Think of it as another form of reincarnation

“Lost but Found,” at the Norton Simon Museum, is a show about the afterlife. Not what follows our own deaths, but the afterlife of objects, the reincarnation of something familiar as something else.

The show’s full title, “Lost but Found: Assemblage, Collage and Sculpture, 1920-2002,” suggests a survey, but what’s presented is more of a sampling. The 60 works all come from the museum’s own collection and, accordingly, reflect its thin and thick spots. The unevenness detracts mostly at the chronological end of the show. Otherwise, assistant curator Michelle Deziel has done an admirable job tracing the 20th century artistic practice of reusing what’s around by reusing what’s around her own institution, art that’s had numerous public lives already. The show is rich in gifts that keep on giving.

Kurt Schwitters gets the show off to a vigorous start with three small, perpetually vital collages from 1921. The German artist patched together slips of paper, used tickets, other printed matter and fabric scraps in these “Merz” collages, their title itself a fragment that Schwitters appropriated from an advertisement for the Kommerz-und Privatbank. Part urban archeology, part autobiography, the collages are spatially flat, but their mix of colors and shapes with specific if ordinary relics gives them a sense of temporal depth.

Painters had long incorporated trompe l’oeil renderings of personal correspondence and other ephemera into their still-life arrangements by the time Schwitters came along, but he brought the real stuff directly onto the surface. The materials are humble but the effect is energizing, a piquant bite of Europe’s fomenting cultural climate between the wars.

Picasso is widely credited with doing it first, launching both modern collage and assemblage in a 1912 Cubist painting containing a swatch of oilcloth printed to mimic chair caning. The painting was framed by a length of rope. Illusion (the delicious trickery of persuasive realism) and allusion (reference to a world of experience outside the work of art) established a powerful, lasting team. Collages and assemblages could represent and re-present, their ingredients standing for something other than themselves, and also standing in as themselves, anew. No monumental works by Picasso appear in the show, just a pair of small etchings of an image printed on two different patterned papers. It’s a cameo appearance, at best, but the show -- any show about 20th century collage and assemblage -- would be incomplete with him.

Joseph Cornell, the mid-century shaman of the box assemblage, also has a small presence in the show, but a resonant one. His undated “Hotel du Nord (Little Durer)” has all the concentrated mystery and potency of the artist’s best work. Structured like a shallow stage set, its interior walls are chalky white, punctuated by reproductions of Durer drawings and an anonymous 15th century portrait.

The history of collage and assemblage is one of several strands in the braid of art’s demystification, the narrowing of the divide between art and life. Marcel Duchamp’s seminal contributions in this regard reverberate still. He formalized the process of recycling one’s own creations -- “Boite-en-Valise” (Box in a Suitcase) (1941-42), is a packaged collection of his own work in reproduction -- as well as everybody else’s. His “L.H.O.O.Q.” (or “La Joconde,” a 1964 replica of which is on view) famously made sport of the Mona Lisa, bringing a masterwork down to the level of graffiti. He also reversed the process, taking common objects and elevating them to the status of art.

Duchamp believed with wry conviction that all human-made objects were works of art. The ready-made -- such as the show’s spiky iron “Bottle Rack” (1963 replica of the 1914 original) -- was, he said, “a form of denying the possibility of defining art.” If Picasso cracked the door open by letting in nontraditional art materials, Duchamp kicked the whole thing down. Why bother with a door? Inside, outside. Suddenly it’s all the same. The sanctified precinct of art is all around us.

The Beat-influenced artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s ran with this notion. “Lost but Found” contains numerous gripping examples by California practitioners. Bruce Conner’s 1963 “Couch” is a stunner. Conner scavenged in demolished San Francisco Victorians and thrift shops for “things that people had no value for.” The chaise in this piece and the fragment of the female mannequin atop it have both been abused by time and the artist’s hand. Each is a corpse, corroded and broken, and yet preserved beneath a dripping varnish-like coat of wax and paint. A whiff of elegance lingers around the forms, mixing pungently with the evidence of their gruesome violation.

George Herms’ “The Librarian” (1960) is more of a homage, channeled through a dense accretion of distressed materials. The piece is a pile of junked goods: wooden crate upon painted stool, a broad shelf of mangled books upon the crate. It stands like a human with arms outstretched in welcome, a musty memory of an old schoolmarm. It also reads as a cruciform altar, its image and texts thick with disjunctive references to faith, chance, adoration, bodily function and race.

The show peaks at this chapter in the history. The story continues avidly into the present, but the Norton Simon’s collection can’t keep pace. There are works of moderate interest from the ‘70s by Llyn Foulkes, Charles Arnoldi and Robert Rauschenberg, but nothing that sustains the energy of the work from earlier decades. What’s absent from the ‘80s, ‘90s and the past few years calls more attention to itself than what’s present.

Contemporary artists (think of Sarah Sze, Tim Hawkinson, Richard Tuttle, Nancy Rubins, Dennis Oppenheim, Damien Hirst, Tony Cragg, Wolfgang Tillmans and Tony Berlant, to name just a few) have thoroughly internalized a collage / assemblage aesthetic. It has become the norm now to combine media, as well as to recycle what’s come before, either conceptually or materially. The mode is inexhaustible.

“Lost but Found” is an engaging reminder of when that intrigue with the material afterlife first came to life.

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‘Lost but Found: Assemblage, Collage and Sculpture, 1920-2002’

Where: Norton Simon Museum,

411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Mondays, noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; closed Tuesdays

Ends: March 28

Price: $8 adults, $4 seniors; free for students and those under 18

Contact: (626) 449-6840