LENOX, Mass. -- For a culture vulture, whizzing through the Hudson River Valley and across the Berkshires in Massachusetts en route to somewhere else can be frustrating.

So many remarkable Americans -- artists, writers, presidents -- have lived, worked and played there over the years, it's nearly impossible to resist the temptations that present themselves at every bend of the road.

There's the sign for Hyde Park ... No time, forget it. Oh, to spend an hour or two at Olana, 19th-century artist Frederic Church's fevered dream of a Persian palace ... What about Edith Wharton's The Mount, in Lenox, Mass., with its fabulous garden? Tanglewood, Naumkeag, Jacob's Pillow, Norman Rockwell's Museum, the Clark Art Institute ...

Stop.

Take a deep breath.

Now, head off the beaten path, just a little bit, to the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio in Lenox, for a glimpse of two 20th-century American abstract artists and the defiantly nonconformist world they lived in.

In 1930, George L.K. Morris, a wealthy expatriate artist and intellectual who had recently returned from Paris, built a white stucco studio on the grounds of his family's estate, "Brookhurst." It was the first modern structure in New England (The Gropius House in Lexington, Mass., and the Wadsworth Athenaeum's Avery Memorial Building came a few years later), where he and his future wife, Suzy Frelinghuysen, would later build their home and use it to paint and collect the work of some of the 20th century's greatest abstract artists: Picasso, Gris, Matisse, Leger, Klee.

It's all still there: the fabulous art, the marble foyer with curving staircase (the couple only built the wrought-iron railing after realizing what a few cocktails might do to one's balance), the fully stocked sunken bar, the cubist frescoes, the Argentinean leather tiles on the floor of the Art Deco living room, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows, the Aalto chairs, even the scrapers Morris used to clean his paint brushes.

Tucked behind iron gates and up a long gravel driveway through a wooded 46-acre property, the sleek white stucco and glass block house is a startling departure from the elaborate Gilded Age mansions nearby.

It's fun, in fact, to think how shocked the neighbors must have been when they realized the architect, John Butler Swann, was constructing a house whose spare, clinical modernism owed more to Le Corbusier and Bauhaus than the shingle-style palaces of McKim, Mead and White. (Interesting factoid: Cost overruns forced Morris to consign a Picasso, "The Poet," for sale. It was purchased for $4,500 by Peggy Guggenheim, noted heiress and eccentric, and used to launch her own remarkable museum in Venice.)

Don't expect a gleaming McMansion out of Architectural Digest: The house is preserved in its original state, which means it's a bit musty inside, with worn door fixtures and rooms that seem oddly small compared to the grand scale of today's homes -- except, of course, for the living room and the studio, soaring spaces full of light, with extraordinary art that you can walk right up to.

Frelinghuysen and Morris -- informally dubbed the "Park Avenue Cubists" along with New Yorker "Talk of the Town" writer Charles Shaw and wealthy collector A.E. Gallitin -- were a glamorous couple with plenty of money, but they weren't dilettantes.

"They were serious artists, especially George Morris," said John R. Lane, recently retired director of the Dallas Museum of Art who purchased one of Morris' paintings, "Stockbridge Church," for the Carnegie Museum of Art when he was director there in the 1980s. "His own artistic work is significant in the context of his time."

Founding members of the Abstract Artists Association, Morris and Frelinghuysen were the immediate -- and to Lane and other experts -- undervalued predecessors of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s, whose best-known practitioners included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Of the two, Morris has sometimes been described as the more important painter -- dedicating his life to abstract art, not just as a painter but as a critic for the Partisan Review, a progressive intellectual journal -- although "Morris considered her his equal, and qualitatively the women in this group were every bit as strong," said her nephew, T. Kinney Frelinghuysen, the site's director.

In addition to her painting, Suzy Frelinghuysen had a successful career with the New York City Opera, singing the lead roles of "Tosca" and "Ariadne auf Naxos" under the name Suzy Morris before bronchitis cut her career short in 1951 and she devoted herself to painting full time.

"She seems to have been highly intuitive, sensitive, her work is, in a way, more lyrical and poetic, whereas Morris did a number of paintings in the 1940s that are not passionate but analytical and biting," Lane said.

"I think there is an interview in the New Yorker in which she comments, "I do these things, painting and singing, because I like doing them,' " T. Kinney Frelinghuysen said.

"These people were pioneers who tried to make cubism advance in the visual arts in America, and the Frelinghuysen Morris House is a working site for two artists left relatively intact," said Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, who noted that there aren't many comparable "house museums" of American artists from that era -- other than, perhaps, Thomas Hart Benton's in Kansas City and the studio of American sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens in New Hampshire.

While relatively unknown outside their own aesthetic circle in the late 1930s and '40s, the couple's work is being rediscovered by fans of modernism today. A Morris painting, "Intrusion," just fetched $144,000 at auction, and the couple's works have been acquired by major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. A current exhibit of 1940s art running through Oct. 19 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art -- "Painting in the United States" -- includes their work.

You can head out to Greensburg to see the art, but if you're in the Berkshires this summer, stop by the house and experience, even for just a little bit, what it was like to be rich, talented and gloriously avant-garde in the early 20th century.