Norton Simon to Rehang Modern Collection

Emerson Woelffer, Inner Circle, 1949. Norton Simon Museum, gift of Casey Wasserman. (c) Estate of Emerson Woelffer

This month the Norton Simon Museum will close its 20th-century galleries for a reinstallation. When the space reopens, it will feature several key works acquired by the Pasadena Art Museum in the 1960s and 70s and rarely shown in the permanent galleries: pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly. Isamu Noguchi's The White Gunas will debut after a conservation treatment. The reinstallation is expected to take about six weeks.

New to the collection is a surrealism-inflected 1949 abstraction by artist's artist Emerson Woelffer. It dates from the year Woelffer taught at Black Mountain College and met many New York School abstractionists. Woelffer moved to Los Angeles in 1959. As a teacher at Chouinard, his students included Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha.

Isamu Noguchi, The White Gunas, 1946. Norton Simon Museum. © 2018 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York