Tag Archives: Ohio

The Toledo Museum of Art

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Libbey Inc.’s web site asserts that “the Libbey® brand name is one of the most recognized brand names in consumer housewares in the United States and among the leading brand names in glass tableware. Our products are sold in major retail channels of distribution in the United States and Canada, including mass merchants, department stores and specialty housewares stores.”

Maybe so. But I didn’t know about the Toledo-based glass giant until recently. Corning, I knew. But somehow not Libbey. So I wasn’t sure about the references I saw on Saturday to Libbey and the Libbey Foundation at the Toledo Museum of Art. Having no hand-held Internet access, I couldn’t check (and on the whole, that’s just as well). I guessed that maybe it had something to do with canned food.

Wrong company, wrong spelling, and in fact, Libby’s just a brand, not a company any more. The glass company notes: “Libbey has its roots in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the New England Glass Company which was founded in 1818. William L. Libbey took over the company in 1878 and renamed it the New England Glass Works, Wm. L. Libbey & Sons Props. In 1888, facing growing competition, Edward Drummond Libbey moved the company to Toledo, Ohio. The Northwest Ohio area offered abundant natural gas resources and access to large deposits of high-quality sand. Toledo also had a network of railroad and steamship lines, making it an ideal location for the company. In 1892, the name was changed to The Libbey Glass Company.”

Why is this important to the Toledo Museum of Art? Let the museum take it from here: “1901 — Edward Drummond Libbey, founder, is elected first president of the board of trustees of the newly founded Toledo Museum of Art. The Museum begins humbly with 120 charter members, temporary exhibitions in rented rooms in the Gardner Building in downtown Toledo, and no permanent art collection.”

By gar, if New York and Chicago and Pittsburgh and Cleveland could have first-rate art museums, so could Toledo. Libbey not only founded the museum, he lived long enough to donate a lot more money to it and set it on a course of expansion, including $1 million in his will in the 1920s, back when that meant fat Coolidge dollars. In our time, the museum holds about 30,000 items and has 35 galleries. It would easily be at home in a larger city.

Toledo Museum of Art, Aug 1, 2015Only this part looks like a museum of 100 years ago, with its Ionic columns and such (and in fact it was designed by Edward B. Green and Harry W. Wachter in 1912). Other structures forming the museum include newer designs by Frank Gehry — but without his trademark curls — and the postmodern Glass Pavilion by the Tokyo architects Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates.

All together, it’s the kind of museum that can’t reasonably be seen in one go. So we looked at things until we felt like we weren’t seeing them any more (ah, here’s another room with paintings on the wall…) To begin with, we took in a good bit of the more recent works. I recognized this artist right away.
Toledo Museum of Art“Beuys Voice” (1990) by Nam June Paik, which a sign told us is new to the museum. I saw a larger, but distinctly similar work of his, in Arkansas last year. I like the hat.

And of course it’s good to have a Henry Moore or two lying around (“Reclining Figure,” 1953-54).
Toledo Museum of ArtAnd a Frank Stella hanging around (“La Penna di hu,” finished in 2009).
Toledo Museum of ArtI rarely see artwork by Beninese artists. Never, that I can think of. This piece, “Made in Porto-Novo (MIP),” is by a fellow named Romuald Hazoume. It’s made of found objects — pieces of metal, mostly, stapled together — with sound coming from within.
Toledo Museum of ArtWe also spent time among paintings of recent and earlier centuries. These do not photograph so well at the hands of an amateur like me, but I did do some details. Such as the face from “Portait of a Freedom Fighter” (1984), Julian Schnabel.
Toledo Museum of Art“London Visitors” (1874), James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot.
Toledo Museum of ArtWe couldn’t leave with checking out the ancient art. Nice collection, including the likes of this second-century AD statue.
Toledo Museum of ArtAnd an 18th-century copy of “Laocoön and His Sons.”
Ahhhhhh!I made full use of the opportunity to tell Lilly the story of Laocoön calling out the Trojan Horse as, well, a Trojan Horse, throwing the spear, and being offed for his temerity by sea serpents, a circumstance that the Trojans fatally misinterpreted.

Even if there’s nothing else in Toledo worth seeing — and I know there is — the museum was definitely worth a few miles’ detour.

The Ann Arbor-Toledo Overnighter

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I can now, with complete confidence, tell the world I’ve been to Toledo. The one in Ohio, that is. As we crossed the Michigan-Ohio border late on Saturday morning, and the signs for Toledo were abundant, Lilly asked me about the name. It sounded familar, she said. I said it was the same as the city in Spain, except for pronunciation.

Ah, she answered with sudden recognition. We studied about places in Spain in Spanish class, and that was one of them, she said. Why is this town named after that one? Was there some connection?

None that I knew about, I answered. Someone in the settlement’s early days thought it would be a good name, and it stuck. There are North American towns with even less connection to their name-givers, such as every Canton. (According to the Canton, Ill. C of C, for instance, “the city was founded by Isaac Swan in 1825, he named it thus, from a notion he entertained that its location was the antipodes of Canton, China.”)

On Friday morning, Lilly and I set out for Ann Arbor, Mich. She’s entertaining the notion of applying to the University of Michigan, so we both thought this would a good thing to do. Since Ann Arbor is roughly five hours’ drive from metro Chicago, if traffic isn’t too bad, there and back on the same day wasn’t a reasonable option.

So we timed the drive to get a look at campus and environs on Friday afternoon, both on foot and in the car. The central campus is large and pleasantly collegiate. Sidewalks and green grass repose under mature trees in full summer green, and among buildings mostly dating from before modernism. Ivy on some of the walls inspired a discussion about just exactly what people talk about when they talk about the Ivy League. Any school can grow ivy, I told Lilly, but only a few are in the Ivy League (most of which I could name, but not all). Yet there are plenty of other schools just as good as the Ivies.

The campus wasn’t overly crowded, it being summer, but it was well enough populated. I’d been there before, but it was more than 10 years ago, maybe as long ago as 1999, to attend a real estate conference that the university holds every fall. I went at least twice, but digging through my papers to figure out just when is more trouble that I care to take.

One on of those visits, I got a good look at campus, including the of U-M Museum of Art, which had the virtue of being open and being free. Nice collection, too, as I dimly recall. I’ve read that the museum’s expanded significantly in more recent years. We arrived too late to see that or the intriguing-sounding Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments (which has the first commercial Moog synthesizer, among other things), or the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Actually we were too tired for that last one, open till sunset, which is quite late this time of the year in the western part of the Eastern Time Zone.

What’s Toledo got to do with this? Toledo’s only a short drive south of Ann Arbor, and I determined that it was barely out of our way in returning home. So as trip organizer, I tacked on a few hours in Toledo on Saturday. Why did I want to go? It’s a distinctive place I’d never been — not counting driving by a few times — yet not really that far away. That’s almost all the encouragement I needed, since that’s the way I think. Also, I’d read that the Toledo Museum of Art is first-rate. And so it is, accessible for a nominal fee: $5 to park. Otherwise, no admission. Behemoth art museums in certain larger cities could learn a thing or two from that.

Quantill’s Graves

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Odd discovery for the day: the remains of William Quantrill seem to be buried in two different places. I was looking at the Wiki page devoted to the notorious raider and noticed, without apparent explanation, pictures of two gravestones for the man, one in Ohio, another in Missouri.

I looked into the subject a little further and this article has some explanation of it. Through a series of convoluted acts of skullduggery on the part of his mother and others, parts of Quantrill ended up in two different places, one close to where he grew up, the other close to where he made his name.

Reminds me of the two gravesites for Daniel Boone, but in that case there’s a dispute about where all of his mortal remain are – Kentucky or Missouri. In Quantrill’s case, the two states seem to have divvied up the distinction of having his final resting place.