ARTS WATCH : Citizen Simon

Norton Simon, who died Thursday at his home in Bel-Air, came late to his love of art. But Southern California is the richer for the rare marriage of means and taste that this latecomer used to build an art collection scarcely equaled west of the Mississippi. Some collectors had more money than Simon. Some curators had more knowledge. But no one had a better combination of the two. Connoisseurs leave the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena astonished that a collection of such range and depth could have been assembled in so short a time.

But Norton Simon was more than just a wealthy aesthete. He did not open his collection to the public only after his death. He saw it as a public service from the beginning. In a wonderfully democratic touch, any visitor to the museum still receives, along with the admission ticket, a reproduction of one of the works in the collection.

The utter independence of mind that made Simon an inspired collector and a dogged champion of art for the people made him, at times, difficult to deal with. He was the classic self-made man; and when he turned his prodigious energies in this new direction, he did not trade in his old personality for a new one with smoother edges. But like the heroic Burghers of Calais who, in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, stand at the entrance to the museum, Simon was also a citizen willing to give freely for his fellow citizens.

The collection he assembled will remain to delight and instruct generations to come. As for the man himself, we shall not see his like again.