The Norton Simon Museum of Art Trip

The Norton Simon Museum of Art Trip

Norton Simon Museum of Art

The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum at the Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena (Los Angeles County), California. In 1922 the Pasadena Art Institute of nineteenth century American and European art opened in the Reed Mansion, located in the Carmelita Park in Pasadena. In 1942 it was decided to merge with the newly created Pasadena Museum of Art. As a new site was chosen for the Grace Nicholson Galleries at the North Los Robles Avenue (which is currently the Pacific Asia Museum is located). Pasadena Art Institute, the name was retained.

A year later the name was changed to the Museum of the Pasadena Art Museum. The acquisition and exhibition policies of the museum would focus on modern art (Chang 2005). In 1969 the building was completed and the new museum, from 1973 the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, opened with even more emphasis would be on modern and contemporary art. This, too ambitious based, objective became the museum for years in deep debt.

It was a collection without a museum and many works were on loan to various museums. Simon was as much about loan agreements expired, looking for a museum where the collection could remain permanently. In exchange for a repayment of debts Simon took charge of the museum. The collections of the museum and that of Simon were integrated and the reopening took place in 1975: the Norton Simon Museum of Art. Simon kept the lead until his death in 1993.

Period of Art History

The Norton Simon Museum is known around the world as one of the most remarkable private art collections ever assembled. Over a 30-year period, 20th-century industrialist Norton Simon (1907-1993) amassed an astonishing collection of European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century and a stellar collection of South and Southeast Asian art spanning 2,000 years (Chang 2005).

The Museum houses more than 12,000 objects, roughly 1,000 of which are on view in the galleries and gardens. Three temporary exhibition galleries feature rotating installations of artworks not on permanent display. The Museum's online collections database presents a portion of the objects in the permanent collection, and is continually being updated.

This is the first critical catalogue of the collection of nineteenth-century paintings and drawings in the Norton Simon Museum of Art. World-renowned for its strength in works by the French impressionists and post-impressionists—Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cézanne and Van Gogh—the Museum also houses outstanding paintings by the Realist Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon painter Camille Corot among others. Each of the 138 artworks featured in the book is illustrated in color and accompanied by a full catalogue entry, comprising critical essay exhibition and ownership history, bibliography and conservation notes (Rutenberg 1999). Color reproductions of comparative works from other collections—public and private—are also included (Hirsch 2008).

Painters who participated in the development of contemporary art, particularly Abstract Expressionism, in or around New York City in the 1940s and '50s of artists, this second generation of ...