(CONTINUED FROM “46 N. Los Robles” at the Pacific Asia Museum)

In 1980 some Pasadena Museum trustees were flipping through a Christie’s catalog. They learned that the Norton Simon Museum was selling works they’d donated before the takeover. The sale included paintings by de Kooning, Lichtenstein, Diebenkorn, and Sam Francis, all of whom had received early, career-making shows at the Pasadena Museum.

“We have limits to our operating expenses,” Simon explained, “and we’re not going to keep inferior contemporary art. 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.”

That was pure Simon, from his days as takeover-artist. The value of a trademark may be greater than the value of the product sold under it. Simon used similar logic when he took over Hunt Bros. Fruit Packing and turned into a ketchup colossus that became grist for pop art.

“Look at the free publicity I’m getting for the museum and the collection,” Simon reportedly told one L.A. curator. “Do you know how many millions that’s worth?”

As part of his deal with the Pasadena Museum, Simon got the right to name 7 of the 10 board members. He packed the board with celebrities: Cary Grant, Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Billy Wilder, Gregory Peck, Tom Brokaw… and of course Simon’s wife, the five-time Academy Award winner Jennifer Jones. Simon apparently believed that A-listers would be putty in his hands, and he was apparently right. Billy Wilder, an astute collector, recalled (in Suzanne Muchnic’s Odd Man In), “There would be a meeting, but no discussion. Norton Simon ruled. If you disagreed with him, he made you feel like an ignoramus. He had to be in control, so every issue passed unanimously.”

The deaccessioning led to a lawsuit that Simon won. The judge asked one Pasadena MOMA plaintiff, Gifford Phillips: “You don’t think your art is as important as Norton Simon’s pictures, do you?”

The stupendous quality of Simon’s collection made him Teflon. Complaints about cavalier treatment of former donors and contemporary art dissolved next to the prospect of Pasadena landing world-class Zurburans, Tiepolos, Goyas, and Picassos. In 1978 Art News quoted attorney Monroe Price, who represented the protesting artists: “One gets the feeling that there must be something wrong. But when you analyze the situation, it turns out to be like one of those string puzzles where you pull two ends of a very complicated knot and it comes out absolutely straight.”

Under Simon, Pasadena MOMA became the Museum of No. The Pasadena Museum had a cafe. No… Simon took it out, saying he wasn’t running a restaurant. Pasadena had big loan exhibitions… No. Education programs… No. It lent art from the collection… No.

Diebenkorn wanted to borrow Bottles (above left), a 1960 painting he had donated himself, for a retrospective… No. Ruscha just wanted to photograph Annie Poured From Maple Syrup… Nada.

It would be easy to suppose that Simon didn’t “get” contemporary art, or L.A.’s contribution to it. But that’s not right, either. He told Hunter Drohojowska, “I’ve bought contemporary art and I have a feel for it. I had to make a choice about which to collect, but I’ve never let go of the other. I purchased Gorky, Pollock, David Smith. I’ve owned far better de Koonings [than the one sold at Christie’s].”

With Simon there was scant distinction between art collecting and art dealing. “I have to maintain some distance from this or it will consume me,” he said. He said he dropped out of collecting contemporary art “because I found it was tough enough to pick good paintings out of the past. I did not want to tax myself with the myriad painters of the present.”

He also said, “There are a few exceptionally good artists in California… I’m not about to propagandize, but it will be demonstrated when the time comes.” That was a more positive opinion of California art than most East Coast collectors of the time would have admitted.

Still, Simon wasn’t encouraging to his own sister, Marcia Weisman, when she was marshalling support for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. He claimed that his museum was and would be a better showcase for contemporary art.

The story has a happy ending. Credit the ever-expanding art pie of post-1970s L.A. The spirit of Pasadena MOMA lives on, more or less, at MOCA, the Hammer, and even the Armory Center (which took over some of the Pasadena Museum’s educational programs).

The Norton Simon Museum remains a treasure for its European and Asian masters. In recent years, it’s pulled Pasadena MOMA-era art out of storage for small, smart exhibitions. (The latest example is “Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California.”)

Grace Nicholson’s Chinese folly has recovered its intended function as programmatic architecture, being home to a museum of Asian art, antiquity to the present.

Simon kept local art audiences waiting to exhale. In 1981, he called up San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein and asked how she’d like him donating his Asian sculpture collection to SF’s Fine Arts Museum. The understandably delighted Feinstein understood it to be a solid offer. It wasn’t.

Simon contemplated a buyout of the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, DC, and moving the collection there. Didn’t happen.

In 1987, he announced his intention to donate his collection to UCLA. Nope.

There were rumors of a merger with the Getty…  Talk of selling all the art to fund charities… nope.

At Simon’s 1993 death, it was announced that the collection would stay in Pasadena.

(Below, Sam Francis, Basel Mural I, a gift of the artist to the Pasadena Art Museum, and now in the Norton Simon Museum collection)

Tags: Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Marcia Weisman, Norton Simon, Norton Simon Museum, Pacific Asia Museum, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis