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Visitors to the Toledo Museum of Art sit in in front of the 1771 painting, ‘Hester, Countess of Sussex, and Her Daughter,’ by Thomas Gainsborough. at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo on Tuesday, June 23, 2020.
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Crown jewel reopens

THE BLADE/KURT STEISS

Crown jewel reopens

The reopening of the Toledo Museum of Art is a boon to art lovers locally and beyond. While visits will be a bit different during the coronavirus age, the museum remains a place of beauty and solace.

If you are a regular visitor, make an appointment and become once again familiar with the amazing artwork at this world-class museum. If you have never visited the museum, you are missing out. It is a true treasure and its collections outshine, in height and depth, the collections of many museums in many larger cities.

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Happily, the museum is free — yes, free. In many cities you’d pay a sometimes hefty entry fee to see such a collection of art from Old Masters to visiting exhibits by living artists.

Jay Colburn, of Mount Vernon, Ohio, left, and his granddaughter, Lily Morrow, 14, of Berrien Springs, Mich., look around in the European Renaissance gallery at the Toledo Museum of Art.
Roberta Gedert
Toledo Museum of Art opens to visitors

The museum is open to all, all of us from Toledo and beyond, no matter what our resources or our backgrounds may be.

The museum was recently swept up in a political controversy, that says more about our fraught times than the museum’s direction. The museum’s new director, Adam Levine, made comments in a memo to staff in which he emphasized the nonpartisan nature of museums. In normal times this would be an inoffensive and mostly undisputed statement. Instead it was reinterpreted as insensitive to the current national debate on race. Anyone who knows Mr. Levine knows he is a gifted fellow sensitive to all people and all situations.

While art and politics do intersect at times, art has to be larger than the politics of the moment. Art is transcendent. Politics is not, though occasionally the words of public figures, like Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., rise to the level of the poet.

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And while museums should note the moment, as best they can, whenever they can, in all its plurality and confusion, as the Toledo Museum of Art often does, they must by definition take the long view. The abiding mission of an art museum must be to offer the public works of art which are somehow “great,” and speak deeply to the nobility and tragedy of the human experience. Many are timeless. Some are from their own time.

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 are two works that began as the latter and are now recognized as the former.

Mr. Levine wisely said: Watch what we do, going forward.

Toledo has many jewels. The Toledo Museum of Art is the crown jewel. Let us celebrate it and enjoy it.

First Published July 1, 2020, 4:00 a.m.

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Visitors to the Toledo Museum of Art sit in in front of the 1771 painting, ‘Hester, Countess of Sussex, and Her Daughter,’ by Thomas Gainsborough. at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo on Tuesday, June 23, 2020.  (THE BLADE/KURT STEISS)  Buy Image
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