Gift adds a new dimension to Norton Simon collection

Norton Simon was an independent art collector who picked the best brains about potential acquisitions, then made his own decisions. When it came to Indian and Southeast Asian art, he concentrated on sculpture and bought voraciously. Tapping into an undervalued market in the early 1970s, he rapidly amassed about 600 pieces, the best of which fill the central lobby and Asian galleries in his museum in Pasadena.

With more than 12,000 pieces of European, Asian and American art, and space to show only a small fraction of it, the museum has not purchased art since Simon’s death in 1993. But the collection has grown, thanks to gifts of artworks -- primarily Asian.

Striking evidence of that phenomenon is on view in a temporary exhibition, “Painted Poems: Rajput Paintings From the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor Collection.” The show of 85 paintings, created from 1450 to 1900, includes about 50 works given or promised by the Kapoors, who live in New York and own a private Indian art gallery in Manhattan.

Most of the paintings are no larger than a sheet of typing paper, but they portray a universe of religious and secular subjects in vivid color and meticulous detail. Commissioned by Rajputs -- Hindu rulers in north-central India -- the artworks include illustrations of Hindu epics, religious texts and devotional poetry; scenes of courtly life; and portraits of princes and religious figures. Twenty-two decorative and utilitarian objects, similar to those in the paintings, were loaned by the Kapoors and installed in glass cases to flesh out the exhibition.

“I have had a good life,” says Ramesh Kapoor, who was born in India, immigrated to the United States in 1972 and opened his gallery in 1975. “The Norton Simon Museum has very few Indian paintings. I thought this would be my way of thanking the lord and giving something back to this country. Even though this is a very small collection for the museum, it’s complete enough to be a study collection.

“I am very pleased and proud to be part of the museum,” Kapoor says. “In my mind, my collection is very humble. In those galleries, it looks like more than I could afford.”

The paintings are important as visual documents of a bygone way of life and as expressions of an Indian aesthetic tradition that incorporates Persian and European ideas, says Pratapaditya Pal, a leading scholar of Indian and Southeast Asian art who facilitated the Kapoors’ donation and wrote the exhibition catalog.

The jewel-like artworks also add a new dimension to a collection formed by one man’s vision and financial clout.

“Norton Simon never expressed much interest in Indian paintings,” Pal says, “and I can see why. He came from European painting, with its large size and overwhelming technical quality. I can’t see him getting seduced by what are considered miniatures, although I don’t like that word. These are paintings of small size.”

Nonetheless, Simon would have been pleased with the Kapoors’ gift, he says, if only because the price was right.

“No matter how rich they are, they like freebies,” Pal says of collectors he has known during his curatorial tenure at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from 1969 to 1995, and through independent projects at other museums. Pal advised Simon on acquisitions when Simon was a trustee at LACMA and his collection was expected to end up there. But Simon resigned from the board and opened his own museum in 1975.

Pal is now a research fellow at the Simon Museum and recently finished writing the three-volume catalog of the museum’s Asian art holdings. While working in a professional capacity, he has also taken a personal interest in enhancing the museum’s collection, donating works of his own and persuading others to part with Asian artworks.

During the past decade, the museum has received 218 pieces of Asian art, including the Kapoors’ donation. Among the highlights are a 28-inch-tall Ghandharan Buddha carved of stone in the 3rd or 4th century; a 19-inch-tall fragment of a 2nd century sandstone structure, bearing the image of a female figure; and a 52-by-36-inch, 16th century painting of a Tibetan Buddhist pontiff.

Kapoor, who worked at his father’s galleries in India before coming to the United States, met Norton Simon but knew of him mainly through other dealers’ tales of the California collector. Kapoor’s relationship with Pal, who was born in Bangladesh and came to the United States in 1967, is a different story. They met in 1977 and became friends.

“He is a great scholar and a very forceful personality,” Kapoor says of Pal.

About three years ago while visiting Kapoor in New York, Pal suggested he and his wife donate a selection of Indian paintings to the museum. Pal envisioned a group of works that would fill a gap and offer possibilities of comparative exhibitions with works from other cultures.

Kapoor, who donated Indian art to LACMA during Pal’s tenure there, immediately agreed to the Simon proposal. Soon he began choosing a group of works that would represent different subjects, periods and schools. Visitors at the exhibition find images of spiritual quests, beasts in combat, equestrian princes, dancing ladies, inebriated ascetics and gods in the form of animals.

“I wasn’t looking for my name to be recognized,” Kapoor says. “I was just looking to give something back, so I had no questions, no argument, no nothing. I hope others will give to them and they will have as good a collection of paintings as they do of sculpture. Somebody had to start.”