A New Era Begins at the Norton Simon

The Norton Simon Museum was the place to be over the weekend, when hundreds of art professionals joined the museum’s members and supporters to celebrate the completion of the Pasadena institution’s $5-million renovation.

It still is.

Now that the refurbished galleries and redesigned sculpture gardens are open, the museum is much more inviting and the collection looks better than ever. And now that public hours have been extended--Wednesdays to Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.--it will be much easier for both local art lovers and tourists to visit the Simon.

Furthermore, the party isn’t over.

Opening celebrations, with free admission and a variety of activities, will continue Wednesday through Sunday. There will be gallery tours, garden walks and children’s storytelling sessions. Among other events, an inaugural reception for the public will be held Friday, from 6 to 9 p.m. and Pasadena’s Southwest Chamber Music will present a concert each day at 3 p.m.

The pace of public events will slow once the party actually is over, but there’s no looking back for the staff and trustees. Indeed, now that the museum has begun its new life, many plans are in the works to ensure that the Norton Simon will play a much more active role in the art community.

In an auspicious move late Friday afternoon, the museum’s board of trustees voted to renovate the long-closed auditorium. If work begins soon, as expected, the 350-seat facility will be ready for use by late spring, said Sara Campbell, the museum’s director of art.

The auditorium was used for programs from 1969 to ‘74, during the tenure of the financially troubled Pasadena Art Museum. In 1974, when Norton Simon took charge of the museum, he closed the auditorium, only using it briefly as a gallery space for extraordinarily large artworks, Campbell said.

She and curator Gloria Williams plan to use the refurbished auditorium for lectures, films and concerts related to the museum’s collection. “We can’t compete with the extensive programs of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but we can do something distinctive that makes sense in terms of our collection,” Williams said.

The first event probably will be a series of lectures on “Picasso: Graphic Magician,” an exhibition of 120 prints from the Norton Simon Museum’s collection that inaugurated the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University last spring and will appear at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio (Nov. 7-Jan. 16) before its April 13 opening in Pasadena. The exhibition is a first for the museum, as well. Although Simon ran an active program of traveling exhibitions from his collection in the early 1970s, “Picasso” is the first show circulated by the museum.

Those who see the show may be surprised that the Simon has so many Picasso prints, but it’s only a sampling of the museum’s 710-piece holding. “We have a substantial collection of Picasso’s graphics, one of the most substantial in the country, after the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” Williams said.

The auditorium also will be used to screen a new 30-minute film on Norton Simon, Campbell said. Narrated by actor Gregory Peck, the film was produced by Charles Guggenheim, who has won four Academy Awards for his documentaries and met Simon in 1970, when the late industrialist and collector was campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The film includes campaign footage and television coverage of a notorious 1965 London auction, when Simon purchased Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus--after the painting was sold to another bidder.

“We hope this will lead to a film series, since we will have facilities for that,” Campbell said. She and Williams are thinking of a thematic approach, perhaps focusing on primitivism, narratives or other themes that pertain to works in the museum’s collection.

Williams also hopes to organize an exhibition of still lifes that would cover a vast sweep of history and geography. It won’t happen soon because such a show would require rehanging much of the recently reinstalled collection, but it would also reveal one of the little-known strengths of the collection, she said. Meanwhile, the gallery that currently features works by Peter Paul Rubens probably will be changed every year or so to spotlight other artists.

Among other projects, the museum’s staff is working with the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Education Institute to produce an elementary school curriculum package on the Simon’s collection that will be available on the Internet early next year. In addition, Campbell hopes to publish a book on the new gardens, as a guide to the sculpture and plants, and to trace the history of the site.

An unexpected bonus of the renovation is that the museum is beginning to receive gifts of art from collectors, Campbell said. Dozens of Indian and Southeast Asian pieces have been donated to the museum by various collectors who have been encouraged by Pratapaditya Pal, a renowned scholar who supervised the new installation of the Asian holdings and is cataloging that portion of the collection.

Another new addition, “Flowers in a Vase,” a watercolor by German Expressionist Emil Nolde, came from local collectors E. Jack and Gerry B. Wilcox. Four Modern prints--”Tahiti,” “Kathedrale” and “Chapel in the Woods” by German American artist Lyonel Feininger and “Vue de Louveciennes” by French artist Maurice de Vlaminck from the collection of the late Grace Waser, a Pasadena resident and admirer of the museum--were donated by Waser’s family.

And what would Norton Simon make of his museum’s new look? “I think he would love it,” Campbell said. “Maybe it’s a coincidence that both of the areas that have been changed most dramatically--the gardens and the Asian galleries--feature sculpture, but sculpture was one of his great loves. Somehow we now have space to show sculpture in other galleries as well. Everything has been given its due in ways that weren’t possible before, and I just know he would be pleased with that.”

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* Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 449-6840. Wednesdays-Sundays, noon-6 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m. Admission: free through Sunday; thereafter, adults $6, seniors and students $3, children under 12 free.