Toledo Is Great on Glass but Disses American History 

Its glass collection is superbly presented, but American art is trashed as ‘white supremacist.’

B efore I write about current exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art, I want to report on two conversations I had with curator friends who work at the Smithsonian. Last week, I wrote about the truly rancid inaugural exhibition at the temporary home of the Museum of the American Latino. I said that this in-the-works museum was a waste of money, some $700 million, which is mucho dinero. The topic’s too vast and nebulous and the cultures too disparate.

The exhibition purports to be about Latino history, but it’s fake history and entirely political. The Smithsonian, I also said, is already too big and unwieldy. Both friends told me that the Smithsonian doesn’t even want the museum, and it doesn’t want the new Women’s History Museum, either. A pandering Congress forced them on the Smithsonian, much as it forced the carbuncular Eisenhower Memorial, an aesthetic horror, on visitors and natives alike.

What Congress giveth, Congress can taketh. The House Appropriations Committee voted to nix spending for the Latino museum from next year’s budget. I hope the vote sticks. The museum will teach anger and resentment.

Back to Toledo. Expanding Horizons: The Evolving Character of a Nation is the new arrangement of American art at the Toledo Museum of Art. It opened in March and is scheduled to run until 2025, God help us, though even the curator says it’s “a work in progress.” Things will come and go. There’s no crime in emptying the space and starting over.

“American culture and history are filled with myths — stories that, while they may contain certain aspects of the truth, are not entirely true,” we read. “Why do certain stories — fictional or not — get depicted when others are erased or excluded?” we’re asked. A predictable, dull narrative ensues. It’s white supremacy, of course. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison owned slaves. Blacks were erased from our foundation stories and images. Words such as “founding fathers” and “discovery of America” get scare quotes.

Frederic Remington’s Indians Simulating Buffalo, from 1908, might be accurate but doesn’t show empathy, of all things. Remington once described an Apache as “a human brute” and a “perfect animal,” its label reads, prefaced in boldfaced letters by “Warning — Remington uses racist characterizations.” I’d use those same words to describe Stanley Kowalski with no slur against Polish Americans.

“Indigenous peoples are no longer in charge of what is imagined about them,” blares a quote on the wall, “and that means they can no longer freely imagine themselves as they once were and as they might become.” What does this mean? Whatever happened to individual agency? Why must imagination be solely a group activity? And “indigenous peoples” is a misleading term for a far-flung, disparate cohort, lumped, like the American Latino, into one group with one voice, and it better be the right voice.

Thomas Cole’s Architect’s Dream, from 1840, which is the cover image for the Toledo’s collection handbook, is faulted for appropriating Classical style as America’s own. And then there’s Columbus and genocide, which is a modern myth. The Pilgrims take it on the chin. The Nation of Islam is a religion of liberation.

It’s a very strange amalgam. There’s a small section on women artists, some Tiffany glass, and the lovely Disciples on the Sea, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, which prompts the curator to ask why his religious work is so little known. I consider Tanner first and foremost a religious painter, but the question, in the only moment of interest, is a good one.

Religious art isn’t a standard here in the U.S. The exhibition credits the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason as diminishing the demand for religion. American Protestants resisted graven images long before the Enlightenment. This lingered, though stained-glass windows in Episcopal and Presbyterian churches are packed with divinities. And Hudson River School painting is infused with religion but not direct about it and more of the ecumenical kind.

Is the show saying religion’s a myth? I don’t know. It’s unclear. The “cult of ideal womanhood,” the notion that women run the private sphere of life and men the public sphere, gets the hook but — news flash — this notion was by no means American-born and -bred. It was nearly universal.

There’s nothing daring about Expanding Horizons. None of the themes are new or original. It’s too text-heavy. The art’s a prop. With all the great works of American art in Toledo’s collection — wonderful things by Bellows, Whistler, Gifford, Fairfield Porter, Homer, Joseph Stella, Hopper, and so many others — why do this? I’d revel in these treasures and keep crappy paintings by Ben Shahn and Kehinde Wiley in the vault.

This is a very negative review, I know. It’s not because of Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of a Black Man in a World of Trouble, a bust of a black man painted on a singed, tattered American flag. That’s in the show. It’s a strong thing. The museum bought it a couple of years ago. Good art can sometimes make the viewer feel uncomfortable. It’s not because the exhibition doesn’t glorify America, either. All of these dings are well known, but what’s not strictly true is mostly on the margins. Who cares whether or not the Puritans actually wore black? Who cares if Columbus thought the New World was mostly vacant? He didn’t have a freakin’ drone.

Simply put, the exhibition’s trite. The museum wants to “broaden the narrative of history,” its strategic plan says. Please, do an Art for Art’s Sake exhibition. There would be no narrative. This would force the curators to focus on art rather than on art as illustration for tired, boring, irrelevant ideas, many of which are modern myths.

Now, on to Toledo’s glass collection and glass pavilion. Both are world-class but rarefied and thus not overrun. The glass pavilion, designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, opened in 2006 to house the museum’s vast, important collection of glass. Both building and collection are enchanting. With glass walls inside and out, the building’s quiet, even reticent, surrounded by old oak trees and deferential to the main museum building across the street. There, Ionic columns and a grand set of stairs to the front door signal uplift. The glass pavilion is quieter but no less serious.

Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife, Florence, founded and funded the museum from the fortune Libbey made from his glass factory, though Florence’s family was among Toledo’s richest. Edward, Toledo’s greatest philanthropist, wasn’t from there. What became the Libbey Glass Company started in East Cambridge, near Boston. Edward (1854–1925) moved what was his family business to Toledo in 1888 in response to Toledo’s financial inducements and a local supply of natural gas. Toledo, in effect, raided the company.

Libbey Glass — it’s had several names but this is the simplest — was consistently on the cutting edge of technology. It made bottles, light bulbs, and automotive glass but, on the decorative side, cut and engraved glass. At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, now best known for Judy Garland’s “Trolley Song,” Libbey Glass wowed the crowds by displaying 1,800 cut-glass objects in its booth. A massive cut-glass punch bowl with 24 matching cups would have knocked trolleys off their tracks. The set’s still the pinnacle of cut glass. The bowl alone weighs 134 pounds.

The Libbey presentation made the company nationally famous for art glass and launched Toledo as the Glass City. Edward himself assembled a serious glass collection both for his own pleasure and to educate his designers and craftsmen in the best that the past offered. His glass collection, which the museum has spectacularly augmented, is displayed in the glass pavilion.

It’s chronological, more or less, starting with ancient glass. Obviously, the art’s rare owing to glass’s fragility. Glass-making began in Mesopotamia around 2200 b.c. with small, colorful cast glass imitating gems. A pair of glass jars and a tube-shaped vase from around 1400 b.c. are Egyptian. Glass-making was, by then, far more sophisticated, with bigger forms and rich swirls of color. These were grave goods. Pharaohs, Nubians, Libyans, satraps, Romans, Turks, Kurds, Mamluks, and Napoleon came and went as these delicate things lived underground.

It’s an encyclopedic collection, with glass from every era. A pair of thick, cobalt-blue cups from 1752 was a collaboration between the glassmaker Thomas Betts and Thomas Heming, later George III’s court silversmith. Heming made the cups’ gilded silver mounts. A German Baroque glass goblet from around 1720 has an engraved frieze of dancing children. Its maker was likely trained as a gem cutter. There’s glass from Venice with filigree and stems as delicate as flowers, Tiffany stained glass, and contemporary glass. I love the monumental Chihuly chandelier from 1996. Chihuly designed it in collaboration with the Waterford Glass Factory in Ireland. The glass is colorless and refractive, with wild, abstract, engraved lines.

I focused on a school of American glass known as Sandwich glass, made by the Boston and Sandwich Glass Works from the 1830s through the 1860s. Other factories and other cities produced it, but it’s called Sandwich glass. This glass is among the earliest examples of high-quality, mass-produced goods and is typically American and offbeat. Dolphin- and tulip-shaped wares, bulbous forms, wild elliptical patterns, and rich colors make it gaudy and provincial on the one hand but bold and appealing on the other. The earliest glass has flint in it, which gives goblets a ping the sound of a bell.

The glass collection is about 6,000 objects. It’s online but difficult to search unless the user knows exactly what he’s seeking. The database is many, many pages and jumps arbitrarily among forms, makers, and eras.

The glass pavilion and glass collection together are unique in America and possibly the world. At the center of the pavilion is a glass furnace used to teach glassmaking to serious students and by artists to makes art glass. The museum does lots of experimental glass-making, too. The red glow of the furnace fire is an attractive touch, even on the sweltering day I visited.

Last year, the museum deaccessioned a modest Matisse and a Cézanne and a very nice late Renoir nude, using the money to bolster its acquisitions budget. The haul made about $60 million at Sotheby’s. Almost all museums sell art to buy art. The Cézanne was good enough, but Toledo already has a great and far better Cézanne, and the picture to which it bid bon voyage was very marketable. It went for $41 million.

While the museum has plenty of money for art-buying from bequests from both Edward and Florence Libbey, it wants to “broaden the horizon” of art in its collection. Now, assuming a 5 percent draw, it has $3 million more to spend each year. I think it wants to focus on African-American art, much of which is overpriced now, and art by women. In the last year, it bought The Seated II, by Wangechi Mutu, who I think is overrated, and Jeffrey Gibson’s She Walks Lightly, an Everlast punching bag decorated with sequins and jingles. Gibson’s hot, hot, hot now, having been selected a few weeks ago as the first Native American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. I’m not sure this object — or the artist — will stand the test of time, but I haven’t seen it. I think museums should buy more Native American art. Let’s focus on young, undiscovered artists. They need the career-building help, and their work’s priced to sell. The big names are overpriced.

It also bought a very beautiful Psalter made between 1400 and 1500 in what is now Ethiopia; it has sublime painted illustrations of Jesus, Mary, and a few saints. It’s an amalgam of Byzantine and sub-Saharan design.

The director, Adam Levine, is competent — most new directors aren’t — and he presents well. He’s spooked by these twisted times, among them the fake, grifting BLM riots in 2020, the Covid mass hysteria, the assault on high culture, and the fantasy that race explains everything. He’s new. He majored in art history and math at Dartmouth and got a Ph.D. at Oxford, which might be why he seems befuddled. I watched a couple of his videos. His long salutes to the Kickapoo Nation are silly. He’s trying to find a place in Toledo. Stay tuned.