Museums showcase new, old treasures

In the 19th century, Cincinnati was a magnet for aspiring artists who flocked to the city to study painting and sculpture - especially after 1881, when the Cincinnati Art Museum was founded as the first American art museum west of the Alleghenies.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is a Richardson Romanesque building with Classical and modern wings, surrounded by woods in Cincinnati's Eden Park. The museum collection is encyclopedic, including Egyptian, near and far eastern art, Greek and Roman, medieval, renaissance, baroque, European and American 19th century painting, early modern and a rapidly growing collection of contemporary art.

Highlights among the more than 50,000 works in the collection include a pure gold libation cup that belonged to Darius, King of Persia, rare first and second century Nabataean sculpture, paintings by Titian, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, and 20th century works by Grant Wood, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso.

The featured exhibition is ''Mistress of the House; Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt,'' Through Jan. 5. 1997. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5, $4 for senior citizens and college students. Museum members and children under 18 free. Free to all on Saturday. (513) 721-5204. ''Mistress of the House; Mistress of Heaven'' tickets $10, $8 college students, seniors and children under 18. Tickets: 721-0300.

Art scholars call the Taft Museum Cincinnati's best kept secret. It is one of the nation's finest house museums, showing the splendid art collection of Charles and Anna Taft in a historically important home. Built in 1820, the house is an outstanding example of Federalist architecture. Newspaper publisher Charles Taft, half brother of President William Howard Taft, and his wife, Anna, owned the house at the turn of the 20th century and, from 1901 to 1927, filled it with Chinese porcelains and European paintings. Included are important works by Rembrandt, Corot, Gainsborough and Whistler, and a marvelous ''abstract'' J.M.W. Turner canvas, ''The Rape of Europa.'' The Taft Museum, at 316 Pike St. downtown, is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $4, $2 students and senior citizens, free for children 12 and under. Free to all on Wednesdays. (513) 241-0343.

The Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St. downtown, grew from the Modern Art Society, founded in 1939, as one of the oldest institutions of new art in the nation. Over the years, the CAC hosted exhibitions for artists such as Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, whose first museum exhibition was at the CAC. The Contemporary Arts Center has no permanent collection, but allows artists to hang shows or create installations in its space, so that each six weeks or so, there are three of four new exhibitions, making every visit to the CAC a new experience. CAC hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $3.50, $2 students and senior citizens. (513) 721-0390.

John James Audubon was the first paid employee of the Western Museum in 1818, and had his first exhibition of paintings of birds at Cincinnati before starting his monumental project ''The Birds of America.''

Sculptor Hiram Powers, who shocked 19th century America by touring his marble statue of the nude ''Greek Slave,'' began his career in Cincinnati, creating in 1828 ''The Infernal Regions,'' a plaster-of-Paris version of hell, with moving clockwork figures, for the Western Museum.

In 1850, Cincinnati arts patron Nicholas Longworth commissioned African-American artist Robert Scott Duncanson to paint a series of landscape murals in the foyer of his home. Mr. Duncanson went on to be the first internationally famous African-American painter. Lost for decades under Victorian wallpaper, the murals have just been cleaned and restored.

Cincinnati's famous painting school in the late 19th century was not called the Cincinnati school but the Munich School. That's because Cincinnati painters traveled to Munich to study with Covington, Ky., painter Frank Duveneck, who brought his Munich style to Cincinnati when he returned here to teach at the Art Academy. The most famous member of the Munich School was the great American impressionist John Twachtman, a Cincinnati artist famed as ''the winter impressionist.''

The two most famous American painters of American Indians were Cincinnatians Henry Farny and Joseph Sharp, both members of the Munich School. Mr. Sharp was a founder of the Taos art colony in New Mexico.

Two of Pop Art's most famous painters, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselman, are Cincinnati natives who first studied art in local schools.

Cincinnati achieved unwelcome renown in 1990 when the Contemporary Arts Center became the first museum in the United States to be indicted for obscenity. The CAC and its director, Dennis Barrie, stood trial for exhibiting ''The Perfect Moment,'' featuring the controversial homo-erotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Suddenly, Cincinnati and the CAC were world famous. The CAC was acquitted of the charges, but the name of Mapplethorpe became forever associated with the Contemporary Arts Center and Cincinnati.