They took a jewel of a museum
cracked it and trashed it.
“Our visitors will see their histories on display,” so says the new director Adam Levine, who is from New York, as he and the former director John Stanley, also of New York, have their way with Toledo’s once and future
Toledo Museum of Art.
The museum did surveys of all the people living in the 2-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything! They completely redo the museum for them! Enough with the European paintings that the Libbeys and others donated. That kind of art, that the museum was built on, is passé, as far as they are concerned.
Instead, the big old building is undergoing a campus-wide reinstallation and architectural renovation that they say will suit the neighborhood. According to this architectural rendering, it will look like a pot store. The walls are white and devoid of art, and on the floor are curvy glass display tables mazed throughout what looks to be the Great Gallery.
Imagine, The Crowning of Saint Catherine, considered to be the best painting by Peter Paul Rubens that is in America, the two paintings called Lot and His Daughters, one by Guercino and one by Artemisia Gentileschi, along with many others being taken off the walls of the Great Gallery. I wouldn’t put it past them.
The Impressionist paintings have already been removed.
They are moving the Cloisters! Will they rip apart the Wolfe Gallery while they are at it, after all, it was built 12 years ago and both of the Wolfes are now dead.
So much for the stewards of the art museum and their fiduciary duty to care for the art so that it is passed on to the future generations of Toledoans.
“Our visitors will see their histories on display.” For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum they love, the history being made now will leave them with a pathetic legacy, and the city with the loss of what made it so good.