By Richard P. Carpenter, Globe Staff

IF YOU GO . . . Places to visit

STOCKBRIDGE -- You'd probably want to visit Chesterwood and Storm King even if they weren't among America's foremost sculpture parks. Their settings alone -- Storm King's in the Hudson River Valley, Chesterwood's among the rolling Berkshire hills -- merit a ramble of a couple of hours. So riveting is their scenery, in fact, that it challenges curators to find sculpture that can stand up to it. It's a wise curator who decides to collaborate rather than compete with these powerful landscapes.

Bring walking shoes, bug spray and an umbrella you'll hope not to need when visiting either park. Both demand considerable legwork. But both reward the effort. Storm King, in Mountainville, N.Y., and Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, are museums without walls, made up of sensitively-sited contemporary sculpture. Just as museums place smallish works on paper in low-ceilinged, softly lit galleries and install masterwork paintings in rooms with lofty proportions, so outdoor sculpture can be matched to a setting. At Storm King, that means Isamu Noguchi's ''Momo Taro,'' a stunning ensemble of nine granite boulders, crowns a hilltop, luring the eye from far away. At Chesterwood, George Rickey's 25-foot-tall steel ''Gyratory Cube and Square'' stands like an alien spaceship that has landed in a vast meadow. Sometimes it's surrounded by cows, grazing unperturbed: In addition to being a sculpture site, the meadow is leased to a local farmer.

Chesterwood is a relic of the age when America was discovering its artistic voice, when both the government and private citizens erected grandiose neoclassical buildings and commissioned monumental sculptures to adorn them. Many of those sculptures were by Daniel Chester French, best known as the creator of the ''Minute Man'' statue in Concord and the 20-foot seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

French worked from the Gilded Age through the Jazz Age. And from 1897 until his death in 1931, he summered on the Berkshire property where he built a house clad in stucco -- a material that reminded him of his beloved Italy, but which, alas, cracks in New England winters. Chesterwood is comfortable but hardly extravagant, especially when compared with the hundred-room Berkshire houses deceptively dubbed ''cottages.'' The owners of those summer cottages came calling at Chesterwood, though: They were French's patrons, and, in his studio, in addition to the area where he worked, is a room outfitted with Oriental carpet and grand piano where he received them. Here he entertained in the style of Edith Wharton, offering his guests tea and lemonade.

The studio is the heart of the estate, and its cast of plaster and marble characters includes gods, heroes, warriors and nubile maidens. Small, medium and large versions of the same subject reveal something of French's working methods, how the poses of those great figures evolved. Just outside the studio's huge double doors is a short railroad track, where French would wheel out his sculptures to see how they looked in the sunlight.

Surprisingly, the most riveting sculpture in the studio is not the cast of the great seated Lincoln, which French worked on from 1911 to 1922, but his 1931 ''Andromeda.'' Unlike most of his works, this one was not a commission; it was a private rather than public undertaking. It depicts the maiden of Greek legend, nude and chained to a rock, head thrown back. The model for this frankly erotic work was a 14-year-old local girl who earned 71 cents an hour for the job, enjoyed regular milk and cookie breaks, and told her parents she was working in the Chesterwood gardens.

So pervasive is French's presence in the studio that you half expect to see him walk through the door. But Chesterwood, which French's daughter Margaret donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1969, is more than a museum of things past: It's also an important center for new art. Each year, Chesterwood stages an impressive outdoor sculpture show of works scattered through intimate woodlands and open fields. Among the highlights this year are Tim Prentice's steel ''Wire Cats,'' strung through the trees and looking like cobwebs; Joyce McDaniel's ''Moments of Being,'' in which fragile paper clothing patterns, her signature material, are arranged in angles that look like giant birds; and Susan Crowder's ''Chesterwood No. 1,'' a classical column sheathed in tree bark, neatly merging the formality of Chesterwood's architecture with the unruly nature that lies beyond its lawns.

You wonder, looking at these sometimes challenging contemporary works, what French's reaction to them would have been. Even in his day he was hardly a radical. Trained in Italy, he belonged to a movement called the ''American Renaissance''; he thought of himself as part of a continuum. Chesterwood's buildings and gardens reflect a love of tradition, from the wide, Italian-style piazza wrapping around the studio to the formal geometry of a garden bordered by curving marble benches. In that garden, the young Isadora Duncan once danced, draped a la Greque and wreathed in flowers.

If you take the guided tour of French's home and studio, and then explore the contemporary show, you will have spent the better part of a day. Should you be sufficiently gung-ho to want to spend the night, you can, as of this year. Meadowlark, a second studio French built on the outskirts of his property when his daughter's constant entertaining became too much of a distraction, has now been converted into a delighfully decorated two-bedroom cottage that visitors can rent. French's sketches can still be seen on the barnboard walls, along with fine photographs of some of his masterful monuments. Recently, one Meadowlark guest was spied by Chesterwood staff roaming the grounds shortly after dawn, communing with the outdoor works, wearing a bathrobe.

The art most often associated with the landscape around Storm King is, of course, the Hudson River School -- Thomas Cole and other mid-19th-century painters who elevated woods and mountains to the status of American icons. Storm King Art Center -- named for the nearby mountain that was a favorite subject of the Hudson River artists -- has created a few icons of its own, by such stellar sculptors as Siah Armajani, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson and dozens of others who make the place a pantheon of contemporary three-dimensional art.

Storm King was once the estate of New York lawyer Vermont Hatch, who lived in a house designed in the style of a Norman chateau until his death in 1959, when the estate was bought by his friend and neighbor, Ralph Ogden. Ogden turned Storm King into a regional art museum that was, well, nice. Gradually, though, his ambitions outgrew this modest mission. Inspired by the Henry Moore sculptures on the grounds of Sir William Keswick's sheep farm in Scotland, and, closer to home, by the David Smith works on Smith's property in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, Ogden decided to create a sculpture park. As a starting point, he snapped up 13 Smith sculptures, all at once.

The Smiths became the nucleus of a collection rooted in late-20th-century abstraction but branching out to other styles. That collection -- currently more than 120 works by more than 100 artsts, displayed on a 400-acre site -- is uneven. The failures tend to be innocuous blobs -- rural versions of what writer Tom Wolfe famously called ''the turd in the plaza'' because every new office building had to have one out front.

Some of Storm King's sculpture is spectacular. Literally so in the case of works by Mark di Suvero, who is the subject of a two-year show that gives new meaning to the term ''blockbuster.'' Surely these multiton sculptures must together constitute one of the weightiest exhibitions in history. Di Suvero works in steel -- girders, I-beams, tanks, even steam shovels are incorporated into his giant constructions that amble across the Storm King landscape. The largest are 40 to 60 feet high, and weigh 20 tons or more. Three of them fill a 20-acre field reshaped expressly to show them to advantage. Rerouting the landscape so it still looks like the work of nature has become a specialty of Storm King's longtime landscape architect, William Rutherford.

The size of the di Suveros seems ''to relate less to other sculpture than to monuments such as the Statue of Liberty, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or even the Eiffel Tower,'' writes art historian Irving Sandler, author of the new book ''Mark di Suvero at Storm King Art Center.'' Adding to the force of the sculptures is di Suvero's penchant for painting them in bright primaries that stand out boldly against the backdrop of green.

It's unusual to devote such vast resources to a single sculptor. Storm King has the freedom to do so because right along it has depended on the taste and money of private individuals -- first Ogden, who died in 1974, then Peter Stern, who has been the center's chairman since its founding. Thanks to them, and to Storm King director David Collens, the center has turned itself into a veritable di Suvero theme park.

Not that other sculptors don't make equally strong -- or even stronger -- impressions with fewer and smaller works. The David Smiths are mint, including totem forms with a human presence that dance against the sky and gleaming stainless steel still-lifes whose burnished surfaces seem to dissolve in the strong sunlight. Being outdoors gives these pieces a chance to breathe and expand that couldn't be matched in an indoor setting.

Sol LeWitt's minimalist, rigidly geometric works are jolting when seen outside, their precision a contradiction of nature's vagaries. The LeWitt at Storm King, the 1970 white steel ''Five Modular Units,'' merges with the grass by casting rhythmic shadows on it. David von Schlegell's trio of steel squares, on the other hand, seems to float above the lawns like a mirage, courtesy of exceedingly thin, virtually invisible legs. Robert Grosvenor's black, Cor-ten steel ''Untitled'' is more than 200 feet long, a low curve that calmly embraces the Earth instead of soaring above it, as so many works here do.

It's a measure of the high regard the international sculpture community has for Storm King, and also an indication of how few venues there are for the immense works contemporary sculptors like to produce, that Magdalena Abakanowicz has given her 143-foot-long ''Sarcophagi in Glass Houses'' to the center. The work of the Polish-born artist has been shaped by the political turmoil of Eastern Europe, and usually has a figurative presence: Often, the figures are incomplete, or uncomfortably bent. In the ''Sarcophagi,'' the figurative element comes from an unlikely source: wooden models used to cast 19th- and early 20th-century engines. Abakanowicz has reworked the forms so they bulge like bellies, suggesting birth, and she's housed them in steel and glass structures that suggest transparent coffins, a la Snow White. Of all the works at Storm King, this is the most emotionally potent.

And of all the works at Storm King, Menashe Kadishman's ''Suspended'' is the most likely to stop you in your tracks. A huge steel rectangle plants one point in the grass and leans sideways at an alarming angle, another rectangle suspended from its top. The balancing act looks impossible; surely the sculpture should fall over. Intellectually, people know that it won't, that somewhere underground there's some powerful armature that keeps the piece erect. Still, people do tend to keep their distance. On the day of my visit, I saw not a single soul walk under it.

Published 09/15/96 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.