Founded by Robinson Locke, a prominent member of the Tile Club and one of the founders of the Toledo Museum of Art, the Toledo Art Loan Association organized exhibitions and donated proceeds to charitable foundations.

The 1898 Toledo Art Loan Exhibition involved leading Toledo art collectors and patrons, including Arthur Secor, Solon O. Richardson, W.A. Gosline, A.L. Spitzer, Carl Spitzer, Clarence Brown, F.B. Shoemaker, and Edward Drummond Libbey. General Celian Milo Spitzer, the co-founder of the investment bank Spitzer and Company, lent 43 paintings from his collection to the exhibition. Among these were four works by Leopold Schmutzler, the Austrian artist who would rise in artistic prominence during the years of the Third Reich as an open supporter of the Nazi Regime and whose paintings were exhibited at the Great German Exhibitions held between 1937 and 1944 in Munich. One of the works exhibited at the 1898 Toledo Art Loan Exhibition, Flower Girl, hangs today in the entrance of the Toledo Club. Most likely gifted to the club by the Spitzer family (its precise acquisition history is not known), the painting features a maiden, dressed in fine garments and surrounded by blooming flowers, who tilts her smiling gaze to the viewer. While the painting’s subject is relatively benign and the work’s local historical significance is recognized, the artist’s clear historical associations with a regime that promoted genocide and other severe human rights violations makes such prominent placement in one of Toledo’s elite institutions problematic and thus is worthy of further reflection.

​

–Allie Terry-Fritsch, Bowling Green State University

​

Sources:

Edward Drummond Libbey, American Glassmaker, p. 114

Shirley Levy, “The Toledo Art Club Art Collection: Leopold Schmutzler (1864-1941),” The Toledo Club Newsletter (April 2013): pp.14-17.