Toledo Museum: A Treasure Trove of the Best

But chasing the diversity, equity, and belonging unicorn, it might derail itself.

I hadn’t visited the Toledo Museum of Art in years. Shame on me. The collection there is splendid, with encyclopedic range and surprising depth. It’s on a lovely campus in the Old West End, a neighborhood of princely Victorian homes where Toledo’s movers and shakers once lived.

Toledo’s not the easiest place to access. It’s a 90-minute drive from Cleveland, but otherwise not near anything. Knowing this, the museum’s founders and subsequent leaders stewarded a self-contained palace of culture. Antiquities, American heavy hitters, Dutch and Italian Old Masters, Impressionism, and contemporary art bring the world to Toledo in a meaningful, satisfying way.

I spent the afternoon at the museum a couple of weeks ago. My visit was an odd experience and not what I expected. I expected glory and magic, and there’s some of this. But the more I saw, and the more I learn and intuit, I’m sad to say, the more uncomfortable I am with its direction. Toledo’s gone big on belonging. Art? Not so much.

First, the positive or, as we say in my little church — catering to Methodists and Congregationalists — the joys. The concerns — the bad news — will come later. The collection’s superb, and I’m not tacitly hedging it with “for a city like Toledo.” Lots of places have museums of very high quality, but Toledo struck gold in glass, or, more precisely, in the fortune and focus of the glass-making gazillionaire Edward Drummond Libbey and his wife, Florence. In 1901, the Libbeys and a few of their friends established a museum in theory — the place had no art and no home — “for the benefit of all the people of Toledo,” a phrase the museum’s masters seem to abuse.

By 1913, it had a perfectly proportioned, low, horizontal, Greek Revival museum building with 16 Ionic columns, a frieze of dynamic acanthus leaves, and a copper roof. Since then, it’s had a few additions, among them the Peristyle Theater, the city’s 1,750-seat concert hall.

A canopied museum parking lot in back, alas, leads to the functional space where most visitors enter. The lot looks as if it serves a train station. I didn’t find the old grand entrance hall until the end of my visit, when I left to cross the street to see the museum’s 2006 pavilion for its glass collection. The Greek Revival entrance, austere and low-slung, is a dazzler. A big, red Calder sculpture on the front lawn is like a snazzy brooch worn by a doyenne.

It’s no surprise that the museum, in Toledo and funded with Libbey money, should have a superlative glass collection. The pavilion itself, a low-lying glass box, complements the 1913 building in shape but nicely contrasts the opaque old pile in its transparency.

Going in through the back door, I wanted to see the American art first — my path took me through Toledo’s distinguished Dutch art galleries. I’d written about Frans Hals’s Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape, from 1625, when I saw it in an exhibition in Brussels. Winter Scene on a Canal, by Hendrick Avercamp, from 1615, is an enchanting village crowd picture on a day when its canals froze during the Little Ice Age. Rubens’s The Crowning of Saint Catherine, from 1631, is Flemish, not Dutch, but it’s also the best Rubens in America. Man in a Fur-Lined Coat is a late Rembrandt portrait that Toledo bought in 1977. It’s a lovely complement to Young Man with a Plumed Hat, from 1631, which the museum bought in 1926. He’s a dandy. The figure in Man in a Fur-Lined Coat is richer but older, wise and reserved rather than dashing.

The museum is famous for having bought often, big, and well. Half the draw from the Libbey endowments must be used for the acquisition of art. This might not be unique, but it’s both radical and smart. Over time, a museum’s collection, not shiny new buildings and not even exhibitions and catalogues, will make it an icon of civic pride and aesthetic rapture.

Toledo wasn’t — and isn’t — a big art-collecting town. The Frick, the Clark, and the Huntington were formed from single, stellar collections. Big-city museums such as the National Gallery in D.C., the Art Institute in Chicago, Boston’s MFA, and the Baltimore Museum of Art — I could go on and on — got lots of great local collections as gifts. Toledo acquired most of its art from the marketplace, one masterpiece at a time.

The museum has very good American things. Sanford Gifford’s Lake Nemi, from 1856, is the pinnacle of Luminist painting. Golden light never gets better. George Bellows’s The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island, from 1909, is the artist at his best, as is Winslow Homer’s Sunlight on the Coast, from 1890 — it looks like one of Homer’s moonlight pictures. It’s his first figureless, crashing-waves painting. As far as American art goes, Toledo bought one of everything. There’s a nice La Farge flower picture, a good Eakins portrait, and a Marsden Hartley abstract picture from 1915, when he was smitten by a German army officer and his regalia.

Many of the American things were scattered or not on view — you can’t show everything at once — and some were in Expanding Horizons: Character of a Nation, a temporary exhibition of works from the permanent collection. The show, which opened in March, is both lame and wretched. It’s hard to pull both off. I’ll write more about it on Saturday, but at least Cole’s Architect’s Dream, from 1840, was on view. It’s Cole’s fantastic, one-off tribute to architects generally and to Roman Revival and Gothic Revival architecture in particular.

Some of the American things were in another, new installation. It’s what I call a gotcha gallery, since almost all the art is there because there’s a link to slavery or to what the museum calls “overlooked people.” A John Smibert portrait from 1730 is dinged because its subject, a woman in Boston, sitting next to a small dog, was married to a man who owned slaves. Having yappy lapdogs is a sin.

John Greenwood, who painted another portrait, owned seven slaves. Henry Hope owned Benjamin West’s The Damsel and Orlando, from 1793, and “played a major part in the finances of the Dutch East Indies Company,” which was involved in the slave trade. And please don’t be a New York silver coffee pot from 1760, whatever you do. Silver was mined by slaves, and coffee was harvested by slaves.

I don’t know why John Singleton Copley’s Young Lady with a Bird and a Dog, from 1767, is there. The label faults Copley for creating “an impression of high social position by incorporating elements traditionally reserved for the British nobility, such as the column and draped curtain” — and, in her case, a pet parrot. The young Copley, then living in Boston, sent the picture to a London exhibition, where critics panned it, not because its subject was falsely la-di-da but because, as children go, she’s homely, not just homely but having a bad puss. Might be a mean girl. And homely she is. And then there’s a portrait of George Washington in the gallery. Shush, but did you know he owned slaves?

The art hangs on walls covered with nifty green, patterned period wallpaper, so the space looks nice. That said, what is the point of the gallery? Are we to feel remorse as we look at the art? Are we to despise the subject or owner? Are we to swear off silver? Or coffee? Are we to esteem Nancy Drew detective curators for getting guilty objects to spill the beans? These “gotcha” galleries are everywhere now. They’re small-minded and tiresome, dumb-downers, and they don’t have much, if anything, to do with the art. Why racialize everything? This isn’t why people are at the museum, looking at art.

According to its FY 2022 annual report, the museum spent $7 million on arts acquisitions in that year alone. I didn’t spend that much in all my years as a museum director, and Toledo has been spending big bucks at least since Libbey died in 1925. No wonder the collection’s, well, wonderful. I saw some fabulous things, too many to report, so I’ll filter them by my own taste, or when I said “wow” out loud.

Toledo owns Jacques-Louis David’s small-scale replica of the Louvre’s Oath of the Horatii, one of the great patriotic pictures of all time. It’s not life-size like the Louvre’s, but, at 51 by 65 inches, it’s big. Near it is Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau, from 1807. Gros was David’s best student, and Napoleon’s bloodbath is a lesson in the perils of twisted patriotism.

El Greco’s Agony in the Garden, from the late 1590s, is unique for its weird cocoons of ambiguous space. Toledo has a cloister gallery anchored by a 13th-century sculpted arcade from a defunct monastery in southern France. A column’s capital depicts demons with pitchforks and tongs tossing sinners into Hell via the jaws of a dragon. I like Last Judgment scenes — the gorier, the better.

Paul Crespin’s soup tureen and stand from 1740 is the pinnacle of English rococo silver, which is to be seen as sculpture. The tureen, a riot of fruits, flowers, and garlands, rests on the backs of two baby goats. In Greek mythology, a nanny goat suckled the baby Zeus. One of her horns became the first cornucopia and a symbol of abundance. The thing looks like a mountain of silver.

Nobody’s complaining about slave silver here. That’s only for American art and curators of American art. Curators of European art don’t diss their objects. And the tureen probably belonged to the Duke of Somerset. Patriarchy, patriarchy!

Francesco Primaticcio’s Ulysses and Penelope, from around 1560, was a shock. I didn’t know it was there. The picture depicts Ulysses — Odysseus in Greek myth and the Trojan War hero — in bed with his wife, Penelope, after, well, a very long business trip. They’re swapping stories, and what stories.

It’s a sexy picture but a grave one. This painting is based on a fresco series on The Odyssey that Primaticcio did at Fontainebleau for the French kings. He was from Mantua and a brilliant student of Giulio Romano. The room with his frescoes was demolished, alas, in 1739. Toledo’s painting suggests to us what was lost.

Joys accounted for, and now, in the tradition of my Vermont church, I’ll recount the concerns — also known as the bad news.

When I do institutional profiles, I look, of course, at art first and foremost, but I also read tax returns, strategic plans, annual reports, and collection handbooks. Antique I might be, but I know some of the directors and curators who are still vertical and worked with many of their predecessors.

The museum’s mission is sweet, simple, and good. “We strive to integrate art into the lives of people.” Its vision sounds a four-alarm fire. The museum will become “a model art museum in the United States for its commitment to quality and its culture of belonging.” Aiming to be a model art museum seems egotistical as well as a fool’s errand. Let’s face the music, and don’t ask me to dance. The museum is for Toledo, and it’s been getting good results. Its visitorship in 2019, the last normal year before the Covid lockdowns demolished habits, traditions, and much else, was 370,000. That’s a lot of visitors. If it wants to go national, the only worthwhile way to do it is through scholarship and exhibitions. “A culture of belonging” seems nebulous, touchy-feely, and unserious.

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.

I dug a bit more. The museum says its values are “diversity, community, innovation, and trust.” No, its values should be art, art, art, and art. “Diverse ideas emerge from a diverse team and engage diverse audiences” is its No. 1 value. “DEIA,” that’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, is “at the core of everything we do,” its Belonging Plan says.

Yes, it has a Belonging Plan. I’m surprised to hear and read so little about art, scholarship, joy, self-improvement, or, simply put, éclat.

There are four basic problems with the museum. First, its 2021–26 strategic plan pledges to cater relentlessly to Toledans living within a two-mile radius of the museum. It’s the Two-Mile Radius Museum now, I guess. I didn’t drive around the museum, but I suspect that, aside from the big Victorian homes in the museum’s neighborhood, the area within the two-mile radius is blighted and its residents are mostly black.

The museum surveys the living daylights out of its visitors. A nice visitor-services staffer surveyed me as I sat on a sofa in a gallery. I was probably the only Vermonter in the building that day, and possibly the only one in Toledo. It seems that 6 percent of the population from within the two-mile radius visits the museum, but this cohort is 14 percent of Toledo’s population. Bad, bad, bad.

Goodness, the museum’s free. People know it’s there and open to the public. There’s some marketing that can be done, but at some point, it becomes economically inefficient for the director and staff to drag people from their homes to raise that percentage for what is, after all, an ego trip. Put a water slide through the galleries. Visitorship will soar, but the museum’s a museum. I read the museum website’s education page. It already does a tremendous amount.

The second problem is that the museum has gone on a spending spree. In the last year or so, it has hired a chief branding and strategy officer, a high-price name for a marketing director. It also hired a new chief people-and-culture officer and a director of belonging and community. Will both try to make race and grievance the center of the museum experience, for staff and the visitors? I’m not sure. On the one hand, that’s what diversity, equity, and inclusion people do. That’s their business model.

On the other, these hires seem geared for PR and marketing. Why does a museum like Toledo put so much money into branding and marketing? Overall, given the strategy-making and policy content of these positions, I’d ask another basic question: What’s the director doing? The director sets the tone, culture, and strategy. He’s the public face of the museum. If he’s outsourcing this, what’s he doing with his time?

Third, belonging isn’t a false value. I was a museum director for years and worked to ensure that visitors felt welcomed, but I didn’t obsess over it. I had other things to do, like raising money, scholarship, teaching, and quality control, and my welcoming challenge was far worse than Toledo’s. My museum was on the grounds of Phillips Academy, a prestigious private school. Some people were never going to make the psychological leap to cross that boundary and venture onto campus. That’s life.

I watched the Toledo Museum’s annual report. I say “watched” because it’s mostly a video with interviews of big donors, staff, and a Toledo city councilman. “Belonging means you’re celebrated, not tolerated,” I heard. I watched all the interviews. Almost no one spoke about art.

The strategic plan defines “belonging” thusly:

Belonging is a sense of fitting in or feeling you’re a part of a group. It is the feeling of security, support, and acceptance that one is a member of a certain community. For people to feel like they belong, they need to arrive as they are and never feel as though they must change for the environment.

An art museum isn’t a community center. It’s not a club. It’s not just like home. It doesn’t exist to validate visitor vanity. An art museum mustn’t target the lowest common denominator. It’s an educational institution, a place for contemplation, and, of course, it collects art and cares for it and interprets it.

Third, as dazzling as the collection is, the galleries felt tired. Lousy lighting explains part of it, but the 1913 building looks in need of an overhaul. The website’s tired, too. I don’t expect or like bells and whistles, but Toledo’s is singularly unattractive.

Fourth an untoward chunk of the strategic plan concerns employee satisfaction. I’m all for employee satisfaction, but I’m a bottom-line person, and the bottom line is quality and production. Museums are nonprofits, so we can ask only so much, but in 30 years in the nonprofit museum world and, before that, the government, I was known, even notorious, for valuing work units. Employee satisfaction is an internal matter of modest interest to visitors if they have any interest in it at all.

I don’t know Adam Levine, the director since 2019. He created the monstrosity that’s the strategic plan. He has a Ph.D. and was a Rhodes Scholar. He was also once employed at the Toledo Museum as associate director in, strangely, the marketing department before leaving to direct the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla. Brian Kennedy, whom I like a lot, was the director before Levine. Don Bacigalupi was the director before him. I like him, too, as well as David Steadman, his predecessor. All focused on acquisitions and quality education programs. Now, under the current director and board, the place seems to be treading water, if not sinking in a swampy fad.

On Saturday I’ll write about Toledo’s new and inane American art exhibition and its lovely, important glass pavilion and collection. Quibbles aside, I loved my visit. For lovers of art, it’s a distinguished, must-visit place.