In mid-June, on a Wednesday, I embarked on a summer road trip, with the goal of visiting some of America’s greatest art museums in five Midwestern cities.

When you see seven museums in five cities over five days, ideas and images sneak into your brain at oblique angles. The stimulants are profuse, often taking on outsize significance. Correspondences accumulate — not only among the various works you see in the galleries, but among artworks and events in the world outside.

One of the exhibitions I wanted to see was about American road trips and photography, which felt pertinent; another was about car culture in France between the wars. Both are at the St. Louis Art Museum, where I planned to arrive on the fourth day, after flying into Detroit, driving to Toledo and spending two nights in Chicago. The trip ended in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

That first day was full. Freshly caffeinated after an early flight, I scoured the stellar collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The fabled Diego Rivera murals, celebrating Detroit’s auto industry, were striped by slanted, annunciatory light. The union of technology and spirituality they posit seems quaint today, a gospel of modernity long since lost in translation. Even so, here they were, emphatically present under the skylight. In art museums, old stories stream into a swollen present. Meaning and narrative break the riverbanks, spreading in every direction.

At about 2 p.m., I drove south to the Toledo Museum of Art, where I spent an hour with Robert Schindler, the curator of a terrific show about Rachel Ruysch, the 17th-century Dutch flower painter. I was surprised, afterward, to realize how much time we’d spent talking about the reproductive process of Surinam toads. But that can happen in museums: They’re great places for freewheeling conversations.

After dinner, I walked to the Maumee River, then up to the ballpark where, on a whim, I bought a $13 ticket and sat behind home plate. The late sun warmed my bare arms as I watched the Toledo Mud Hens go down to the Omaha Storm Chasers.

The next day, at the vibrating wheel of a rented Mitsubishi hatchback, I drove west. Approaching Chicago on westbound Interstate 90 is like scrolling through an endless terms-and-conditions agreement. It’s ugly, vaguely threatening and — on the surface at least — bears little relationship to the product you’re trying to get. That Thursday, against a backdrop of smokestacks and electricity stations, billboards presented an interminable concatenation of injury lawyers and forlorn young women (“I regret my abortion”). Smoke from Canadian wildfires had turned the sky the color and consistency of onion soup. The rinsed, almost biblical light of Rivera’s “Detroit Industry Murals” was a distant memory.

Driving out of a roadside gas station, I passed an Amish family, braced, it seemed, against the storm of modernity like Winslow Homer’s Cullercoats fisherwomen against the North Sea wind. They trudged across a parking lot as vast as America.

The photographer Jim Dow coined a term — the “American roadscape” — for the gas stations, diners, motels, drive-in theaters, billboards, water towers, dinosaurs and other Brobdingnagian attractions that line the roads linking America’s cities. One of Dow’s photographs — a pile of discarded mufflers resembling a roadside shrine — is included in “In Search of America,” the road trip and photography exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM).

One half of the exhibit is a historical survey of photographers who made their pictures while on the road in the United States. There are great things by, among others, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. The other is devoted to a single photographer, the great but underappreciated E.O. Hoppé, who was the first photographer to use a camera to try to capture the full scale and diversity of America. Commissioned in 1926 by a German publisher to produce a photo book about America’s architecture and landscape, he traveled by road to more than 120 cities and scenic sites across 35 states over 12 months.

Hoppé photographed America during the Roaring Twenties. His images predate Rivera’s murals, which were executed during a devastating economic downturn in 1932 and 1933. But his book, titled “Romantic America,” includes fabulous photographs of the same Ford factory Rivera painted in Detroit, as well as the St. Louis Art Museum itself, the Kansas City stockyards, the Pacific Coast Highway, Monument Valley in Arizona and a former slave quarters at a plantation in Savannah, Georgia. “Romantic America” was printed in German and American editions and sold nearly 100,000 copies in this country. Its success helped turn the road trip into a symbol of American culture, braiding freedom and patriotism with car culture.

“Roaring” — the SLAM show about French car culture between the wars — is the bigger, more logistically impressive exhibit. Along with a handful of utterly ravishing automobiles, including 1920s Citroëns and Bugattis, each improbably elongated, shiny and curvaceous (if my rented Mitsubishi saw any of them, it would slink away in shame), the exhibit also has paintings by Matisse and Mondrian, photographs by Lartigue and Man Ray, clothes by Schiaparelli and Hermès, and furniture by Ruhlmann and Le Corbusier.

Over two decades separating two world wars, changing attitudes to freedom, art and democracy, as well as to sex and health, permeated car culture in France. The show traces a poignant shift, as the Roaring Twenties became the depressed ’30s, from luxe art deco designs to a more functional and democratic aesthetic, epitomized by the modernism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.

Roads today can be depressing. The infrastructure supporting American freeways is massive, but the sameness grinds you down. The monotony of industrial agriculture. The enforced bad diet. The despair-inducing billboards. You zip through vast tracts of terrestrial space, gaze locked ahead.

Arriving at art museums after four or five hours on these roads, day after day, is reliably uplifting. Everything is reversed. You’re in a huge building, with high ceilings and no predetermined path. You meander through different centuries and cultures, encountering different ideas of beauty, different understandings of power and mortality, different ways of living. The things you see are made by hand, rather than mass-produced, often with staggering skill.

The people around you, meanwhile, are all ages and all backgrounds. Eros is in the air — especially on weekends: You see couples on dates, dressed to kill, gazing upon paintings and sculptures of beautiful naked bodies from 19th-century France, 16th-century Italy, 12th-century India and 2nd-century Rome. SLAM and the Nelson-Atkins were both hosting weddings on the days I visited. At the Nelson-Atkins, a wedding party with a mariachi band triggered joyous dancing on a shady terrace by the entrance.

“Do you know how much this painting is worth?” a man in Detroit had asked me as we stood together in front of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Wedding Dance.” “A hundred fifty million dollars,” he said, pausing to let it sink in as his girlfriend stared blankly ahead. I assumed they knew that the city had come close to auctioning off the collection after filing for bankruptcy in 2013, but maybe not?

“Not a bad thing to have,” he concluded, incontrovertibly.

Correspondences kept coming.

After spending time with Rivera’s murals in Detroit, for instance, I came upon Frida Kahlo’s portrait of herself with Rivera at a Kahlo show in the Art Institute of Chicago. A few minutes later, I was standing before Delacroix’s rapid sketch for “Liberty Leading the People,” on loan to the Art Institute from a private collector. The finished work, a giant canvas that hangs in the Louvre, celebrates the Trois Glorieuses, or the Three Glorious Days of 1830, when Parisians rose up to overthrow King Charles X. Outside the museum, I encountered a phalanx of protesters holding “No Kings” signs. They passed by the Lions of Michigan Avenue, hemmed in on both sides by police officers wheeling bicycles.

Over the course of my trip, America’s political and cultural life was coming under increasing duress. As I blinked naively in front of paintings by Kahlo, Magritte and Delacroix, Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, announced she was leaving her post, about two weeks after President Donald Trump announced on social media that he had fired her. A minor personnel matter, perhaps, but after Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, a harbinger of what, exactly?

Meanwhile, a U.S. senator asking uncomfortable questions at a news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem was hustled out of a room and pushed face forward into the ground by FBI and Secret Service agents.

The next day, a state legislator was assassinated, her husband also shot to death. This came less than a year after two assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Trump.

I thought of the levity in Honoré Daumier’s sculpted caricatures of 19th-century politicians, ranks of them displayed behind glass at the Art Institute of Chicago. What happens, I wondered, when policy disagreements and a healthy cynicism about politicians stop finding outlets in humor and argument and turn physical, even deadly?

More unwanted correspondences presented themselves toward the end of my journey. Within minutes of entering the museum in St. Louis, I stood before a panel of beautiful Persian tiles. According to the wall label, they had once adorned the inner portal of the mausoleum of a holy man in Isfahan, in central Iran. Israel’s air force was firing missiles into Isfahan at that very hour, trying to take out the nuclear facilities there.

In Kansas City the next day, I saw an exhibition devoted to the impact of Islamic astronomers on the scientific revolution. The dissemination of their groundbreaking ideas was aided by the invention in Europe of the printing press. Bizarrely, at the same time, I was getting text updates from a friend, Elmar Seibel, whose wife, the restaurateur Azita Bina-Seibel, was in northern Iran, at the Caspian Sea, when Israel began its airstrikes. Bina-Seibel was born in Iran but came to the U.S. to study ahead of the 1979 Iranian revolution. She stayed here, becoming a U.S. citizen, but goes back to see family when she can. Secretary of State John F. Kerry was a regular at her Persian restaurant, Lala Rokh, while negotiating the Iranian nuclear deal during the Obama administration. (He lived just up the hill.) She and Seibel collect contemporary Iranian photographs. Seibel also owns the only extant, mid-19th-century daguerreotype of an Iranian. His collection of rare books focused on the transmission of Persian and Islamic knowledge to the West — one of the best in the world — includes a precious edition of a French account of the coronation of a shah in Isfahan in the 17th century.

But nothing in his collection mattered on this weekend in June: Seibel was pulling out all the stops, he told me via text, to extract his wife from Iran. After several days, he was able to get her across the border into Azerbaijan, and from there to Baku, where he had booked her on a flight home.

Museums are great places to escape to. That’s obvious. An antidote to the daily grind, to highways and traffic jams and to current affairs, they have air conditioning, clean bathrooms, cafes. You enter them and you breathe a different, more richly oxygenated air.

But none of America’s museums are insulated from the real world. They can seem slow-moving or out of step with the times. But don’t be deceived: Everything they display shades and fills out the present, amplifying a reality that would seem that much dumber and more dismal without them. What they conserve also testifies — if only by its status as an exception — to centuries of death and destruction, and to the terrifying precariousness of beauty and peace.