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Artists of Toledo

Behold, The Dismantling of The Toledo Museum of Art

Why don’t they just build their own museum?

“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.

Famous Impressionist paintings thrown out the door.

The museum conducted surveys of all the people living in the two-mile radius of the museum. They want to get them to come. They are trying everything. They must completely redo the museum.

They rebranded at great expense, creating a $200K operating deficit for 2023 (they spent much more than that). The redesigned logo looks like a gun scoping things out. It’s animated and dominating and scopes out their website back and forth when you visit it. It’s out to kill the artwork! Especially the American and European artwork because it’s not politically correct.

Enough with the European paintings that the Libbeys and others donated. That kind of art, that the museum was built on, does not speak to the people. They don’t like that kind of culture even if it is great art. The amazing thing about a museum is that it has this amazing ability to say whatever the museum puts up on the walls – it’s instantly going to be great art. This is what the new director says after previous directors really did collect great art, which is what really made the Toledo Museum of Art so great. But the new guy replaced the connoisseurs with culture workers and lowered the bar. Because the museum sets the cannon. Boom!

Instead of adding to the collection to create more diversity, he is subtracting from it, and the money’s good.

Who cares that the new Glass Pavilion was designed by the famed Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa specifically for the glass art collection in 2006 for $30 million and that was only 18 years ago. Move it out, the fixers have arrived.

The museum is undergoing a campus-wide reinstallation, mostly led by employees and consultants who are brand new. They don’t bother to mention it in their five-year plan, nor in their 2023 annual report. That’s because they just thought of it. They are like kids in a candy store. They hired numerous firms, consulting curators and searched for simpatico fellows to help them.

According to their new architectural renderings, the redone museum will look like a hospital with a bad facelift. 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. People are not happy about it.

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. Oh yes they will.

The Impressionist paintings have already been removed.

They are taking the glass collection out of the Glass Pavilion and will sprinkle it among the 2-D art in the main building, arranging the art chronologically. The Glass Pavilion will be for special exhibitions and to serve as the graveyard for Impressionist paintings.

They spread the rumor that they were getting rid of the Cloisters, only to let it leak that they are just moving the Cloisters.  To a smaller area behind the the ancient art. Imagine dismantling the ancient tile floor and the delicate and very old four walls of columns, all related in history, that form the Cloister gallery. It will never look or be the same.

To find a spot for the Cloisters, they will dismantle the 12-year old Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery that was built for contemporary art.  Two million dollars towards the renovation of the former glass gallery that was made into a contemporary art gallery was donated by Mary and Fritz Wolfe, who are both dead now.

Fritz Wolfe served 27 years on the Museum board and Mary Wolfe co-chaired the 100th anniversary celebration in 2001.

But the new museum people don’t care about respecting donors. They get their money from the government now.

Museum floor plan in 2014, note the purple + bright blue will be moved to the orange galleries — the museum’s greatest paintings, European, Renaissance now hanging in the Great Gallery and adjacent galleries getting shoved aside, in a much smaller area. The Cloisters to be moved to where the new two-story Wolfe Contemporary gallery is now.
Sketch presented by the museum to other museums at the symposium they sponsored in the summer of 2023.

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 future generations of Toledoans. Adam Levine, a financial crypto specialist, sees the future of museums as being “screen-based.” He is not the best person to be put in charge of caring for and keeping the art and the art museum, let alone to be given the right to remodel it.

It is very risky as well. Remember the disastrous fire of Notre Dame was caused by a mistake made during a renovation.

“Our visitors will see their histories on display.” They are replacing the prominent Impressionist gallery with a gallery showing Toledo’s glass industry history and the history of the Museum. As if it’s a history museum and not an art museum. They sold us out.

For Toledoans, including the Toledo Museum Board of Directors, if they don’t stop this disastrous dismantling of the museum we love, the history being made now will leave them with a pathetic legacy, and will leave the city with the loss of what made it so good.

Contact the board members of the Toledo Museum of Art if you agree with me.

This is a photo of the Libbey grave on Easter 2023 showing that the museum left it in tatters in spite of the directive of the Libbey Endowment. The Libbeys are the founders of the museum.

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Art. Think about it.

If the museum needs to make repairs to its HVAC system, and it doesn’t have the money in its own operating funds, why doesn’t it take more money from the Libbey endowment? If the museum can’t find enough money in the Libbey endowment because the Endowment requires that 50% needs to be spent on art, why not do a fundraiser? If the museum can’t raise enough money from a fundraiser, why doesn’t it apply for grants? If the museum still can’t raise enough money to repair the HVAC system from the endowment, fundraisers and grants and its own operating funds, why doesn’t the museum apply for a loan from a bank?

These are fair questions. Instead, the museum went to the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, asking them to install “port authority facilities” into the museum in the form of an HVAC system. The port authority eagerly agreed and posted a bond for the museum as a part of their .4 mill operating levy that was passed by voters on November 5. More money came from the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and the Columbus-Franklin County Finance Authority for the total of $24.89 million for a new HVAC system. Pretty slick.

The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority owns and operates “port authority facilities” such as the Port of Toledo, Toledo Shipyard, Toledo Express Airport, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza train station, ParkSmart Parking Facilities, General Cargo Terminals. And now the port authority is adding one more “port authority facility” to this governmentally controlled list — the HVAC system at the Toledo Museum of Art. The port authority approved a $25 million bond, together with the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and the Columbus-Franklin County Finance Authority, then approved by taxpayers, the constructing, developing, equipping, improving, and installing “port authority facilities” across the 328,568 square foot museum.

Interestingly, the Secretary of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, Thomas Winston, is also the President and CEO of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The Vice Chair of the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors, Sharon Speyer, is on the Board of Directors of the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, among other interested parties, including a banker.

Now the big question is, where is the money coming from for the rest of the “improvements,” “remodeling” and “reinstallation” for the newly planned “facelift” of the Toledo Museum of Art, as every gallery gets remodeled and painted white, and the recently renovated Cloister gallery gets disassembled and moved to the east, and new technologies get installed in every gallery, and all of the art gets shifted around and arranged chronologically? The Glass Pavilion, which cost $35 million to build in 2006, will be repurposed as the glass gets removed and scattered among the art in the main building arranged by date. What is it going to cost, and what will the museum have to do for that? Are they going to sell their soul, as they have already let the port authority claim “port authority facility” ownership to infiltrate the very air they breath? Do people need or want this radical change?

And the even bigger question is, how much great art that the public loves will fall through the cracks during this seismic shift?

Remember the sale of the three French Impressionist paintings for $62 million in 2022, and the promise for new art, which never happened. And then the removal of all the rest of the Impressionist paintings to a back room of the glass museum.

Art. think about it. Is it inevitable that the last bastion of freedom and independence and great wealth in Toledo, the freedom of art, will get gobbled up by the turkeys?

They just can’t seem to get enough.

Categories
Artists of Toledo

This Facebook post went viral before it was banned

I have a quiet little Facebook page titled “Toledo Now.”  Lately I’ve been posting about the doings of the Toledo art museum. My posts don’t go around that much, but I noticed a lot of activity on this post that I put up on November 16, going around many thousands of times! I saw that it had been shared on November 19 around 5pm (not by me) on a Facebook group called “Toledo Then and Now” which has 32,000 followers. This page states that it is run by AI. Apparently it stops the commenting after a period of time or activity, and when I first saw it, two hours after it was shared, the commenting had been stopped. But during that short time the post was shared many times and had inspired dozens of comments — each one expressed disappointment in the direction of the museum.

The photo is an architectural rendering provided by the museum to publicize their announcement of their selection of design partners for a major reinstallation project.

Two hours after it was posted, commenting has been turned off for this post.

Here are a few comments I was able to document  —

  • Horrible! We have one of the finest museums in the world. Keep it in the classic Grecian style.  (7 likes)
  • I agree. Don’t mess with perfection. 
  • THAT is hideous.
  • The museum was designed to mimic the Louvre in Paris. I hope this is a joke, it looks ugly and uninviting. The building itself is a work of art. If this is true, it could lead to a decline in visits and threaten the uniqueness of our museum.
  • Do you ever read about art restorations and upgrades and say, “What were they thinking?” We’re living in one of those.
  • No!
  • Apple store
  • Leave it alone keep it like it is don’t destroy the museum
  • Nooooo!
  • Cold and stark. Why the need to mess with the beautiful, classic style?
  • It looks like a mall.
  • It sure does.
  • Why???? Horrible. Feels like a hospital.
  • (crying emojis)
  • (mad face emoji)

The public comments on the shares remain on the Facebook pages of those who shared the post, with the actual post removed and the group’s banner replacing it, leaving all their comments out of context, but here are some of those comments —

  • Please god no
  • Wow, that is history they are messing with…how disappointing they would do that
  • man toledo be really pissing me the f— off
  • That’s terrible! A museum should reflect and honor the past.
  • It literally doesn’t need to change. That modern white is so ugly. They’re about to ruin one of my favorite places.
  • I hate the new design, will not go back, they are going to ruin the museum.
  • Wow I love when historical legacies with real beauty get removed to have a museum that looks like an apple store.
  • Use this money to fix the roads/schools, the art museum is beautiful the way it is

  • It looks so minimal eww

  • I’m pissed!
  • asf, ruins the whole vibe

  • Lookit this garbage they are tryna do to our art museum

  • They better not smh

  • Yeah they better not

  • NOT a fan (of the changes)!
  • Disgusting
  • if they do this will never go back fal@ don’t make the art museum look like a damn hospital plsss

  • Maaan
  • What the hell
  • It literally doesn’t need to change. That modern white is so ugly. They’re about to ruin one of my favorite places

  • Stupid
  • Ts take the history out the museum??

  • That’s terrible! A museum should reflect and honor the past.

  • I will actually sob uncontrollably

  • That looks so boring why would they want that??

The Blade asked me what I thought of the museum’s reinstallation plan, to include a quote for their news article, Toledo Museum of Art furthers reinstallation plans, which was published on November 21. I was looking forward to sharing the link with the group, but I wasn’t allowed to share it or anything else, and then I noticed that my post was removed! And I was censored!

Many people went to the trouble of posting their displeasure with the direction of the museum. Their voices were censored too.


Here’s my quote in the article that was published in The Blade:


And just to make my feelings perfectly clear

It should disgust the community that the museum sells its great paintings and diminishes its collection, after stopping its decades-long Saturday classes that brought together 2500 children from all over the city. It’s disgusting that the museum brands itself with the “community” buzzword after killing the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition. How patronizing it is to use the 2-mile radius of the museum as an excuse to rip apart the museum as if to make it more appealing to the neighborhood…… When all Adam Levine wants is attention from other museums so he can have a way out of Toledo, after spending a fortune giving the museum the wrecking ball. The museum never had to worry about its reputation before, because they truly were great, and now they are just running on fumes.


Adam Levine believes that the future of museums is screen-based. Should he really be at the helm of our museum today? Hmmm….
Categories
Artists of Toledo

The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition of 2024

Pondering prospects of the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition that was shamefully taken away from local artists in 2014

The irony is striking: over the past three years, the Toledo Museum of Art has introduced layers of new bureaucracy—hiring a “chief people officer,” a “belonging and community engagement” czar, and even establishing a “branding” department. Add to this a new position perpetually funded by the Conda family to ensure that a “director of access initiatives” is always on payroll. All these changes are made under the guise of fostering a caring, inclusive community museum.

Yet, just a decade ago, this same museum abruptly canceled the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, a long-standing tradition that enriched the city’s cultural landscape for nearly 100 years. The exhibition not only helped launch local artists’ careers but also provided a valuable platform for Toledo’s artistic community. Former museum director Brian Kennedy axed the tradition before he himself left town, and his successor, Adam Levine, appears more interested in making a name for himself nationally with his phony belonging mantra than in doing something real by restoring this local cultural treasure.

For a museum that once prided itself on being a national example of excellence, this shift in priorities to the director’s self-interest is despicable.

Reinstating the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition would genuinely foster the sense of belonging that the museum now claims to value. If the Brooklyn Museum’s recent revival of its local artist show after 20 years is any indication, perhaps Toledo will see the value in embracing its local talent once again. Until then, one can only hope that Toledo’s art community doesn’t have to wait another decade for its rightful place in the museum to be restored.

(For more background on the demise of the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, feel free to explore my numerous blog posts detailing its history and the museum’s decline.)

This weekend the Brooklyn Museum local artists show, which began in 1980 and ended in 2004, was revived with the opening of The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, of 2024.

Exuding community energy and a sense of belonging, the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition was pretty great. This piece, a beautiful sculptural dress made out of packets of hair weave, was created by Tinuade Oyelowo. It would make a great addition to the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art — because the museum likes artwork to talk to each other, and I can see this artwork in conversation with the 1893 Libbey glass-spun dress, or of course in the contemporary galleries.

Incidentally, along with adding all of the above-mentioned bureaucrats, the Toledo Museum carved out a new position for a contemporary art curator in 2021 hiring Jessica Hong, who is leaving already! Has the contemporary art curator position been eliminated? Will this institution in transition (hard to call it a museum anymore after they moved out the Impressionist paintings) hire a general “cultural worker” instead – that is, a worker who is merely “accountable to the idea of culture” with no art history degree necessary? After all, you don’t need a PhD to buy a burnt American flag to hang in the American gallery, as did Jessica Hong. Perhaps these days a genuinely educated art historian/art expert is passé, even superfluous for whatever it is that this bloated bureaucracy is trying to achieve.

Speaking of the bloated bureaucracy, it is interesting to note that Rhonda Sewell, who was initially hired in 2021 for the new post of “Belonging and Community Engagement Director” transitioned to another new bureaucratic museum post, that of “Director of Advocacy and External Affairs” in June 2023. This role is described as “forming and maintaining key relationships with legislators and policy makers at the local, state and federal levels.” Fascinating, since it was only a month before that the Ohio Attorney General embarked on an investigation of the Toledo Museum of Art regarding the circumstances surrounding the sale of three famous Impressionist paintings for $62 million in 2022 and the apparent breach of fiduciary duty by the trustees of the Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey endowments – the Libbeys being the museum founders. Ms. Sewell must have her work cut out for her.

Curiously, but not surprisingly, the short-lived position of “Belonging and Community Engagement Director” at the Toledo Museum of Art has been abandoned.

Stuffed with bureaucracy, but no meat on the bones.
Categories
Artists of Toledo

Toledo’s Unmuseum

The Glass Pavilion was built in 2006 to display the glass collection.
New at TMA: The Glass Pavilion as Dumping Ground

Toledo Museum of Art’s outstanding collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings have been moved to a back room gallery at the Glass Pavilion.

The Glass Pavilion, with its curved glass walls was built in 2006 to display the museum’s glass collection.

But since then, the leadership of the museum has completely changed. The new people, not from Toledo and with little if any experience running a museum, are having a field day “rebranding” the museum and selling off valuable paintings from the Impressionist collection. They act with no regard for the museum!

The Impressionist paintings hung in two front galleries of the museum — they were often the first galleries a visitor would go to. The famous French paintings, made by white men, had to go, regardless of how important they are to the history of art, and to the museum’s collection.

Islamic and Asian art, regardless of the importance of this collection to the museum, will occupy the former Impressionist galleries —  contemporary Asian art all the way back to ancient Asian art. Visitors can now contemplate the politics of looted art (which is also on view in the African collection in the opposite front gallery).

It was just last year that they took the American art from the American Galleries in the west wing that had been thusly funded by the Barbers, and moved it all to the back of the museum, shaming the art with controversial wall text.

The relocation of the popular paintings from the museum to the Glass Pavilion makes it hard for visitors with mobility issues to have equal access to artwork. Visitors must go down 26 steps to get to Monroe Street, then cross the four-lane busy street without a traffic light to follow a long curvy sidewalk leading to the Glass Pavilion. The  relocation contradicts the principles of the newly formed Access Initiatives Department. This issue exists, in spite of the new Conda Family Manager of Access Initiatives (the department manager’s salary being perpetually funded by an endowment from the Conda family).  How does the manager of Access Initiatives, Katie Shelley, justify her salary after she let that happen? She starred in a video, describing the long trek over to the Glass Pavilion, and blaming the historic museum for its lack of access – this – after the museum purposefully moved the paintings out of reach.

It seems that nobody running the museum these days cares about art, least of all the new donors like the Condas, and also the Savages (the namesake of the new “community gallery” which has proven to be an insult to local artists.) Donors of the past as well as board members used to be great art aficionados — check them out — but today’s museum board’s appreciation of art is questionable to say the least. The museum’s stellar reputation for being a great art museum is running on fumes.

How long before the Toledo Museum of Art is entirely dismantled? They work fast!

art is not mentioned in the museum’s new mission statement

The museum can’t stop spending money on surveys and branding and rebranding. Here are some quotes from the design firm, Scorpion Rose Studio, who designed the museum’s new spyglass logo, about how the museum came to them for branding because they wanted to look modern and inclusive.

We answered with a total rebrand, including strategy and a holistic design system, that will help TMA continue its journey toward the kind of modern museum they strive to be – one that has its doors open to all.

We grounded the rebrand on a strategic platform: The transformative power of art is for all of Toledo.

TMA’s previous brand voice – academic, critical, elite – created a barrier to expanding its audience to those who felt historically excluded.

B.S.!!

I took art classes at the museum for years. Everyone was included, no one felt unwelcome. Then two years ago, they hired a Brand Manager from Colorado for a new branding department who branded the museum “academic, critical, elite” to justify the “new” branding of being inclusive and welcoming – the very qualities the museum possessed from the beginning.

THE MUSEUM IS FREE FOR EVERYONE, THANKS TO THE FOUNDERS.

The Toledo Museum of Art was built on the principle of community.

November 1919 in front of the art museum: looks like inclusion to me.

a wicked opportunity

Adam Levine, who is from New York, came to our democratic museum in 2020 as the new director. He made a huge blunder right away by saying the museum should remain neutral during the George Floyd crisis. Ever since then he’s been bending over backwards, blaming the museum for being racist. He condescendingly reduced the standards of the museum, as if it is morally necessary to lower the quality to what he perceives to be the lowest common denominator. Is Adam Levine an opportunist?  Read this blog post from April 2022:

Covering the director’s memo mistake

Could all of this be a smokescreen for selling off our famous Impressionist paintings by Cezanne, Renoir and Matisse to private collectors — making $61 million on the three paintings in 2022? The woke quote floated by museum insiders in 2022 was, “Who cares about a few old white men?”

Three famous French Impressionist paintings – a Matisse, Renoir and Cezanne – thrown out the door of the white marble pillared museum and sold to the highest bidder, grossing $61 Million, on May 17, 2022.
“Museum-goers want to see themselves on the walls!”
In 2012 the museum came up with the bright idea to invite Toledoans to pose for a community portrait that would be a part of an exhibit in Gallery 1. Since then, most of the community has been crossed out, along with the Impressionist paintings.

With an engorged staff having been added for a new department for “Belonging” and another for “People” and another for “Access Initiatives” as well as for the “Branding” department, the museum started concentrating on the nearby black community exclusively, actually going personally to their door to get them to come to the new woke museum, all redone to what Adam Levine condescendingly thought would be to their liking. Now, what to do with those paintings by old white men? They have to go! Conveniently, the paintings are so valuable as well…

about being a good steward and having a fiduciary duty

Soon after the Ohio Attorney General’s investigation commenced, Adam Levine moved the Impressionist paintings across the street to the unlikely room in the Glass Pavilion. How very arrogant to appear so untouchably righteous.

Edward Drummond and Florence Libbey, the museum’s founders, would wonder, who are these people entrusted with their generous gift to the people of Toledo, and what do they think they are doing? And that is why the museum is being investigated by the Charitable Law Section of the Ohio Attorney General’s office.

“The superpower that an art museum has is when something goes up on the wall, it’s considered good. We set the cannon,” told the new Director of the Toledo Museum of Art, Adam Levine, to Forbes.com in 2022.

The Toledo Museum of Art makes their own art now.

Edward and Florence’s Wills

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Before they sold off masterpieces prominently on display

Our museum should not be a catalog for billionaires to add to their art collection at our expense.

The day I shot these photos, on October 13, 1979, I was teaching a children’s Saturday photo class. It took place under the stage of the Peristyle. We went up to the galleries, as Saturday classes often would.

This photo is of the center entrance of the museum. The first gallery a visitor would come to was that gallery in the upper left, and on view here, in the distance, is the famed Cezanne, The Glade, that Adam Levine sold at auction on May 17, 2022, touting it was necessary in order for diversity.

This is a student in my class. She’s taking her first photo — in it appears The Glade by Cezanne, which is right next to Renoir’s Bather, which was also sold off by Adam Levine.

This photo shows a diverse group of people in that very gallery — so why did Adam Levine think that the museum did not attract diversity? Is it because he was using diversity as a smokescreen for his outrageous sale of three French Impressionist paintings, two of which were bought with funds from the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment and were Libbey’s gift to to the people of Toledo, but Adam Levine took those proceeds and funded a separate private fund devoid of public scrutiny and against the wishes of the Libbeys — in the amount equal to that of the Libbey Fund?

Right next to the Cezanne and the Renoir paintings that Adam Levine sold is Renoir’s sculpture of a bather, shown here on the left. Adam Levine considered the painting of the bather by Renoir redundant and not necessary for the museum to keep, since they had the sculpture of the bather by Renoir. He said that the museum never intended to have more than one example of any one artist so therefore they sold the Renoir painting of the bather. Note the diverse group of children drawing on the floor in this room.

After leaving the first gallery, where the Cezanne and Renoir paintings were shown prominently, a visitor would enter the next gallery, where one of the first paintings in the gallery hanging on the right would be Henri Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait that Adam Levine also sold. Here, a visitor examines a sculpture by Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), Le Monument à Debussy, (in conversation with the Renoir sculpture in the first gallery) with the Matisse painting hanging in the background.

Important to the museum’s collection.

So that’s three very famous, highly valuable paintings that were prominently on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, showing that these were the first paintings out of hundred of works of art that a museum visitor would encounter. But in 2022, these highly valuable paintings were called redundant and mediocre by Adam Levine, and sold for “diversity,” supposedly.

Here are two young black men enjoying the museum. This was in 1979. The museum has always had a diverse audience. But now Director Adam Levine keeps careful head count, mapping and going out of his way to exploit diversity or is that just a cover for the unconscionable sales he made of the museum’s great artwork?

Here’s a shot of the photography classroom under the stage of the Peristyle. In the background, a student is drying his print on the ferrotyping drum.

Incidentally, the children’s Saturday photography classes have also disappeared.

Photography is such an interesting medium. How could I have known then, when I was taking these photographs, that they would have such meaning today?

43 years later, three important and significant paintings that were hanging in the museum’s main galleries would be shipped to Sotheby’s where the Cezanne and the Matisse would be sold to the same buyer, for $57 million, and all three, grossing $61 million, would duplicate the value of the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Fund, putting the money into a private fund, not subject to public scrutiny, and skirting past Libbey’s rules and wishes for the museum that the Libbeys began. Reducing the art collection and taking away Libbey’s legacy. Shame on Adam Levine and shame on each one of the museum board members and Libbey Endowment trustees for their total breach of fiduciary duty and loyalty to the Libbey Trust and to the Toledo Museum of Art.

We will never see the paintings on the museum walls again. But I have photos. And this story to tell.

(If you zoom in on the flash, you will see me there.)


I am hoping that the findings of the Charitable Law Section of the Ohio Attorney General, which has been investigating the museum and the Libbey Trust for about five months now, will be bringing justice to Libbey’s trust, to our museum, and to the people of Toledo. The Ohio Attorney General’s office has the power to find out who bought the paintings and under what circumstances. They can investigate all the inner workings of the board of directors and the trustees of the trust that let this happen. They can do a complete audit. Can Adam Levine and the trustees of the museum and the Libbey trust actually be allowed to transform Libbey’s endowment into private funds devoid of the restrictions of the Libbey Endowment?

Categories
Artists of Toledo

TMA’s disgraceful national review

Wow! Read this: Toledo Museum: A Treasure Trove of the Best – But chasing the diversity, equity, and belonging unicorn, it might derail itself 
And this:  Toledo Is Great on Glass but Disses American History – Its glass collection is superbly presented, but American art is trashed as ‘white supremacist’

The Toledo Museum of Art is getting national attention — but not in a good way. Unfortunately the unflattering critique by art critic, Brian T. Allen in the National Review is right-on. The museum is using its stellar collection to promote a trite, tired and divisive political point of view, reducing great art to the level of mere illustration, targeting the lowest common denominator. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

It’s missing a few points though…. like perhaps the museum has gone all out with their inclusion theme as a smokescreen to cover the bigger picture. They want us to look over here at their diversity theme and not follow the money. Like the questionable sudden selling of the museum’s three great Impressionist paintings for over 61 million dollars and starting a whole new unrestricted fund with it. Taking from Edward Drummond Libbey’s bequest and defying his rules. And who exactly bought TWO of these paintings? Hopefully the Ohio Attorney General, in their current investigation of the Libbey Endowment Trust funds, will uncover it all.

The mayor is a dope

Toledo’s mayor, in a dollop of snark and a show of ignorance, said the museum catered to “Florence Libbey types,” which means a high-society dame, the kind who wear a tiara to weed the orchid patch. It’s safe to say he’s a dope. The museum’s not a colony of the country club. It has cultivated a broad-based appeal and affection. And a mayor shouldn’t trash the thing that adds the most class and cachet to his city. Toledo, after all, isn’t the Paris of Ohio. – Brian T. Allen, Toledo Museum: A Treasure Trove of the Best, National Review

Yes, the mayor of Toledo, Wade Kapszukiewicz, is a dope. And it is safe to presume that this line of thinking was fed to him by the museum’s newly appointed “Brand” department and manager — a man who lives in Colorado! Once you trash the beginnings of the museum, and the Libbeys, and the museum’s history — a museum built by progressive founders who gave the gift of the museum to all of the people of Toledo — the exact opposite of the image that the mayor of Toledo is promoting — it’s easy enough to trash the art inside of it and whisk it away.

As they destroy the museum’s legacy, they can easily sell off the museum’s masterpieces. If they can get away with secretly selling valuable paintings that were purchased with funds from the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment, a publicly scrutinized trust fund, and move those assets into a secret private fund, or who knows what they do because the public no longer has access, they set a precedent and can keep doing it until the museum has no resemblance to the intentions of the founders.

If they were not going to buy art right away with the proceeds (as per the wishes of the Libbey trust) then why didn’t they simply put it back in the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Fund? I’ve read Libbey’s will in regard to the trust and there is absolutely nothing in it that would stop them from putting the money back into the endowment fund.

The wills of the Libbeys make it very easy for the Trustees to do what they think is best — but of course that freedom is predicated on the Trustees’ fiduciary duty. The Trustees are legally required to do their best to act in Libbeys’ stead, but it appears that they are breaching that trust. And they are dwindling the endowment away (check it out for yourself at the Lucas County courthouse — it’s public information) while the museum builds up a private fund. Is there a conflict of interest? Some of the same Trustees of the Libbey Trust are on the Board of Directors of the museum.

While they, to quote the article, cater relentlessly to Toledans living within a two-mile radius of the museum” and drag people from their homes to raise that percentage for what is, after all, an ego trip” (but never answer the emails of community members or respond to open letters on blogs, being the hypocrites they really are) they are actually stealing from the people of Toledo.

This happens because the mayor of Toledo, city council, museum board members, donors, members, etc., play along with them (after all, they go to the same parties and have the same lawyers) and they are all such dopes.

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Who bought our Cezanne, The Glade?

It was the gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

 A one-year anniversary look-back. 

Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey gave their money to fund and start the Toledo Museum of Art, and to keep it going with stipulations made in their wills and trusts. The museum sold paintings that the Libbey Endowment paid for and started a new fund equal to the amount of the Libbey Endowment that takes the Libbeys out of the equation. In theory, the Toledo Museum of Art has always been Edward and Florence Libbey’s creation and gift to the city of Toledo. The current “stewards” of the museum are breaking their fiduciary duty to the museum and to the city of Toledo.

One year ago today, on May 17th, our valuable French Impressionist painting, The Glade by Paul Cezanne was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $41.7 million, along with Matisse’s Fleurs ou Fleurs devant un portrait for $15.3 million, to the same mysterious buyer. Both of the paintings were bought with funds from the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment. Renoir’s Nu s’essuyant (Bather), was also sold at auction, for $2.7 million, possibly thrown in as a red herring.

Although the museum has recently spread the rumor that this painting had been in storage in the museum’s basement for a long time, this photo, above, is proof that it was not in the basement. On the left is a section of a photo that I took on October 27, 2021, and on the right is a Toledo Museum of Art-credited photo of Bob and Sue Savage with the painting on the wall behind them. The photo of the Savages was used in a press release in regard to their recent donation and was published in at least one newspaper in June 2021, this found online on the BG Independent News.

The current so-called “stewards” of our museum took the Cezanne painting right off the wall of Gallery 33 and shipped it to Sotheby’s. But it was an important painting. Cezanne is considered the father of modern art. It was one of the first paintings a person would see when they visited the Toledo Museum of Art.

We were told this:

The director, Adam Levine and the board members and other so-called museum “stewards” as well as an outside consultant took a vote as to which of the two Cezanne paintings that the museum owned they thought was the best, The Glade or Avenue at Chantilly. They all decided that Avenue at Chantilly was the best. So then they told us that the museum had never intended to have multiple examples of an artist, so they were selling The Glade, along with an “extra” Matisse, as well as the Renoir painting of the nude bather that was apparently too similar to the Renoir sculpture of the nude bather in their collection. Adam Levine told us that Edward Drummond Libbey would want them to get rid of the Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir because they were mediocre, invoking Libbey in this quote:

As Edward Drummond Libbey put it in 1912: “Let the multitudinous array of the mediocre be relegated to the past and in its place be found the highest quality, the best examples and the recognition of only those thoughts which will stand for all time.”

Announced only 38 days before the auction, Toledoans protested the sale. The Blade and the Los Angeles Times published editorials against the sale. The Blade wrote that it doesn’t make sense to deaccession the museum’s best paintings, and that as the museum represents Toledo, they shouldn’t be selling them. The Los Angeles Times wrote in authoritative detail that the deaccession was unconscionable. But it didn’t stop our museum “stewards,” because the museum had arranged with Sotheby’s for it to be a done deal. Our “stewards” stipulated the auctioned paintings to be “Guaranteed Property” with “Irrevocable Bids.” If the paintings didn’t sell, they became the property of Sotheby’s.

How important was our Cezanne?

It was very important. Here it is on the cover of Museum News after it was acquired in 1942, and the text.

Museum News March 1943 – download PDF here

ADDED TO THE LIBBEY COLLECTION

LANDSCAPE by Cezanne brings to the Toledo Museum the union of nature and an intellect especially attuned to it. Here is a man who worked always from fact and expanded it enormously by his understanding. When morning lights the southern wall of Gallery Twenty-four, The Glade admits us to its spell. Sit down for twenty minutes and enjoy it without effort or prejudice, as if pausing here to await a friend on a morning’s walk. Surely a simple landscape, this place where we choose to rest. Sunlight laps the warm earth at our feet; the low scrub flares into second-growth trees, none of them remarkable for size or majesty. Yet the place has elemental grandeur; this small area is instinct with sun and wind, the joy and sparkle, the grace and severity of life itself. Through to the left opens a little vista, made more intriguing by the slender tree that cuts our view. Trunks at the right have grown aslant toward the sunlight. Cezanne was deeply conscious of his “sensations in the presence of nature” and he is able to convey them to us in the surface sparkle of his brilliant brushwork and the solid foundations of form and space and volume that compose this world about us. These sapling trunks fling pyramids of foliage on the summer air. Between them pulses heat and light. Tree after tree separates itself from the mass and takes on individuality. Far to the left, the sun strikes the ruddy earth once more. The distance grows with contemplation.

Beside the Cezanne hangs a landscape by Monet, and we learn to see more truly if we compare the two, the Monet representing the high tide of Impressionist painting, and the Cezanne still Impressionist but with instinctive turn toward those more solid qualities which were to rebuild international art in our time. Monet’s objective was light and atmosphere, colors laid side by side, not mixed on a palette, but fused by our eyesight to more sparkling vivacity. Monet in this canvas shows more of heat and sun and shimmer, but the distance down The Glade is more firmly defined than are Monet’s miles across the bay to Antibes. Cezanne’s trees toss more solid form into the air than Monet cared to give to the very walls and towers of his city. Monet’s summer day is the gayer of the two, more lyric, not so epic as the Cezanne of darker majesty. Turn to the left of the Glade and you will see the work of Pissarro, with whom Cezanne painted the summers of 1873 and 1874 at Auvers. From this older French master stems Cezanne’s only recognizable heritage in art. From him he learned to look with care at the world before him and to be more aware of nature than introspective in his vision. Pissaro’s methods of painting were effective, flexible and assured, and Cezanne went on to develop them further into his own idiom.

Cezanne said, “I wish to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums.” He worked a lifetime from dawn to twilight to keep the light and atmosphere at their height yet give them a foundation of geometric forms, the solid structure of all things, set in resounding space. Volume and space were aims in some degree of most masters in the history of art, yet Cezanne unified these objectives and knit them into a single powerful restatement, from which derives much international art of our time. All artists today who emphasize three dimensions, all those who go deeper than decorative surfaces, all modern artists are somewhat different since Cezanne lived his years of unremitting work from 1873 to 1906. Some artists can only reflect the great; being devoid of creative gifts themselves, they add nothing of their own temperament. Other imaginations speak their own native dialect of the Cezanne language. None would have painted the same, had not this quiet, shy man lived before them. The Glade gains its form through Cezanne’s minute observation of color. His eye took in not only the local color inherent in an object, and the colors reflected upon it by surroundings, but the subtle changes of hue which shape for our eye the recession and turn of surfaces which enclose the volumes of reality. He pursues these manifold aims with innate simplicity and discretion. So interwoven is the resulting fabric of color, texture, volume, and space that no one aspect of the creation breaks through the grave composure of the whole. Minute and unremitting was his scrutiny of nature. Across the surface of his canvas flickers unceasing life compounded of transparent slender brushstrokes. Effects were built up, layer upon layer, hour after hour of slow contemplation, conviction, action. Often his brush was washed in turpentine between strokes to keep his color more exact and pure. Slow work and humble effort and absorbed devotion to nature filled his life to the exclusion of all but a few friends, his wife and affectionate son. From 1892 to 1896 he painted in the forest of Fontainebleau and along the river Marne. Some time he passed at Aix in Provence. As The Glade would seem to have been painted between these years, we are not sure of its exact locale. Perhaps near Aix or not far from Paris he found this clearing circled by rich green. Landscapes are frequent in his masterly production. A writer has compared his canvases with photographs of the scenes he chose to paint. He can see with striking clarity how much Cezanne’s vision simplified and reinforced the salient facts of nature. From her casual vegetation he developed a vast and solid structure of space, volumes, dramatic sequence of related objects.

Because of his methods of work, his exceedingly patient analysis of nature, this artist had need of equal patience in all his subjects. His great still life compositions are instinct with apples, bottles, clocks, fabrics whose complete lack of motion is but one step beyond the painter’s exceedingly slow method of painting them. His still lifes are among the most remarkable of all time. Resolute and personable, these inanimate objects take on a majestic finality which is the reward of his intellectual and sensitive perception and translation of a three-dimensional world into the two dimensions of the picture plane. His portraits are equally magnificent, forceful and direct. They are limited to the figures of friends, those relatives or devoted ones who could be asked for even a hundred and fifteen hours of unflinching quiet, as was Vollard. A village group sat absorbed by their cards day after day while Cezanne immortalized them as The Card Players. The nude attracted him throughout his life, but with slight success due to the hazards inherent in his dream of having large groups of unclothed models motionless for long periods outdoors in a provincial society. He was too sincere to paint them in the comfort of a studio and by imagination surround them with the light of heaven. Born to security beneath the rule of his most autocratic father, he was always assured of funds for a modest existence. Later inheritance brought him comparative wealth, but he continued a simple life, devoid of ornament. Sincere and shy, despite profound intelligence, he guarded his independence and in isolation dedicated himself to research in vision and paint. We learn the truth direct from the words of an artist and so can picture Cezanne profligate with paint, squeezing the luscious tubes of expensive colors and exclaiming, “ I paint as if I were Rothschild!” And, more seriously, “I live under the impact of sensations. I go ahead very slowly, as nature appears very complex to me and incessant effort is required. One must look at the model carefully and feel very exactly and then express oneself with distinction.”

Here is a little history from Sotheby’s website.
Paul Cézanne
1839 – 1906
Clairière (The Glade)

oil on canvas, 39 ½ by 32 in. 100.3 by 81.2 cm., Executed circa 1895.

Clairière (The Glade) is one of the largest landscapes Cézanne ever painted, measuring a meter in height. Recent scholarship by Walter Feilchenfeldt has brought a new focus to the significance of size in the artist’s paintings: “There is no question that an artist such as Cézanne chose the size of his canvases with deliberation. Though we will never be able to discover why he used different small sizes, he must have chosen the large ones with the intention of creating an important painting” (Walter Feilchenfeldt, By Appointment Only: Cézanne, Van Gogh and some Secrets of Art Dealing, New York, 2006, p. 237). Feilchenfeldt examines large-scale canvases of figures, still lifes and landscapes: “The most enlightening statistical outcome,” he writes, “is the evaluation of the large-size landscapes. They represent all of Cézanne’s motifs, with the exception of Jas de Bouffan and the Quarry of Bibémus, and are all to be considered among the artist’s masterpieces. There are only two early ones…. Of the remaining seventeen canvases, the majority group themselves by subject in twos, making us wonder if this was intended by the artist” (ibid., p. 240). The present work is paired with Sous-bois (see fig. 1), a part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Provenance
  • Baron Denys Cochin, Paris
    Ambroise Vollard, Paris (acquired on 26 October 1899)
    (possibly) Auguste Pellerin, Paris (acquired by March 1901)
    Emil Staub-Terlinden, Männedorf (acquired by 1923)
    Wildenstein Galleries, New York (acquired from the above in 1942)
    Acquired from the above in 1942 by the present owner
Literature
  • Fritz Burger, Cézanne und Hodler, Munich, 1913, pl. 104 (titled Waldlichtung)
  • Fritz Burger, Cézanne und Hodler. Einführung in die Probleme der Malerei der Gegenwart, Munich, 1918, pl. 109, illustrated (titled Waldlichtung)
  • Fritz Burger, Cézanne und Hodler, Munich, 1919, pl. 109, illustrated
  • Fritz Burger, Cézanne und Hodler, Munich, 1920, pl. 109, illustrated
  • “Vie de Cézanne” and ”Lettres de Cézanne,” L’Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d’esthétique, no. 2, 1920, p. 142, illustrated
  • Fritz Burger, Cézanne und Hodler, Munich, 1923, pl. 108, illustrated
  • René-Jean, “L’Art français dans une collection suisse: La Collection de M. Staub-Terlinden,” La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe, vol. 6, no. 8, August 1923, p. 472 (titled Sous bois) 
  • Pierre Courthion, “L’Art français dans les collections privées en Suisse (suite): La Collection Emile Staub,” L’Amour de l’art, vol. 7, no. 2, February 1926, pp. 42-43 and p. 40, illustrated (titled Paysage)
  • Lionello Venturi, Cézanne: Son Art, Son Oeuvre, Paris, 1936, no. 670, vol. I, p. 209, catalogued; vol. II, pl. 215, illustrated (titled Clarière and dated 1892-96)
  • Maximilien Gauthier,”L’Art français du XIXe siècle dans les collections suisses: une heure avec Charles Montag devant les chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture française réunis à la Galerie des ‘Beaux-Arts,'” Beaux-arts: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 285, 17 June 1938, p. 12
  • “Art News of America: Toledo’s Cézanne,” Art News, 15 April 1943, p. 6, illustrated (titled The Glade)
  • Abraham A. Davidson, “Toledo Acquires Fine Cézanne Landscape,” Art Digest, vol. 17, no. 16, 15 May 1943, p. 9, illustrated
  • Toledo Museum of Art, ed., Museum News, no. 101, March 1943, illustrated on the cover
  • Edward Alden Jewell, Paul Cézanne, New York, 1944, p. 20, illustrated (titled The Glade and dated circa 1892-94)
  • Molly Ohl Godwin, Master Works in the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, 1953, p. 32; p. 33, illustrated (titled The Glade)
  • Alfonso Gatto and Sandra Orienti, L’Opera completa di Cézanne, Milan, 1970, no. 689, p. 117, illustrated (titled Radura and dated 1892-96)
  • John Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne, A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1996, no. 814, vol. I, p. 58, illustrated in color and p. 490, catalogued; vol. II, p. 284, illustrated (titled Clarière and dated circa 1895)
  • Walter Feilchenfeldt, By Appointment Only: Cézanne, Van Gogh and some Secrets of Art Dealing, New York, 2006, p. 242, illustrated in color (titled The Glade and dated circa 1895)
  • Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jayne Warman and David Nash, “Clairière, c.1895 (FWN 302).” The Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings of Paul Cezanne: An Online CatalogueRaisonné https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/catalogue/entry.php?id=790 (accessed on April 1, 2022)
Exhibited
  • Basel, Kunsthalle, Paul Cézanne, 1936, no. 50 (titled Waldichtung and dated circa 1896)
  • Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Five Major Paintings by Paul Cézanne, 1936-37
  • Paris, Galerie de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, La Peinture française du XIXe sièce en Suisse, 1938, no. 11 (titled Clairière and dated circa 1892-96)  
  • Toledo Museum of Art and Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Spirit of Modern France, 1946-47, no. 55, illustrated
  • New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., A Loan Exhibition of Cézanne for the Benefit of the New York Infirmary, 1947, no. 55, p. 60, illustrated (titled Clarière and dated 1892-96)
  • Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, Six Centuries of Landscape, 1952, no. 56, n.p. (dated 1892-96)
  • New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc, Loan Exhibition: Cézanne, 1959, no. 41, n.p., illustrated (titled Clarière and dated 1892-96)
  • Vienna, Kunstforum and Zurich, Kunsthaus, Cézanne: Finished—Unfinished, 2000, no. 113, p. 334, illustrated in color (titled The Glade and dated circa 1895)
  • Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art and Aix-en-Provenance, Musée Granet, Cézanne in Provence, 2006, no. 145, p. 268, illustrated in color (titled Clearing and dated circa 1895)
  • Humelbaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Cézanne & Giacometti—Paths of Doubt, 2008, no. 42, p. 318, illustrated in color (titled Glade and dated circa 1895)
What the auction looked like at the moment of the winning bid on Cezanne’s The Glade, sold at auction on May 17, 2022 going for $41.7 million – same secret buyer also buying the Matisse for $15.3 million on the same night:


  • Who bought the paintings? Was it prearranged?
  • What happened to the money – money equal to the value of the Libbey Endowment?

The painting was deaccessioned because it was mediocre, at least that is what the museum “stewards” and “trustees” gave us as an excuse for them to take it off the museum’s wall and ship it to Sotheby’s. It was all done in secret. Makes one wonder that under these circumstances, since nobody gets to know anything, perhaps our museum could be used as a catalog for a wealthy buyer to arrange a purchase.

Former TMA director John Stanley, who serves on the art committee of the museum board of trustees, said he thought the deaccession was “a brilliant idea” when it was presented by Mr. Levine.  – The Blade, Controversy surrounds Toledo Museum of Art sale of three paintings by Jason Webber, May 16, 2022

Secrecy at this level is incredibly powerful. The stewards of the museum, with the very high level of trust and privilege given to them, have the responsibility to act within the founding principles of the Libbeys, and to not betray the museum by using Libbey assets to create a whole new fund without any of the rules and the public scrutiny and oversight required by the Libbey Endowments.

This painting, as shown above, meant a great deal to our museum. An issue of Museum News featured it on the cover. It was a big part of our story.

Decades later, for an entirely new set of “stewards” to treat it like crap is so disloyal. To spread it around that “people are sick of the paintings by tired old white men” is subversive and traitorous, not to mention divisive.

They were put in charge of caring for our museum and preserving our collection – it is not theirs to tear apart and sell off.

Lying about the quality of the painting and the number of artworks intended to be collected by one artist as a reason to deaccession an important masterpiece by Cezanne is dishonest and a breach of fiduciary duty.

The Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Trustees are negligent:
  • Why didn’t the Libbey Trustees put flowers on the graves of the Libbeys on Easter day this year, as required in the Florence Libbey endowment?
  • Why didn’t the Libbey Trustees get the Libbey Endowment Fund Account Statement filed with the Lucas County Probate Court on time this past year? They received a “Notice To Trustee of Failure to File an Account” from the Probate Court Judge.
  • Why is the balance of the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Account 20% less in value on June 30, 2022 than it was on July 1, 2021? Are they that bad with money, that the fund would drop in value by $12,000,000, when it never even grew during the high-flying pandemic years when stock portfolios at other museums increased quite a lot?
  • Why would the Trustees of the Trust allow the museum to take money from the sale of two paintings purchased from the Libbey Endowment Fund and not oversee that it was returned to the Libbey Endowment Fund until it was used to purchase art?
  • Isn’t it a conflict of interest for Libbey Endowment Trustees to also be on the Toledo Museum of Art Board of Directors?
  • Why did the Trustees file for a variance from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2022 to use money from the Trusts of both Edward and Florence Libbey that was required to be spent on artwork, to be spent on something else, claiming pandemic hardship, considering that Adam Levine announced in The Blade on March 26, 2023 that they had actually increased their budget by 20% during the past three years? If they could increase their budget by 20%, then they were dishonest about needing a variance due to Covid hardships. They also received $3,484,260 in Covid relief money which was disclosed on their public charity 990 tax filings.

Why didn’t the Toledo Museum of Art celebrate the 110th anniversary of opening of the museum on the first Monday the museum was ever opened, which was for Martin Luther King Day in 2022? They couldn’t manage to celebrate both? Or do they simply not care whatsoever about the museum?

Do the current “stewards” of the museum actually hate the museum? – Are they robbing the museum of assets in order to create an entirely different institution without any of its rules?

Are the current “stewards” of the museum and of the Libbey Endowment purposefully defying the intentions of the Libbeys, who started the museum and funded the museum throughout its history?

Why did the Toledo Museum of Art kick out the local artist community by taking away our once-proud Toledo Area Artists Exhibition that brought the entire community together?

Will the Toledo Museum of Art be selling more artwork and not be telling us?

Should the current “stewards” of the Toledo Museum of Art be allowed to sell off the artwork of the museum and funnel the money into a completely different fund – a new fund without any of the restrictions that the Libbey Trust has – restrictions that helped make the Toledo Museum of Art become what it is today? Don’t the Libbey Endowment trustees have a fiduciary duty to look out after the best interests and the intentions of the Libbeys for the museum, as put forth in the Libbey wills? How could they let this happen?

Is it fair that the Toledo Museum of Art gets grant money in the name of the Toledo Museum of Art for them to spend that money on only on a 2-mile radius for 12 afternoon art sessions for seniors averaging $9,998 for each session (my goodness!) instead of sharing that grant money and programs with the entire Toledo area community of seniors? Will the museum disclose exactly what they are spending the money on?

Categories
Artists of Toledo

Museum shrinking away from founders

The Toledo 2-Mile Radius Museum of Art

It’s Edward Drummond Libbey’s birthday today – he was born on April 17, 1854. Some people care – like the alumni of the high school named after Mr. Libbey that was torn down in 2012 and never replaced, and the runners of the “Florence Scott Libbey 419 Race” in honor of Edward Drummond Libbey’s wife. As for the Toledo Museum of Art, they stopped putting flowers on his grave, letting his memorial look terrible one week ago on Easter Sunday, a day that the museum is required to decorate the grave with flowers, as stipulated by the Florence Scott Libbey Endowment. (see my last post, No flowers for the Libbeys the year.)

Adam Levine’s recent guest editorial in The Blade

After my guest editorial in The Blade on March 18, where I showed that the museum is moving away from the wishes of the Libbeys, Adam Levine countered with his own editorial on March 26, “Museum growing on mission set by founders,” where he grasped to make connections with the founders – as if words, regardless of deeds, would make it so.

I found a lot of inconsistencies in his editorial. Here they are.

Comments on Adam Levine’s March 26, 2023 editorial

First of all, it was George Stevens’ wife, Nina Spalding Stevens, who instituted the art classes. At least give her that much credit. Nina and George ran the museum together. Yes, a woman was a partner in running our museum, way back in 1903. Imagine that.

Secondly, the adult classes back then in the beginning and through at least the 1970’s and 1980’s were quite extensive, nothing like we have now, and to say that they are “as we still know them” is just not true.

The museum let the richness of the adult art classes slip away when the university took over by hiring their own faculty in the 1990’s when moving to the new Gehry building that is attached to the museum. The adult population now has to pay a ridiculous tuition and unfair activity fees to take the university art classes. It’s a great disservice to the community. Over in the museum basement in the old school, there’s not much going on.

This is not true, I went to the University of Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design in the early 1970’s and my art classes were university credits.

My sister went to the University of Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art School of Design in the 1960’s and her art classes were university credits.

Many artists on this website had art classes at the museum that were applied to their University of Toledo BA degree, going back to the 1940’s, maybe earlier, such as Carroll Simms, LeMaxie Glover, Edith Franklin (who had her credits for her art classes in the 1940’s and 1950’s applied toward her degree in 1987, when she turned 65 and wanted to get her degree so she could teach. All she had to do was pay the extra amount to the university, as adults could take adult art classes at the museum in the past without being a university student, and it was cheaper. University students pay university tuition.)

Except that Adam Levine has shrunk it.

Again, Adam Levine invokes our great museum’s reach when he has actually shrunk the museum’s focus from a community of over a half a million down to a community of 18,000 people all within a small 2-mile radius, forsaking the larger community that is 36.111 times that in head count, from a number which reflects the museum’s local reach in their own words, noted in their 5-year strategic plan – “its 650,000-person metropolitan statistical area.” (see below)

The Libbey Endowment Trust variance

In the summer of 2020, the museum filed a petition with the Lucas County Probate Court for a temporary variance on the Edward Drummond Libbey Endowment Trust to use less than the trust-stipulated 50% of the annual draw on the purchases of art, on account of the economic hardship of the pandemic. They were granted, for two years, ending July 1, 2022, the use of $150,000 per year to be taken from the art purchase fund to be used on “direct care costs of art” instead of on buying art. And I am guessing they did the same thing with the Florence Scott Libbey Endowment Trust, as well.

So it seems contradictory that the museum was able to increase their budget by 20% during the past three years – years that they were claiming hardship and diverting art-purchase funds. And during this time they also sold three of our famous paintings for $59 million, claiming to want to spend it on new art. All it’s been spent on so far is a new financial vehicle that’s making money for financial people.

5-year plan said so

Also, this contradicts the statement in The Blade on March 9, 2021, reporting that the 5-year plan calls for decreasing the percentage the museum draws annually from the Libbey endowment —

The plan calls for financial changes that include increasing the budget from about $18 million to $20 million, and decreasing the percentage the museum draws annually from an endowment that founder Edward Drummond Libbey established for the museum upon his death in 1925.

over budget already, and it’s only been 2 years

Also, the increase in the budget two years ago was about 12%, but now he is saying the budget has increased by 20% — 8% more than the 5-year plan called for.

the remote control of the museum

Why do we have curators who live outside of Toledo? Adam Levine hired a consulting curator, Lanisa Kitchiner, for the museum’s African collection. Although the museum doesn’t mention it in their press release, she is the Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with an educational background in literature, African studies and politics, not art history.

Why did the museum hire a curator of ancient art, Carlos Picon, the director of the Colnaghi art gallery in New York, who is an ancient art dealer? Isn’t that a conflict of interest? 

What is going on that the Toledo Museum of Art is hiring people from out of town who do not live in Toledo, or even in Ohio, to run our museum remotely?

Why “rebrand” the museum?

Adam Levine started a brand-new department, Brand Strategy, to redefine our museum, hiring Gary Gonya, who lives in Colorado, as the director of the department. First, Adam Levine painted our museum as being somehow elitist if not downright white supremacist, (see, Blade article, June 2021) when it had always been a progressive, democratic museum for all of the people.

“Art museums…Elite. Erudite…but for many, the word ‘inaccessible’ must also be included on that list.”

“…their auras of excellence can deter the average citizen from feeling they are places to frequent, enjoy, and learn from without having a gold-embossed degree in one’s back pocket.”

“the art museum really is looked at as a place for the people on the river…”

“Mayor Kapszukiewicz said there historically has been a sense that the art museum was a place for the Florence Libbeys of the world. Mrs. Libbey was a patron of art married to Edward Drummond Libbey, the owner of Libbey Glass Co. and the art museum’s president from 1901–1925.”

Then Gary Gonya came in and said, “We will develop an inclusive brand voice and experience that inspires all people and awakens their connection to the deep human story we all share.” Art Matters, Winter/Spring 2022

Now Adam Levine harks back to the museum’s founders, claiming ownership of the museum’s progressive, democratic history.

It’s as if what they have done by discriminating against most of the people in the Toledo metropolitan area in favor of people who live in a small geographic area, and by selling our best paintings, isn’t actually a big break from the founding principles instead.

A new Communications Manager, a department which is now overseen by Brand Strategy, was hired at the museum who was living in Lansing Michigan. She appeared on TV saying that Toledoans want to see themselves on the walls. She wrote and edited a belated quarterly Art Matters Magazine in September 2022, and then after just a few months of museum employment, she left. There has not been another Art Matters Magazine since then.

TMA was greater when the budget was half as much

Even though they have added the Branding Department, a Chief People Officer and a Director of Belonging and Community Engagement and fully staffed these new departments, and even though they spend $3.6 million more this year than they did three years ago, the museum has not managed to continue the things that has made it great.

The School of Design made the museum great. The great Saturday Children’s Class program that was coordinated with the Board of Eduction to provide about 2,500 public school children (parochial school children too) with an extensive, full-school-year program of art classes is what made the museum great. Free at first, then nearly free.

The adult art class culture and community that the museum used to have made the museum great.

The annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition that brought together the region’s art community, that celebrated their creativity and made everyone feel part of it and welcome made the museum great.

Selling our valuable and historic art

It is so ironic that while expanding budgets and commandeering endowment fund art allocations for other uses, that Adam Levine took away perhaps the most important thing that made our museum great.

Adam Levine sold three of our world-class famous historical French Impressionist paintings that we had in our collection for a very long time. These paintings were a substantial part of the museum’s small but strong collection of French Impressionism. These paintings meant so much to our community, and people came from near and far to see them. They were very accessible. Cezanne is considered the father of modern painting.

The museum’s great art made our museum great.

Invoking Libbey to pass off a lie

Adam Levine took our Cezanne, The Glade, right off the wall and sold it for $41.7 million. He lied to us about the reason why he was doing that, saying that the painting was mediocre and Libbey would have wanted us to get rid of it, and that the museum never meant to have two examples of any one artist.

He embarrassed us to world by promising our other Cezanne to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Cezanne Exhibition taking place concurrently, which is documented full page in the show’s catalog as being in the show. Instead he sold our other Cezanne, The Glade, right off the wall, just two days after the opening of the important Cezanne Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Just wondering why the art acquisition numbers indicate that a lot more art was bought during that time? I saw a work with the number 2022.92. That would indicate it was the 92nd work bought in 2022. And he states here that they acquired only 75 works over 2 years. Did they buy and sell works to flip them, perhaps? Funny thought but with all the weirdness going on at the museum, I wouldn’t put it past them.

TMA has never not explored world art

The Toledo Museum of Art has always explored art of the entire world, it doesn’t need to raise budgets and hire more employees to do so. What the museum needs are art curators who are connoisseurs, not statistical survey satisfiers.

Unimpressive shows and few of them

I counted only five shows in 2022, and they were unimpressive. Two shows in the past two years were showing the restoration of artwork. The second show like this, in the fall of 2022, was used as a fundraiser to raise money for the restoration of certain pieces, which is funny because the restoration of art is what the Libbey variance of 2020 was about (“direct care of art”) – the museum received extra money for this use, yet there they are trying to get the public to pay for the restoration of the glass dress that represents the Libbeys themselves. The variance diverting Libbey’s money for the restoration of art was not even used to care for Libbey’s deeply important and meaningful legacy.

The shape of things to come

The coming show about extinct birds, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo is running an extra-long time for a show at a museum that claims to be working on bringing in repeat visitors – seven long months – from April 29 to Nov. 26. The show is not sponsored by the Libbey Endowment Fund. Instead, it’s sponsored by 8 different sponsors, including corporations, donors, foundations and the Ohio Arts Council: “Presenting sponsors Susan and Tom Palmer, Season sponsor ProMedica, Platinum sponsors Taylor Cadillac, the Rita B. Kern Foundation, and The Trumbull Family and Silver sponsor Dana Charitable Foundation. Additional support provided by the Ohio Arts Council and the Boeschenstein Family Foundation.” All those corporate sponsors, and still, the museum is charging $10 for non-members to see it.

Nearest neighbors being left out? a big lie

First of all, the museum is free and the doors are open. We can thank Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey for that. The museum has always welcomed everyone, since Day 1.

The museum’s 2021 5-year strategic plan puts TMA’s reach at 650,000 people for the Toledo Metropolitan area. Over the decade, they report having about 380,000 visitors per year.

The 2-mile radius is 12.57 square miles and the Toledo Metropolitan area is 240 square miles. So therefore, the 2-mile radius of the museum is only 5.24% of the museum’s Toledo Metropolitan area. 8% of the museum’s attendance from the 2-mile radius neighborhood is a lot more than 5.24%, and 14% is way more. So how have the “nearest neighbors” been left out?

“An active approach to community outreach not only increases the level of offsite programming, but in so doing, it allows TMA employees to create personal relationships and invite program participants individually to visit the Museum,” the plan reads. The Blade, March 9, 2021, Museum outlines 5-year plan of growth

All this effort the museum has recently made to hire more people (raising the museum’s budget by $3.6 million with public and private grants) to befriend and make personal relationships with a select area of their total reach, and to hand-hold these neighborhood people to get more to come to the museum, and to pass out free memberships (good for free parking and special shows) at the expense of all other visitors who are not members to which they raised the parking fee by 45%, has made the statistics grow to 14% for the visitors being from the 2-mile radius – a large percentage compared to the overall population of the museum’s reach – but are they accounting for less people coming from other areas? Is reducing the attendance of the other areas part of the plan too? Because they are absolutely leaving everyone else out.

A siphon and a funnel

It’s like a siphon of most of the former efforts the museum made for the entire community being funneled into one place – the 2-mile radius.

Closing museum on a Friday to dismantle the Great Gallery for a private party for themselves and the 2-mile radius

The museum was closed on a Friday in October 2021 to put on a private concert with John Legend that was supposedly for the kids in their outreach program but ended up being a private party for adults. Using the Great Gallery, where most of the Old Master paintings are displayed including the Peter Paul Rubens, they removed the paintings from the gallery walls, risking damage to the museum’s most valuable collection, and replaced them with contemporary paintings by black artists. Information was initially released that it would be for the neighborhood kids they are doing outreach for. However, it was reported in the Sojourners Truth newspaper after the concert that only 40 children attended, who came from the seven different “communities” within the 2-mile radius of the museum. Along with 400 adults who had a party for themselves. Printing a full-page photo of their private concert in the 2021 annual report, the museum asserted that the museum would be doing more private functions like this in the future.

Not very Libbey-like

Why would the museum close its doors to the public on a busy day to have a private party with the neighborhood? Why does the museum feel that the people from the neighborhood can’t relate to the great collection that the museum presently has? Isn’t that a supreme insult to people of the neighborhood? Or is it all just a smokescreen to sell off our great paintings?

Art-making experiences for seniors in the 2-mile radius only
siphoning $9,998 per art-making session

The Toledo Museum of Art just received a grant to give art lessons/art experiences to senior citizens in senior centers. See story in M-Living here: Toledo museum program takes art to older adults

The grant, for $119,916, from Michelson Philanthropy, “a pioneer in creative aging,” will be used to give a 6-session art program at two senior centers serving seniors in the special “2-mile radius” this summer, summer of 2023. That works out to be $9,993 for each art-making session.

There are many seniors all over the city of Toledo, many of them who have never been to the Toledo Museum of Art as well, and to isolate a small section of Toledo to pour $119,916 into 2 senior centers for just 12 art making sessions this summer is divisive, strange, and unbelievable. Toledo has 14 or so Senior Centers, and most of them are out of luck. Many people in their communities are feeling unwanted, isolated, lonely, poor and miserable. Survivors of the pandemic, but for what. To emerge into a world that literally doesn’t want them anymore.

we made you but now we decided to eliminate you

The museum made note in their 5-year strategic plan that they have way too many older educated white women. They don’t like us anymore, so I guess we have to sit the rest of our lifetime out.

How could the museum have known, when we were little children, educated at the museum’s Saturday classes and also having college classes at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design, that we would stay so interested in art when we would grow up – that we would enjoy going to the museum so much that it would make the Twenty-first Century museum director’s socio-economic and racially profiled and ageist statistics explode his mind? There are some people that don’t fit in to their new branding – also called, discrimination.

Adam Levine’s solution is to cut us out, just like he got rid of the French Impressionist paintings that skewed their art collection so male and so white.

Over the past decade the Museum has received, on average, 380,000 visits per year, which as a percentage of its 650,000-person metropolitan statistical area ranks it among the top five most visited art museums per capita, according to annual statistics from the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Though TMA can claim a history of executing on quality and community, this Museum, like so many others, has implemented its strategies in ways that have not been equally inclusive or equally accessible. Though TMA is known across the world for its outstanding collection, that collection reflects a Eurocentric view of the world. Likewise, the demographic attributes of those 380,000 annual visitors skew Caucasian, female, older, affluent, and highly educated. – TMA Strategic Plan 2021

Exactly WHAT strategies have not been inclusive or accessible? Our museum is NOT “like so many others.” Our museum has been collecting diverse art from the very beginning. For example the Henry Ossawa Tanner painting purchased in 1913, for just one example.

Nothing has ever stopped the museum from making diverse purchases. They have been buying quite a lot of non-European-type-non-white-male art for the past several decades. in fact, I made a survey of art acquired by the museum from 2017 to 2022, and it lines up pretty closely to U.S. Census statistics of nationality and race. See my survey here: The Artists of Toledo Report.

Are they going for full collection-wide parity? Are they not going to collect art by white men altogether?

Money and politics

Could it be that they are using the outreach program to politically organize the 2-mile area, using the neighborhood as a pet anthropological experiment?

Will their radicalism in our meek Midwest town that lets them do anything win them the fame they so desperately seek?

expanding? or pushing us over the edge?

The museum is leaving everyone else out. The museum has always been about art, but now it seems they have traded art for money and politics. Lots of grant money for the taking. They are doing focused outreach in this 2-mile radius area, which is what the Arts Commission had always done in the past.

The museum should be a museum. Let the arts commission be the arts commission.

Adam Levine is the steward of our museum, it is not his to remake. 

People come to the museum. It has art. It has education. It has a beautiful marble pillared building. It is a place for personal contemplation. It is not a place to be bullied. It is not a place to be beaten over the head with politics.

People who run the museum first and foremost must care for the art for future generations. They shouldn’t be selling it off. They shouldn’t be trying to make themselves famous at the expense of Toledoans. It’s ridiculous that they claim to want to remake our museum to set an example for all other museums to follow. As if to let them recreate our museum for the sake of their own notoriety among other museums would make us proud. Our museum was a great example for other museums from the beginning, but it never set out to make fame its priority. The art and the people of Toledo were always the museum’s priority, and should be now.

Our museum always used to welcome everyone and was fair to everyone. Our museum served everyone. Our museum never had to do surveys on the race or gender or income level of their visitors. Our museum never discriminated against people based on their zip code, but they love doing that now.

What George Stevens said in 1903

What would our founders think?

What do you think?

Categories
Artists of Toledo

No flowers for the Libbeys this year

I wrote a blog post last year on May 31 titled “Edward and Florence’s Wills.” I had gone to see their decorated graves that Memorial Day weekend, after reading their wills in the aftermath of the unconscionable sale of our three famous historical French Impressionist paintings. The whole premise of the post was how the new direction of the museum was moving away from the intentions that the Libbeys had for the museum.

https://artistsoftoledo.com/2022/05/31/edward-and-florences-wills/

At the end of the post I wrote this:

Why does the museum put flowers on the grave of the Libbeys, three times a year — on Easter Day, Memorial Day, and on November 13?

Because they have to – it’s in Florence Scott Libbey’s will. But I wonder, since Adam Levine and the museum trustees are making such swift and radical changes out from under the original intentions of the founders of our great, progressive museum  — calling our museum out for being somehow socially unjust, when our museum has been the most democratic and forward-thinking museum of them all, selling artwork gifted by the Libbeys to make a new acquisition endowment, just how long will the trustees be keeping those flowers going on that grave?

It didn’t take the museum long to forget about the Libbeys. Here are photos showing the state that the Libbey Memorial was in on Easter Day, 2023.

No flowers. The Libbey cemetery lot was a mess at high noon, with dead Christmas-decorated plants in broken plastic pots tipped over and strewn aside the monument, the monument itself stained with algae and dirt.

Before I left, when I was walking back to the road, I witnessed people walking by it, hearing their banter in the distance mentioning Libbey, because Libbey is famous and loved by Toledoans, and I watched the two women attempt to put the plastic broken pot upright on the steps of the monument.

I spoke to the man with the two women, who pointed out that the three cut glass orbs that were part of the monument, in front of it, were made from a process that Libbey Glass Company was known for. I hadn’t noticed that before, I thought they might have been lights at one time.

The responsible parties for keeping up the cemetery plot are the Trustees of the Trust (different from the trustees or directors of the museum, but they are interchangeable and at this time, two of them are on both of the boards — Elizabeth Brady and Deke Welles.)

That’s the kind of shambles our museum is in too. Pray for it.