Norton Simon Accentuates American Art

Donald Judd's Untitled (1966), Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack (1963 replica of 1914 original); Sam Francis' Basel Mural I (1956-1958). Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum has refreshed and reinstalled its rooms of 20th-century art. It's now showing more American art (and women's art, and L.A. art), alongside the Picassos, Matisses, and Kandinskys. Nearly all the American pieces were acquired by the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, which was the West Coast's most progressive contemporary museum prior to Norton Simon's 1974 takeover of the financially troubled institution. As Robert Irwin put it in 1980, "It is as if the Modern had become the Frick." Simon's aggressive deaccession policy—he sold off the museum's only de Kooning—must have chilled donations of contemporary art. "We have limits to our operating expenses and we’re not going to keep inferior contemporary art," Simon said. "There is a residual importance to the PMOMA name because of their exhibition record, not the collection. No one talks about the junk they have down there."

Helen Frankenthaler's Adriatic (1968) and Agnes Martin's Leaf in the Wind (1963)

The new installation rolls back the clock, presenting more major postwar American pieces than have been on view together in decades. The large, skylight gallery of modern art is now roughly split between European and American works. There is a time-capsule quality, however. Almost all the American pieces date from the two decades before the Simon takeover. But the works are often of special significance. The Frankenthaler was a gift from the artist. The Martin, donated by L.A. gallerist Nicholas Wilder, is the reductive epitome of everything you'd want in a Martin painting. 

Isamu Noguchi, The White Gunas (Abstract Sculpture), 1946

For reasons unclear to me, the Noguchi White Gunas has been moved to an unusual pedestal in the corner. It's now between a great Kandinsky and and Asian-inflected AbEx painting by the under-recognized Walasse Ting. That's a juxtaposition you won't find anywhere else.

Vasily Kandinsky's Heavy Circles (1927), Isamu Noguchi's The White Gunas (1946), and Walasse Ting's Untitled (1959) 

Emerson Woelffer, Inner Circle, 1949

There's a fantastic 1949 Emerson Woelffer, Inner Circle, donated last year by Casey Wasserman, and a small Hilda Levy, acquired in 1977 but never shown in recent years. Levy studied with Adolph Gottlieb before moving to L.A. She had a brilliant career in the Left Coast avant garde, capped by a one-artist show at—where else?—the Pasadena Museum in 1960. Then she was forgotten. Number Six packs dripping, smearing, and wax resisting into a numinous microcosm only 16 inches across. 

Hilda Levy, Number Six (mixed media on board), 1954

Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #24, 1954

One donor who wasn't put off by Simon's wheeling and dealing was Cary Grant. In 1980 the actor donated Diego Rivera's Flower Vendor, the museum's one rockstar Latin American painting.

Diego Rivera, The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies), 1941

There are more American pieces that aren't on view: a set of 100 Warhol Brillo Boxes (a gift of the artist); Ruscha's Annie Poured From Maple Syrup (presently in the MoMA-LACMA show); Lichtenstein's 30-ft.  Big Modern Painting (gift of the artist and Leo Castelli); Oldenburg's soft sculpture of a Ketchup Bottle;  a Robert Irwin Disk. Showing these on a long-term basis would probably demand more space than the NSM can spare. The Lichtenstein alone would displace a dozen Impressionists.