A Gem Loses Its Rough Edges

Have you heard? Los Angeles gets a new art museum this week. The collection is amazing: Renaissance, Old Master and Modern paintings, including breathtaking examples by a wide range of stellar artists; exquisite sculpture from South Asia, shown to remarkable advantage; a display of 14 paintings and pastels by Edgar Degas, plus 36 bronzes posthumously cast directly from his original waxes. Even a room largely dedicated to some fine examples of postwar art made in L.A.

“New” might initially seem an incorrect characterization for the Norton Simon Museum, since it has stood at the corner of Colorado and Orange Grove boulevards in Pasadena going on 25 years. But a lovely and comprehensive renovation of the exhibition galleries, which will be formally celebrated during a week of free admission beginning Saturday, accomplishes something unexpected: The 12,000-piece collection--which is the preeminent art collection in the West--feels renewed, refreshed and dramatically repositioned. The new setting begins to transform an institution that has always seemed oddly elusive, making it into something durable and robust.

Like every member of L.A.’s far-flung art public, not to mention those from around the world who travel here, I’ve been going to the Simon Museum for years. Always, I found myself surprised--as if discovering for the first time works of art that I knew full well were there but had somehow let slip from my memory bank.

Everyone knows that the stark but limpid “Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose” by Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664) is among the Simon’s most prized and celebrated possessions--a signature work for the museum. Why, then, did I always forget that it’s also the best of four strong and accomplished pictures by the artist that hang there?

Why was I always startled when I came around the corner and stumbled on the bustling vortex of sharp, faceted color that is “The Traveler,” painted in 1915 on the brink of an explosive social and artistic revolution by the great Russian avant-gardist Liubov Popova (1889-1924)?

How could I not have noticed before the otherworldly lushness of the two ample still lifes--full-fledged portraits of flowers, really--by Ambrosius Bosschaert, the Elder (1573-1621), achieved through translucent layers of colored glaze? Haven’t they always been there?

Surely the museum must have been hiding that unbelievably sophisticated schist sculpture of a princely Bodhisattva, carved by an unknown Pakistani artist sometime in the second or third century. I would not have forgotten that!

And I hadn’t, really. It was just that the great collection always seemed somehow unmoored in my brain. On every visit to the Simon I instinctively made a habit of searching out the erotic little panel painting by French sensualist Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a tiny picture that shows a voluptuous young girl reclining on a puffy cloud of white sheets before a velvety brown background. The dreamy Watteau became my talisman, a small but steady anchor for what otherwise always felt like an evanescent, almost ephemeral collection.

Finally, though, the Starship Simon has landed. The redesign of the galleries and the reinstallation of the paintings and sculptures have--for the first time--given the 85,000-square-foot museum a gravity, density and sense of epicurean visual delight commensurate to the collection’s stature. It isn’t lavish (the budget was a tidy $5 million), just luxuriously sensitive. This is a design keyed to gently massaging a visitor’s perceptual antennae, making for a wonderful fit between art and setting.

And why not? The architect for the project was Frank O. Gehry, a former Simon trustee and a designer who knows a thing or two about art and art museums.

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The building that houses the Simon Museum was notoriously bad from the beginning. Designed in 1967 by the firm of Ladd & Kelsey as a new home for the old Pasadena Art Museum, it had little to recommend it.

Given a floor plan like the letter H, galleries tended to be configured like long hallways leading to dead ends. Walls of glass on the interior courtyards let in natural daylight--but from the side, where it raked across rooms and reflected off the surfaces of paintings. The corners in many rooms were curved, which limited usable wall space while unhelpfully urging your eye to slip right by. Downstairs, on the lower level of the north wing, was little more than a confused and uninviting warren of corridors and rooms.

Gehry’s renovation plan is sensible and simple. Spend a while and you will see: Surfaces emerge as critical to the design, as befits a setting dedicated to the carved, cast or painted surfaces of traditional works of art.

Gone are the interior glass walls upstairs--save for those in the dramatic entry court, which is exquisitely dominated by a monumental Buddhist sculpture, and where the glass allows an orienting view out into the newly configured garden. Skylights have instead been introduced wherever possible, inviting filtered natural light from above.

Hallways have been transformed into rooms. Curved corners have been replaced by square ones. Dark floors have been supplanted by light oak, buff-colored stone or soft carpet. Benches and other simple seating arrangements are abundant.

Corridors once leading to dead ends now feel like classical enfilades that arrive at important destinations: Gauriento di Arpo’s great “Coronation of the Virgin” altarpiece (1344); Tiepolo’s spun-sugar ceiling confection showing personifications of virtue and nobility triumphing over ignorance (1740-50); Manet’s brushy portrait of an urban ragpicker as a weary philosopher for the modern world (1865-69); and, finally, a poignant suite of progressively abstracted portrait heads by Alexei Jawlensky (1864-1941), who transformed the visual language of traditional Russian icons into a modern Expressionist idiom.

In articulating rooms and reordering space Gehry has employed a traditional Beaux Arts architectural vocabulary, whose refinement was coincident with the 19th century efflorescence of the European idea of public art museums. Here, however, it’s spoken in a sleekly modern dialect. The feeling at the Simon is one of processional formality, softened by a judicious selection of casually sensual materials, a rich palette and the periodic introduction of natural light.

Perhaps the greatest revelation occurs downstairs, in quietly dramatic galleries devoted to sculpture from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In place of the old “suburban modern” floating staircase, a walled spiral stair (like a nautilus shell) capped by a circular skylight overhead creates a gently magical portal inviting visitors into the lower galleries. Sometimes clad in stone, and with a canopied glass wall opening onto a lushly planted hillside, the spaces feel cool and almost temple-like, yet without any trace of pastiche. Simon’s stunningly beautiful collection of Asian bronzes and stone carvings fairly sings.

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Among the more remarkable features of the renovation is the choice of wall colors. Often buff-colored to harmonize with the stone and wood floors, it’s frequently given visual depth through the addition of tints--emerald, violet, gold and more. The effect is unobtrusive but essential to providing a quiet richness for the setting.

Outside, between the northwest and southwest wings, what was once a rectangular reflecting pool surrounded by lawn has been replaced with an irregularly shaped lily pond and a planted garden with split-stone pedestals for sculpture; the inviting design is by Nancy Goslee Power. Her garden, still being installed on the day of my visit, completes a newly coherent reversal. Before, the outdoors was a formal space, the curved rooms of the museum interior an organic one. Now the galleries are more formally articulated, the garden a restfully meandering delight.

The new display has two significant drawbacks. One is the omnipresent glazing of pictures.

Putting paintings behind glass has become a common practice at art museums, and while the concern for security is certainly understandable (if perhaps overstated) the practice is a shame. Even non-reflective glass creates a subtle barrier between your eye and the all-important surface of, say, Raphael’s limpid “Madonna and Child” or Dieric Bouts’ brittle yet luminous “Resurrection,” where unobstructed visual intercourse is the ideal. The attentiveness to sensuous surfaces in Gehry’s design attunes you to looking at art, but it also heightens awareness of those blasted glass barriers.

The second disappointment is a rise in admission price--to $6. The museum’s hours have been expanded through the addition of another day (Wednesday), and the welcome decision to stay open until 9 on Friday evenings could tie the museum more closely into the lively revival of Old Town Pasadena down the street, where Friday night has begun to seem like New Year’s Eve at Times Square. But was a 50% hike in ticket costs truly necessary?

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Overall, the renovation has allowed for a more sensible and coherent installation of the Simon paintings and sculptures. In addition to the new rooms downstairs for Indian, Cambodian and other Southeast Asian art, the upstairs galleries now follow an easy chronology: Europe’s 14th through 18th centuries in the north wing, 19th century and Modern art in the south. A small but serviceable gallery for temporary exhibitions has been carved out on the lower floor, while a room beyond displays work from the museum’s original incarnation as the Pasadena Art Museum.

The tangled tale of the late Norton Simon’s 1974 takeover of the financially collapsed Pasadena Museum as a venue for his own expanding collection does not need to be recounted here. (“Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture,” the engaging book written by Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic and published last fall by the University of California Press, offers the definitive, often surprising account of what happened--along with much else.) Suffice it to say that rancor and bad feelings were left in its wake, and they lingered long.

But the transformation of the museum’s galleries now, on what is in effect the 25th anniversary of the Norton Simon Museum, announces the arrival of a new day. The graceful renovation valorizes what’s inside. In that sense it really is a new museum, one whose incomparable collection of art occupies a rare position within the cultural fabric of L.A. *

* Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-6840; free admission during regular hours between Saturday and Oct. 10. (Regular admission: $6 adults, $3 students and seniors, members and under 12 free.) Open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.; Friday, noon to 9 p.m.

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Three Decades of Change

1967: Pasadena Art Museum breaks ground in Carmelita Park for a new $3-million building designed by Ladd & Kelsey.

1969: Pasadena Art Museum opens in November, with cost overruns of $2 million on the 85,000-square-foot building.

1973: The museum changes its name to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art.

1974: Bankrupt, the museum merges with the Norton Simon Foundation and begins a $1-million upgrade of the facility.

1975: Without fanfare, the Norton Simon Museum opens in March.

1993: Norton Simon succumbs to pneumonia. Jennifer Jones Simon, the actress and Simon’s widow, becomes president of the board.

1996: In March the museum announces a major renovation of the museum’s interior, designed by architect and Simon Museum trustee Frank O. Gehry, and of the gardens, by landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power.

1999: An October celebration marks the $5-million renovation, completed in phases while the museum remained open to the public.