An Art Center Flowers

Norton Simon’s proposal to give his fabled art collection to UCLA is an act as generous as it is enlightened.

There are two significant advantages for Southern California:

--The gift will substantially strengthen the university’s fine-arts program.

--The terms of the gift will perpetuate the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, one of the jewels of fine arts in the nation.

The art that Simon has collected is, as our art critics have written, “the finest connoisseur’s compendium of Old Master, classic modern and rare Asian art put together by one person in recent decades.” The extraordinary exhibitions in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena demonstrate that fact.

This plan will also enable UCLA to have its own new museum, perhaps unrivaled among the university museums of the world in the value of the masterworks that it will contain.

Southern California can feel a special gratitude to Simon for resisting the temptation either to disperse the collection or to move substantial elements east. His museum in Pasadena attracts visitors from around the world. Under the new arrangements with the university, even more of his collection will come to public view.

This extraordinary gift coincides with other major events that are elevating fine arts in the area. Construction will commence soon on the J. Paul Getty Center in Brentwood, which will include yet another major museum. At the end of last year the new Museum of Contemporary Art opened in downtown Los Angeles and the Robert Anderson building for 20th-Century art was added to the lustrous facilities of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among the other rich resources are the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. A world art center is indeed flowering here.