Art: Toledo Selection

With the distinguished and discreet selectivity for which it is noted among U. S. art galleries, the Toledo Museum of Art last week acquired five paintings by contemporary U. S. painters, all of them well known. Bought before the paint was dry on it in Eugene Speicher’s studio at Woodstock, N. Y. was Blue Necklace, a quietly florid and sexual portrait of a girl in a pink bodice, one shoulder strap fallen, brooding over a letter held in her open lap. Others: a sentimental painting of a young girl sewing by Frederick C. Frieseke. a vivid luminosity with figure by Alexander Brook, a nude by Guy Pène du Bois and a swirling composition called Stampeding Bulls by Jon Corbino.

Twice before this summer had the Toledo Museum pounced on the sort of thing it wants. From a private English collection which had last shown it at the Royal Academy Exhibition of Old Masters in 1904, the Museum acquired Adoration oj the Child, painted about 1495 by Piero di Cosimo for Lorenzo de’ Medici. Notable for its luxuriant and microscopic detail and for the figure of the Child asleep. Piero’s own idea, that masterpiece was one of the few the Museum could lay its hands on that it considered worthy of hanging with such possessions as Filippo Lippi’s Madonna & Child, François Clouet’s Elizabeth of Valois. No less choice was the head of a Greek girl in Parian marble, 4th Century B.C., which the Museum snagged in June, The Boston Museum has the only other life-size fragment in the world which critics consider comparable in style, quality and period.

The Toledo Museum is housed in a long building of white marble and considerable magnificence on Monroe Street in the residential part of town. Its severely Hellenic design is carried through to the two new wings and the auditorium, which is called the “peristyle” and is a fairly exact reproduction of a Greek outdoor theatre. Detroit’s late symphony conductor. Ossip Gabrilowitsch, thought its acoustics unsurpassed in the U. S.. and Theatre Critic fohn Mason Brown shared the transports of classical scholars when it was opened in 1933. The Museum’s collection is as exceptional as its building. Both are the fruit of the artistic interests of Toledo’s late eminent glassmaker, Edward Drummond Libbey. He founded the Museum in 1901 and the endowment he left it on his death in 1925 is supposed to be anywhere from $15,000,000 to $20,000,000.

Director of the Museum since 1927 has been Blake-More Godwin, a tweedy executive who came to Toledo as curator in 1916 and personally designed the Museum’s Gothic Hall. Greying Mr. Godwin has been able to adhere with exemplary firmness to a policy of never accepting a bequest with any strings attached to it, never accepting any more of a private collection than he wants, and buying “only the best of its kind whether we like it personally or not.” By this standard Founder Libbey began and Mr. Godwin has continued to amass one of the best-balanced collections of art in the U. S. now ranking perhaps fifth among the nation’s museums.

In the vigor with which it has entered the life of the city around it, Toledo’s Museum has no equal. Last year 67,000 people attended lectures at Manhattan’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art. The attendance at the Toledo Museum’s lectures was 90,000. The number of visitors to the Museum last year was 350,996, including children. This figure is about 101% of Toledo’s population. According to Art Annual the next best showing of any art museum in the country was made by the Joslyn Memorial Museum in Omaha, Neb., with 49%. Director Godwin and his wife, Molly Ohl Godwin, have built up this following by offering free courses in drawing, painting and music to all the schoolchildren of Toledo, by bringing the best symphony orchestras for free concerts in the Museum’s peristyle, thus spending Founder Libbey’s money as much for the benefit of Toledo’s citizens as for the enrichment of their museum.