Recalling their 1957 visit to the ruins of Laurelton Hall, McKean said his wife vowed to “buy everything that’s left and try to save it.” And so they did. But their gallery wasn’t large enough to display all the treasures, so Genius designed and opened a Winter Park restaurant, La Belle Verriere, festooned with her Tiffany glass. It operated from 1976 to 1990. In 1978, the McKeans gave Laurelton Hall’s monumental garden loggia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it’s now part of the courtyard of the American Wing.

The Morse Museum opened at its current location in 1995, displaying Tiffany’s creations as well as work by John La Farge, Daniel Chester French, John Singer Sargent and Frank Lloyd Wright plus Arts and Crafts furniture and pottery. A 1999 addition houses the magnificent Byzantine-Romanesque interior of the chapel Tiffany created for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Thanks to the McKeans’ well-endowed estate, the Morse does not take public funds, and even in this time of museum retrenchment it was able to complete the Laurelton Hall galleries.

Today the center of the Morse is Laurelton Hall’s 32-by-18-foot Daffodil Terrace. Originally attached to the south side of the house, it now looks out at the museum’s garden courtyard through walls of glass. Its triple-bayed pergola rests on eight marble columns 11½-feet high, each crowned with a capital of glass daffodils. When it was in Cold Spring Harbor, a pear tree grew from the terrace level and up through the opening in the middle of the pergola. At the sides of the opening are small panes of opaque blue glass, joined so as to resemble a trellis. Each pane is embedded with green glass in the shapes of leaves and stems. The flanking bays have Moorish-style ceilings of coffered tiles, painted to resemble wood. Ms. Thalheimer, the curator, explained that the cedar planks (stenciled with rectangles and six-point stars) surrounding the tiles were probably painted by Jane Peterson, who spent several months with Tiffany painting views of his house and gardens.

The Daffodil Terrace is an amazing structure, its tiles and glass seeming to shimmer and change with each step taken under it. When it was finally brought out of storage in preparation for a 2006-07 exhibition at the Metropolitan, it took two years to clean, restore and assemble its 600 parts. Mr. Ruggiero told me of visiting the New York exhibition with the Morse’s trustees: “When we’re all standing there looking at this magnificent terrace, we can’t just put it back in the box.”

Mr. Ferguson is writing “Ladies of the House: The Rossetter Sisters of Florida,” to be published by the Florida Historical Society.

By DANIEL GRANT

We don’t think of artists as people who cut corners. As poor as he was, Vincent van Gogh didn’t use 10% less paint on his canvases to save money, and Michelangelo didn’t substitute quartz for marble. But the rising price of copper, the main component of bronze, has forced more and more sculptors to economize.

“It’s ridiculous how expensive bronze has become,” Manhattan sculptor Bryan Hunt said. Piero Mussi, owner of Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, Calif., stated that the per-pound price of bronze has risen in the past 10 years to $5 from $1.20. And Marc Fields, owner of New York’s The Compleat Sculptor supply house, claimed his prices have more than tripled since 2008, reaching $7 a pound. (He also noted that shipping costs to New York City are higher than elsewhere.)

As a result, Mr. Hunt now casts some of his sculptures in a water-based plaster called Aqua-Resin, allowing him “to save way more than 50%. It’s quicker to produce and less expensive for me, and I think the quality of the material is high.”

He is not alone. Kitty Cantrell, a wildlife sculptor in Ramona, Calif., used to work primarily in bronze, but foundries now cast her work in polyester resin, which saves her more than half what she used to pay. “I’ll work in bronze if someone is willing to pay 50% up front for casting,” she said. In her studio are a couple of clay models from 2008—one of a wild turkey, the other of a group of vultures—that she will cast only in bronze when the economy improves. The turkey’s long, slender legs are too likely to break if not done in metal, she believes, while the vultures are intended for outdoors and it isn’t clear how the polyester resin will stand up to ultraviolet rays.

Mr. Fields said a growing number of artists are looking to Aqua-Resin, concrete, Fiberglass, gypsum- and polyurethane-based resins, plaster and terra cotta—which are less expensive than bronze and can be produced right in the studio, without the labor costs of a foundry. He said many of his customers are buying metal and mica powders that are poured into molds or applied as a patina to give a “faux finish” that resembles bronze or other metals. In fact, resin sculptures are often labeled as “cold cast bronze” or “bonded bronze,” which may lead some buyers to believe they are purchasing a traditional bronze sculpture.

Many artists are offering different works—and sometimes the same works—in different media, to give prospective buyers a range of prices. “Nearly all my works are available in more than one material,” Michael Alfano, a sculptor in Hopkinton, Mass., said. “It makes it more open and affordable to everyone.”

New York’s CFM Gallery has the work of Manhattan artist Aileen Fields in stone, bronze and acrylic. “The resins are OK if you are going to keep it inside, and they cost less” than bronze, Ms. Fields said. New York sculptor Carole Feuerman, whose life-size Aqua-Resin “Brooke With Beach Ball” is now outside Jim Kempner Fine Art in Chelsea, noted that her monumental bronzes are $335,000 while the resins of the same size cost $300,000. Mr. Hunt, on the other hand, claimed that “people pay to own one of my works, not for the materials used.” His sculptures range from $60,000 to $210,000, depending on size and complexity.

Mr. Hunt’s New York art dealer, Renato Danese, agreed, stating that “collectors are evaluating the quality of the work, leaving the choice of the material up to the artist.” If prospective buyers ask about the durability of Aqua-Resin, he tells them that with regular care it should last “a very long time.” But he said the subject doesn’t come up often. Bronze may be the “Tiffany of metals,” as Pomona, N.Y., sculptor Martin Glick said, but with faux-bronze finishes and discreet salesmen, buyers may not know to ask what the thing is made of.

Even when artists stick with bronze, they are looking to spend less, and that may affect foundries’ bottom lines. “We haven’t had as many reorders,” Marjee Levine at New England Sculpture Service, a Boston-based foundry, said. Sculptors who previously would place an order for half an edition are now just asking them to produce “one or two” works at a time. “Everything is a bit slower.” Other artists are seeking estimates from foundries far from home, in the U.S. and elsewhere—not because the price of bronze is lower there, but because labor costs are. “The cost of living is high in Boston, and we try to pay our employees a living wage,” Ms. Levine said.

Mary Sand, a bronze sculptor in Philadelphia, claimed that “I can’t afford any of the foundries on the East Coast”; she now uses Artworks Foundry in Berkeley. The labor costs of making the mold for one of her sculptures average $1,600 at Artworks, compared with $2,400 on the East Coast, she said, while the casting and patination costs $1,000, compared with $1,500 back east. Travel expenses—she visits the foundry to supervise the process—and shipping reduce some of those savings, but Ms. Sand sends Artworks multiple orders at once, which reduces the number of trips to the foundry.

Jeanne Touissaint at Art Castings of Colorado in Loveland said it is also “getting inquiries and orders” from East Coast sculptors. So are foundries in Mexico and Asia. Ms. Feuerman said she plans to try out foundries in Thailand and China in the coming year, because “it’s so much less expensive, even if you add in shipping and traveling there.”

The price of stainless steel, not bronze, was a concern for New York artist Rob Pruitt when he designed a statue of Andy Warhol, which the Public Art Fund commissioned and sited in Union Square (“The Andy Monument” stays on view through Oct. 2). The foundry bid came in at $80,000, “which ran into some budgetary limitations,” he said. Someone suggested casting the piece in fiberglass, which cut the foundry costs in half (a different foundry was used). A coating on the sculpture gave it a metallic look, so you would never know.

Mr. Grant is the author of “The Business of Being an Artist” (Allworth).

Ever thought of starting your own cellar? It was a question a friend of mine recently raised, somewhat searchingly. He was eager, I later find out, to receive confirmation that what he had been buying over the past year was likely to improve with age and was the right sort of wine to lay down. It was.

Domaine de la Presle, Burgundy

Judicious purchases of red Bordeaux, red and white Burgundy, a small parcel of port and some Champagne—not from one of the major grand marques but an individual grower—should provide happy drinking for the next decade or so.

For those who don’t take their wine consumption as seriously as my friend, I can understand the reticence of spending hundreds of pounds on wine that needs, in some cases, as long as 10 years evolution to drink at its best. With a slew of old, rare and fine wine widely available, as well as many different kinds of good-value wines on offer, you may wonder why bother at all. Most of you, who aren’t wine connoisseurs I suspect, will buy your wine as and when you need it and will probably regard the idea of a wine cellar as a little anachronistic.

But starting a wine collection doesn’t have to require cloistered cellars, a large capital outlay or wooden cases stocked with Bordeaux’s finest and most expensive wine. With a little thought, one can put together a mini cellar that not only meets all your wine needs, but will expand your knowledge and shine a little ray of light on the magic of understanding how wine evolves in the bottle, improving and mellowing with age. More importantly, starting a cellar is by far the most cost-effective way of buying wine, as purchasing by the dozen automatically qualifies for a discount. Moreover, buying fine wine when it is first released and requires a few years aging is almost always cheaper.

Before you start wine shopping, it’s worth jotting down a few objectives as to what you want your cellar to achieve. You will want to have a ready supply of your favorite wine to prevent that last-minute dart to the supermarket when the relatives come around. But there is more to a cellar than plucking out your favorite Chardonnay. A good cellar will supply a ready flow of wines for a multitude of different occasions and palates: for sharing with friends, for aging, for investment and, in some cases, simply for owning.

When putting together the basics, try and think in terms of entertaining. First off, you will need a stock of wines that act as an aperitif and don’t require long-term aging. I’m thinking sparkling wine and easy-drinking white wines, with plenty of light, fresh aromatics. These include varieties such as Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, white Bordeaux, Pinot Grigio, Portuguese white wines or Grüner Veltliner from Austria. A drier white wine with a little more depth and character is needed to accompany food. Ideal candidates include white Burgundy, Californian and Australian Chardonnay, Soave or a Rueda or white Rioja from Spain.

Malbec, the great red grape of Argentina, is one of the most sought-after wines in this country. How did it become such a success? Lettie Teague on Lunch Break looks at the history of the grape and its two-part rise to the top.

With red wine, pull together a few cases of affordable, reliable wines for everyday drinking, such as a house wine from a wine merchant or a familiar branded red. Chile, Malbec from Argentina, French country wines, southern Italy, Australia and California are your hunting ground here. Also, keep some lighter red wines that won’t require aging, such as Beaujolais, Valpolicella and Chianti.

You will also need medium-strength red wines that can be pulled out for the odd dinner party and can stand up to most meat dishes. Look to Bordeaux, the Rhône Valley, Burgundy, Australian Shiraz from Coonawarra, Syrahs from New Zealand and many Portuguese reds. These are your wines that can be aged for five years or more, will improve with time and are fascinating to taste as they evolve.

Laying down a few cases for investment isn’t a bad idea, as you can buy three and the sale of one case may pay for the other two down the line. High-end Bordeaux is where you want to look from vintages such as 2005, ’09 and ’10.

Wine has experienced a phenomenal bull run in recent years, but please remember, if the price rises, it can always come down again, too. On the other hand, you can always drink it.

Write to Will Lyons at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI

Crystal Bridges Museum

The museum’s gallery of late-19th-century works, with Harriet Whitney Frishmuth’s bronze and glass statue, ‘The Bubble.’

Bentonville, Ark.

Over the past decade, as she set about creating the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Northwest Arkansas, Alice Walton has annoyed, alarmed and antagonized not only the art world but much of the rest of the populace too. Her offense? Ms. Walton, the youngest child of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, had the audacity to use her wealth to bring American art to a corner of the U.S. that had little. This upset both those who did not see why such a backwater deserved great art and those who would rather have Wal-Mart pay its workers better, a confusion of apples and oranges if ever there was one. Besides, skeptics said, it’s impossible to build a comprehensive, world-class collection so quickly—despite the $1.2 billion lavished on this effort.

The reckoning arrived last month when her museum opened in Bentonville, and the results are best described as mixed. The sprawling 201,000-square-foot structure, designed by Boston-based architect Moshe Safdie to span Crystal Spring, contains some excellent works among the 450 on view, drawn from five centuries of art made in what is now the United States. The strengths lie in the colonial era through the early 20th century; later works, added to Ms. Walton’s grand design only recently, are mostly mediocre. Throughout, although guided by experts, Ms. Walton has followed her own True North, making idiosyncratic selections designed to celebrate history, nature and the “American spirit,” as well as to weave women, as subject and artist, and other lesser-known artists into the narrative of American art.

Her vision makes for some odd moments. A room containing John Singer Sargent’s masterly “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife” (1885) and gleaming “Capri Girl on a Rooftop” (1878) offers none of the full-length society portraits the artist excelled at, but rather is dominated by two large-scale portraits of women by the far less talented Alfred Maurer. Later on, Andy Warhol is represented solely by his silkscreen portrait of Dolly Parton, a nod to locals but hardly an important work. And Wayne Thiebaud is seen not as a painter of luscious cakes or colorful landscapes, but by his mystifying, uncharacteristic “Supine Woman.”

But there are great moments as well. One wall displays 16 of Martin Johnson Heade’s iridescent “Gems of Brazil” (1863-64) hummingbird paintings, juxtaposed with five of his floral oil sketches. Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” (1849), the painting Ms. Walton purchased from the New York Public Library for $35 million, is flanked by the last finished painting by the artist Durand was memorializing—Thomas Cole’s “The Good Shepherd” (1848)—and “Home by the Lake” (1852), by Cole’s greatest follower, Frederic Edwin Church. In the Modernist galleries, five canvases by Stuart Davis line one amazing wall.

Fears that Crystal Bridges would sugar-coat American art may be true in the sense that it lacks the latest from profane or transgressive artists like Paul McCarthy, say, or Richard Prince. But the collection does not shrink from issues like race, shown in works by Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall, or the American Indian experience, which is covered extensively, starting with the collection’s earliest painting, James Wooldridge’s “Indians of Virginia” (c.1675).

The inaugural installation, organized chronologically, starts strong in pale olive galleries that make the paintings glow. Along one long, curved wall, visitors see the sweep of early American art, starting with portraits of the Levy-Frank family (c. 1735), attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck I. Interior walls and alcoves highlight important works, like Gilbert Stuart’s 1797 portrait of George Washington.

In the next gallery suite, walls painted deep red hold portraits and genre paintings: Works by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt stand out, but portraits by the lesser-known Dennis Miller Bunker and Gari Melchers hold their own. Another long, curved sweeping wall, this time painted blue, displays the course of landscape painting, starting with Thomas Moran’s “Green River, Wyoming” (1878) and ending with two early 20th-century works, a teaser for what comes next.

That is where problems with Mr. Safdie’s design, which begin with a clumsy entrance that requires visitors to descend to the lobby via an elevator, worsen. The galleries for early 20th-century art sit in a glass-walled bridge. Several paintings are strong—a 1908 portrait of actress Jessica Penn by Robert Henri, first-rate works by Marsden Hartley, and two beautiful abstractions by Arthur Dove, among them. But they are hung in enclosed, rectangular galleries that leave large empty spaces around them. Currently occupied by a few odd sculptures (including a giant wooden boy by Jim Dine), they are awkward areas not helped by the fact that sculpture is one of the collection’s weak points.

In the next suite, for 20th-century art, both the white-box spaces and the collection take a downward turn. Ms. Walton has name-checked many of the great artists—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois. But most are secondary works. There’s a small early work by Pollock (not a drip painting) and a surrealist work by Rothko (not an emblematic Abstract Expressionist work). Meanwhile, the easily overlooked side galleries—tributaries off the main rivers of art history—need work. One, for artists’ portraits and self-portraits, is a good idea with some excellent choices, especially Oscar Bluemner’s wild-eyed 1933 self-portrait. But the theme is not sustained. The other side gallery, for figurative works made while abstractionism and later -isms reigned in the 1940s through the ’80s, falls apart even more quickly. And this 20th-century art suite ends anticlimactically with a sour throwback to realism: Jack Levine’s sardonic “The Arms Brokers” (1982-83).

For the moment, the temporary exhibition space (entered by a return to the lobby through the restaurant) also contains works from the permanent collection—recent pieces, often lighthearted, organized around the theme of nature. Eventually, these works will be integrated into the permanent-collection galleries, which will make for a better finale.

Critics will go through Crystal Bridges looking for gaps, and there are many: J.A.M. Whistler and Edward Hopper are among those represented by token works, for example. There’s no late Winslow Homer, no Willem de Kooning, no combine by Rauschenberg. Ms. Walton passed on recent opportunities to purchase excellent Rothkos, Warhols and Clyfford Stills, to name just three.

But Crystal Bridges isn’t finished; it’s a work-in-progress with a $325 million endowment for acquisitions alone. And even now, it’s worth the trip.

Ms. Dobrzynski writes about the arts for many publications, and blogs at www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts.

By KIMBERLY CHOU

Think General Tso meets green market.

At a new crop of Asian restaurants in New York, chefs are cooking versions of familiar fare that emphasize higher quality and locally sourced ingredients—making the case that even Chinese takeout staples can fit into current food fashions.

In Williamsburg, the menu at Brooklyn Wok Shop includes a note that the meat is free of antibiotics and hormones. Edric Har, the chef and owner, also uses better cuts: His version of beef and broccoli features hanger steak from Pino’s Prime Meats in SoHo.

“It’s not just different for the sake of being different,” said Mr. Har, 33 years old, who put in time on the lines at Michelin-starred establishments such as Le Bernardin before opening Brooklyn Wok Shop with his wife, Melissa, at the end of last year. “It’s good food.”

In Manhattan, Joe Ng and Ed Schoenfeld’s RedFarm serves inventive dim sum—soup dumplings with black truffles, egg rolls stuffed with Katz’s pastrami—shaped by a farm-fresh approach and an aesthetic to match. The restaurant’s centerpiece is a rustic communal table, above which hang Edison lights, chopsticks and potted plants.

In part, these Asian-American chefs are able to revise classic recipes to fit the times because better ingredients are now available locally.

Simpson Wong, the chef-owner of Wong in Greenwich Village, shops at the Union Square farmer’s market four times a week for produce to pair with Hudson Valley ducks and pork from an eco-friendly farm. His “locavore Asian” concept was inspired by the discovery that he could find local produce similar to the Malaysian markets of his boyhood.

“More and more farmers realize Asian produce can be grown here,” including napa cabbage, yu choy and Asian pears, Mr. Wong said. He said about 85% of his restaurant’s produce is local, as is nearly all the meat, eggs and seafood.

Of course, the younger chefs are reflecting a larger shift in food attitudes, and they have more freedom to experiment than the city’s more established Asian-food purveyors.

“If you’re a grab-and-go takeout place, or you’re a 100-year-old dim sum place, I understand if you don’t have all-natural Berkshire pork,” said Eddie Huang, 29, whose Taiwanese steamed buns at BaoHaus are filled with Creekstone beef and organic tofu. “But if you consider yourself kind of a new restaurant, I think these days the standard should be all-natural, no hormones, antibiotic-free.”

The difference in thinking is, in part, generational.

When the Hars started planning Wok Shop, they said their parents didn’t understand the concept. Both come from Chinese immigrant families, and Melissa’s father is a chef.

“This whole movement started with Alice Waters,” Mr. Har said. “This is definitely not in their generation.”

There are limits to sourcing locally and seasonally, and in Asian cooking those limitations can sometimes be felt more keenly. Despite the availability of locally grown hakurei turnips and bok choy, some key components of these cuisines cannot be found in any green market.

“Let’s face it, the Asian larder is not the American larder,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a partner in RedFarm. “There are a lot of fermented foods. Not all of this is coming from here.”

For produce such as lotus roots and lily bulbs, Mr. Schoenfeld said that “even when they’re in season, they’re in other parts of the world. We’re local to a degree that it makes sense.”

Sourcing food carefully is also more expensive. Entrees at Brooklyn Wok Shop range between $9.50 and $12, which may be on par with other restaurants off Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, but are more expensive than local Chinese takeout joints.

“I would love to source things from a farm upstate,” said Mr. Har, who estimates his food costs are twice those of a conventional Chinese spot. “Considering who we are and our price point, it’s just not feasible.”

Write to Kimberly Chou at kimberly.chou@wsj.com