An Old Master Embraces the New

It’s Monday morning at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and a group of casually dressed students from Sierra High School in Azusa is in the galleries, amid one of America’s most impressive collections of European Old Masters, French Impressionism and Asian sculpture. As they admire Degas’ bronze ballerinas--especially the big one with the real tutu--and argue about paintings by Picasso and Manet, a dozen cars pull into the museum’s parking lot. Soon an eclectic group of tourists, local residents and college students with notebooks gather outside the entrance, waiting for the museum to open at noon.

Downstairs in the museum offices, phones are ringing, curators are planning exhibitions and scheduling lectures for the just reopened Norton Simon Museum Theater; independent scholars are digging in the archives; and museum educators are developing new children’s programs.

It’s an ordinary day in the life of an art museum, but it hasn’t always been this way here. Don’t forget, this is the Norton Simon Museum--not the Getty or the Huntington or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or any number of other museums that have much higher profiles.

Long known as a sleepy, essentially private enclave and only open four afternoons a week, the Simon has been transformed during the past year, since the grand opening of a celebrated $6.5-million renovation designed by architect Frank O. Gehry. Officials have extended its hours, expanded its outreach and upped its advertising budget.

The payoff has been dramatic. “Every time you turn around, they are trying something new,” says Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the nearby Armory Center for the Arts. Then he ticks off a list including the new theater, food service in the garden, 20th century and contemporary shows in the temporary exhibitions galleries, and participation in Pasadena Art Nights.

“They have embraced all of that. But what’s even more remarkable, after all those years when they didn’t do much, is that they have done it quickly and they have done it well,” Belloli says.

Deborah Gribbon, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, which packs in well over 1 million visitors a year, checked it out recently.

“It was palpably different,” she says. “More people were there, it was a younger group and I had a wonderful encounter with a young woman who was writing a paper on the Raphael painting ‘Madonna and Child With a Book’ for her art history class. There was a feeling of liveliness and interest and a breadth of audience that I don’t remember in the past.”

In fact, during the past year, annual attendance at the Simon has more than doubled, from 122,446 to 254,843, and the number of people who take tours of the museum has grown from 8,248 to 15,541 annually.

“That’s still small compared to the Getty or the Louvre,” says Sara Campbell, director of art at the Simon. “But for us, it’s marvelous. It’s amazing to see what has happened.”

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Norton Simon, art aficionado and Hunt Foods magnate, started the museum that bears his name in 1974, when he took charge of the financially troubled Pasadena Art Museum and converted it into a showcase for his own collection, along with the modern and contemporary holdings of the original institution.

In art, as in business, Simon made his own rules--and he seemed to operate his museum more to suit his needs than to attract the public. He was ill for nearly a decade before his death in 1993; as a result, his collecting was sharply curtailed and the museum was run very quietly.

The current renovation began in 1996, under the leadership of his widow, Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Jones Simon. With a healthy endowment to pay the bills, the building was modernized wing by wing, with the aim of creating a setting that would enhance the quality of the collection as well as the visitors’ experience. Gehry’s interior changes, the new installation of the artworks--including a dramatic display of the Asian holdings--and a new lush sculpture garden designed by landscape architect Nancy Goslee Power all got excellent reviews when they were completed in 1999.

After the renovation, the museum began to match its practices to its new image. It is now open six afternoons each week--Wednesday through Monday--and Friday nights.

As for outreach, there has always been a waiting list for school tours, and that hasn’t changed much, but the number of tours has doubled with the museum’s hours, says Nancy Gubin, director of educational programs. She has gradually built a part-time staff of 15 lecturers, and fashioned an increasingly flexible program that caters to each group’s needs.

In the past, the school tours were geared for grades seven through 12, but sixth grade has been added, she says. In an attempt to reach younger children, the Simon introduced in July an Internet program of collection-related activities on ArtsEdNet, the Getty’s educational Web site.

In another initiative, the Simon will launch a new packet of educational materials this month at its first workshop for teachers and administrators in Pasadena middle and high schools. Gubin also plans to create a family guide for visitors.

None of this is new in terms of her vision, “but it’s exciting to see things start to come to fruition,” she says. “We’ve had some great movement forward.”

Temporary exhibitions aren’t new either, but they now have a permanent home and a larger presence in galleries that have been renovated to accommodate modern and contemporary art. On view until Jan. 15 is a pair of shows, on color lithography and Henry Moore’s sculpture and drawings. Next comes another example of institutional outreach: “Creation, Constellations and the Cosmos,” which is part of “The Universe,” a collaborative exploration of connections between art and science at eight Pasadena institutions. The Simon’s show, opening Feb. 4, will investigate how Asian and European artists interpret spiritual ties to the cosmos.

A smaller show in a gallery near the lobby reveals an unexpected benefit of the renovation: gifts of artworks from private collectors. Several European and American pieces came from friends of the museum who were impressed with the renovation. Most of the Asian works were donated at the suggestion of Pratapaditya Pal, a leading scholar of Indian and Southeast Asian art who is working on a three-volume catalog of the museum’s Asian collection.

And that brings up another new development. In addition to Pal’s project, the museum has commissioned New York-based art historian Vivian Barnett to catalog the Galka Scheyer collection of works by a group of 20th century artists known as the Blue Four. Los Angeles-based Dutch art scholar Amy Walsh is writing a catalog for the Northern European collection. Documenting the 19th century collection are three other specialists: Richard Brettell, a professor of art history at the University of Texas in Dallas; Stephen Eisenman, who teaches art history at Northwestern University outside Chicago; and Richard Kendall, a New York-based Degas authority who is preparing a volume on the museum’s Degas collection. Simon curator Gloria Williams is working on the 17th century Italian holdings.

“We want each catalog to be the reference work on the collection that students and scholars consult,” Campbell says, “but we still want it to be accessible to interested museum visitors and general readers.”

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The rejuvenated Norton Simon Museum Theater is the latest of the museum’s moves to engage a broad audience. It’s likely to surprise even frequent visitors who may not even know it existed. The auditorium presented public programs when the building housed the Pasadena Art Museum, but after Norton Simon took over, it was used for storage.

The room hadn’t been structurally altered, but turning it into “a premier screening room” required many changes, says architect Tom Goffigon, vice president of Gensler, the firm that designed the renovation.

Gensler moved the projection room from the balcony to the main floor so that the projector lens is perpendicular to the screen, eliminating distortion. The architects also removed seats from the main floor to accommodate the new projection room, two new aisles and increased stage clearance, reducing the total seating capacity from 375 to 290.

The new screen is framed “so the image of the film sits in front of you, much like you would look at a painting,” Goffigon says. The size of the screen can be adjusted to fit different formats, and the entire apparatus is on rollers so that the screen can be easily pushed to the back of the stage when it isn’t needed.

One big challenge was to accommodate sound requirements for different kinds of events in a single room, he says. The solution was to place poplar slats on the walls at varying intervals to create a balance among sound reflection, diffusion and absorption.

As to the arrangement of the slats, the architects had a certain amount of flexibility, Goffigon says. “Theoretically we were trying to create an abstraction that would approximate the notion of the art of sound design.”

Approaching it from the galleries or lobby, visitors encounter a central wall of frosted glass. Designed to look a bit like a movie screen, the glass also can be used as a surface to display projected images.

A Simon documentary, commissioned as an orientation film by the museum, is the theater’s first attraction. Showing hourly beginning at 12:30 p.m., Wednesday through Monday, “The Art of Norton Simon” is a 30-minute, 35-millimeter film directed by Davis Guggenheim, produced by his father, Charles Guggenheim, and narrated by Gregory Peck. Davis Guggenheim is a Los Angeles-based director whose credits include the film “Gossip” and episodes of TV’s “NYPD Blue,” “ER” and “Party of Five.” His Washington-based father is best known for four Academy Award-winning documentaries: “RFK Remembered,” “Nine From Little Rock,” “The Johnstown Flood” and “A Time for Justice.”

The Guggenheims had easy access to the art collection. But they had to weave that material into the life of a tycoon-turned-art-collector who also ran for political office and became an outspoken member of the University of California’s Board of Regents.

Simon made his fortune by parlaying a $7,000 investment in a bankrupt orange-juice bottling plant in Fullerton into Hunt Foods & Industries Inc., a multinational corporation with a wide variety of holdings. In the 1950s, he plunged into art collecting at the high end, starting with French Impressionism and moving to Old Master paintings and the art of India and Southeast Asia. Remembered for his contrary nature, computer-like mind and love of negotiation--as well as his artistic acuity--he is credited with building the best private collection in the U.S. since World War II.

“I thought the art would be the easy part and the man would be less interesting,” Davis Guggenheim says. “But we got so much great material on him and it was so compelling that it drove everything. Here’s a guy trying to figure himself out--this great intellect trying to figure things out and expressing that through art.”

Charles Guggenheim filmed Simon in 1970, when he mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate. That project provided footage for a minor aspect of the story, but the filmmakers had to do a lot of sleuthing to find other images. “We also did tons of interviews,” Davis Guggenheim says.

Along with the film, the theater will present a lecture series, to be launched in January. Art historians, curators, authors and conservators will be part of the mix, says curator Williams, who is working on the schedule. The Southwest Chamber Music also has adopted the theater as a venue for its concerts.

All programs, including music, will be related to the museum’s collection, Campbell says. But the artworks cover such a broad sweep of history--from the 14th through the 20th centuries--that there’s no shortage of possible themes.

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Having worked with the collection since 1969, when Simon was buying art fast and furiously, Campbell says that she thinks he would be delighted with the growth in attendance. But there’s still much to be done to develop the museum’s potential. “I’m really looking forward to seeing the public’s reaction to programs in the theater and to engaging visitors in a dialogue about the collection, in ways that can’t always be accomplished with just works on the wall and labels. I think it is going to be really fun for us to start meeting our constituents.”

Looking at the Simon from an out-of-towner’s viewpoint, James N. Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, cites the quality of the collection and the museum’s emphasis on the art as the sources of its success in attracting those constituents.

“What I love about the Simon,” Wood said, “particularly in this new transformation, is that you feel it is totally dedicated to experiencing art. I really hope people in Los Angeles realize what they have got.”