Cleveland Museum of Art

A free encyclopaedic art museum, one of the finest collections in America

Address 11150 East Boulevard

The Cleveland Museum of Art is the city's signal cultural achievement and, by most measures, one of the five best comprehensive art museums in the United States. The collection of around 60,000 works covers six millennia — from Old Kingdom Egyptian sculpture and Asian bronzes to Caravaggio, Picasso, and Warhol — and the building itself, a 1916 neoclassical core enlarged by a luminous Rafael Viñoly atrium in 2012, is a pleasure to walk through.

General admission is free, which makes it one of the great civic gifts of the American Midwest. The Asian galleries (particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Indian) are world-class; the Armor Court draws kids; the photography rotations are excellent. Allow at least three hours; a full day if you take the audio tour and have lunch in the atrium café.

Closed Mondays. Public bus 9 from downtown drops you at the museum's front door; parking on site is paid but rarely full.

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A story
Rodin's *The Thinker*, posed on the steps of the museum's south entrance, was bombed by the Weather Underground in March 1970. The blast tore the legs and base apart and the museum chose to leave the damage unrepaired as a record of the era — a decision so unusual that the disfigured statue is now the museum's de facto signature.

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