NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Norton Simon Museum in brief

This is a museum you would rather expect to find in Europe. With its exquisite collection of over 11,000 works of Asian and, above all, European art from the Renaissance to the present, the Norton Simon Museum is one of the most important American art museums. Located in the suburb of Pasadena, in the north of Los Angeles, the art museum is not only worth a visit for art lovers.

The history of the Norton Simon Museum

The museum is named after the industrialist Norton Simon, who was one of the most important art connoisseurs and patrons of the postwar period. The museum grew out of the Art Institute in Pasadena, a contemporary art museum that was housed in a flat, pavilion-like structure in a manicured garden setting. The collection ran into severe financial difficulties in the early 1970s. At the time, Norton Simon was looking for suitable space for his own outstanding art collection. An agreement was quickly reached and the museum became the property of the billionaire, who placed his collection of paintings and Asian art there.

The collection of the Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum collection is divided into the following sections:

Asian art

The museum owns a world-famous collection of art from South and Southeast Asia, which includes significant examples of the region’s pictorial and sculptural traditions. Of particular importance is the collection of art from the Indian subcontinent and the collection of woodblock prints from Japan.

European art: 14th-16th centuries

The collection of European art from the 14th to 16th centuries includes masterpieces from the early and high Renaissance and Mannerism. Italian masters such as Jacopo Bassano, Botticelli, Giovanni di Paolo, Filippiono Lippi, Raphael and Paolo Veneziano are represented, among others. But also German and Flemish masters such as Dieric Bouts, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Memling can be found in the exhibition.

European art: 17th-18th centuries

The collection of European art from the Baroque period consists of works by Italian and Spanish artists Guido Reni, Ganaletto, Tiepolo, Guercino, Murillo and Zurbarán. Central European Baroque is represented by masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens. One of the highlights of the Norton Simon Museum are three portraits by Rembrandt. The French masters also have some significant representatives in the exhibition with Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Boucher, Fragonard and Watteau.

European art: 19th century

The paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Francisco de Goya introduce the 19th century in the collection and lead through the representatives of Realism, such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, to the exquisite collection of Impresionists and Post-Impressionists of the Norton Simon Museum. Edgar Degas alone is represented in the exhibition with over 100 works. In addition, the museum features paintings by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh. In the beautiful garden of the museum there are some monumental bronze sculptures by the French master sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Modern art

The Norton Simon Museum also owns an extensive collection of modern art, with seminal works by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. In addition, the museum owns some 450 works by the artists’ group “Der Blaue Reiter,” with world-renowned representatives such as Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexei Jawlensky.

Contemporary art

The Norton Simon Museum’s collection of contemporary art is also among the most important in the United States, with works by Joseph Cornell, George Herms, Ed Kienholz, Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenberg. The Pop Art and Minimal Art movements are represented by works by Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. A focus of contemporary art is in the works of California artists from the 1950s through the 1970s, such as Charles Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Ronald Davis, Jay DeFeo, Ed Moses, Kenneth Price, and Edward Ruscha. Color Field Painting and Lyrical Abstraction are represented by artists such as Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Ronnie Landfield, Kenneth Noland, Kenneth Showell, and Frank Stella.

Sculpture

In addition to its collections of paintings, the Norton Simon Museum also owns many sculptures by important 20th-century sculptors such as Constantin Brâncuși, Barbara Hepworth, Aristide Maillol, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi. The sculptures are distributed both inside the museum building and in the extensive museum gardens.