Retrospect: 50 Years of the Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum started out as the Pasadena Art Institute in 1922, exhibiting 19th-century American and European art and hosting annual shows of artists from California. Over the next few decades it moved from place to place, merging with the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1942 and then in 1953 receiving a bequest of some 500 German Expressionist works from the collection of Galka Scheyer. In the mid 1960s, it was a seedbed for the experiments of the visionary contemporary curator Walter Hopps. Then, in 1975, the industrialist Norton Simon assumed the management of the museum – part of a deal in which the museum was renamed in his honour and gave him a home for his prodigious art collection in exchange for financial support. Now the institution is looking back at its evolution over the last half-century, from key acquisitions by artists including Memling, Raphael, Canaletto, Fragonard, Goya, Ingres, Renoir and more, to its Frank Gehry-led renovations in the 1990s (14 February–12 January 2026).

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View of the downstairs galleries at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, photographed in 1989. Photo: Antoni E. Dolinski/Norton Simon Museum Archives

The sculpture garden at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, photographed in c. 2002 after its renovation in 1995 by Nancy Goslee Power. Photo: Norton Simon Museum Archives

Interior galleries at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, after their renovation by Frank Gehry in the 1990s. Photo: Steve Oliver/Norton Simon Museum Archives