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.
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.
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.
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.
