Norton Simon Museum

"Still Life With Lemons, Oranges and a Rose" is back at the Norton Simon Museum after a revealing conservation job. But you'd better be quick if you want to see its new look before the 1633 painting by Francisco de Zurbaran takes a trip to New York. A crown jewel of the Simon collection and one of the finest Spanish still lifes in the United States, the painting recently got some expert TLC at the J. Paul Getty Museum's conservation laboratory. Like an aging beauty queen who quietly retreats, then slips back into the public eye looking younger, the 375-year-old artwork has returned to the Pasadena museum refreshed and ready for close-up viewing.

Gifford Phillips, a gentlemanly patron of cultural institutions and passionate advocate of contemporary art who played a leading role at museums on both coasts of the United States, has died. He was 94. Phillips died Wednesday of natural causes at a hospice in Palm Desert, said his daughter Marjorie Elliott. A member of a wealthy family - including his uncle, art collector Duncan Phillips, who founded the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. - Gifford Phillips was a partner in Pardee Phillips, a real estate developer of residential and commercial property in California and Nevada.

Jennifer Jones became one of the top stars of the 1940s and '50s under the guidance of her second husband, uber-producer David O. Selznick. Because of Selznick's firm grip, though, Jones didn't make as many movies as some of her contemporaries, such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. As a result, many people today aren't familiar with her work, save perhaps for her final role as Fred Astaire's love interest in 1974's "The Towering Inferno. " But during her career, Jones earned a lead actress Oscar for 1943's "The Song of Bernadette" and received nominations for 1944's "Since You Went Away," 1945's "Love Letters," 1946's "Duel in the Sun" and 1955's "Love Is a Many Splendored-Thing.

What is it, exactly, about Van Gogh? For those of us with a vested interest in contemporary art, who spend much of our time immersed in the work of artists most Americans have never heard of, it is an important question to ponder from time to time - one that the Norton Simon Museum's temporary installation of an 1889 self-portrait on loan from the National Gallery of Art calls again to the fore. There is no more familiar face in all of modern art history: the piercing blue eyes; the gaunt, sallow features; the imagined spectacle of a severed ear (turned discretely away from the viewer in this, as in most, variations)

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is focusing on liquid pleasure in two summer exhibitions. "The Lure of the Water: Impressionists at the Seashore" (through Sept. 26) consists of ocean paintings and beach scenes by Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Eugene Boudin and other French artists. "Seascape/Cityscape: The Art of Lyonel Feininger" (through Jan.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused Thursday to rehear an appeal by a Connecticut woman seeking the return of two of the Norton Simon Museum's most prized holdings. Marei Von Saher, who is trying to win the nearly 500-year-old paintings of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, had sought a rehearing before all of the court's judges. The ruling could mean that barring a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, families whose art was stolen during the Holocaust and now is owned by a California museum or gallery have lost their right to circumvent the usual three-year statute of limitations in suing for its recovery.

The Norton Simon Museum is something of a miracle, art experts say, because Simon built his collection long after most acknowledged masterpieces had been safely entrenched in older museums. His is generally recognized as the best repository of European paintings west of Chicago. The now-retired industrialist emerged as a major collector around 1964 when he purchased the entire inventory of legendary dealers, the Duveen Brothers of New York.

Retired industrialist Norton Simon was reported to be resting at his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow Thursday after an emergency hospitalization coinciding with the announcement that he has relinquished the presidency of his Pasadena-based museum and its fabled art collection.

It gives local pride a nice glow to discover that the most important new exhibition of modern art in town has been here, unseen, for decades. The case in point is the Norton Simon Museum's presentation of "The Spirit of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in the New World." The Scheyer collection is one of the revered treasure troves of pioneer modernist art in these parts and would hold such status anywhere.

With four scowling faces, 12 eyes, 12 arms, numerous weapons, skulls adorning the rim of his crown, severed heads dangling from his waist, human figures crushed beneath his feet and his consort Vajravarahi wrapped about him in rapturous congress, Chakrasamvara is a force to be reckoned with. He is one of many to be found in "Divine Demons: Wrathful Deities of Buddhist Art," a small but captivating exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum. When one thinks of Buddhist art, one tends to conjure images of tranquillity and bliss: Buddhas poised in beatific meditation and benevolent bodhisattvas hovering on lotus flowers.

While designing what is now the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in the late 1960s, architects John Kelsey and Thornton Ladd expressed a belief: Space that houses art "can be part of the event and experience. " When it opened in 1969 as the Pasadena Art Museum, observers saw art in the striking curvilinear exterior, which was clad in mottled tiles that appeared to change color with the sun, and in the curved interior walls conceived to showcase modern art. An early review by The Times pronounced the structure "eye-catching" and "undoubtedly superior to its only local competition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. " After forming the firm Ladd & Kelsey in 1958, the two USC graduates built a number of major projects over the next quarter-century, including main buildings at CalArts in Valencia and Busch Gardens, a theme park in Van Nuys.

First published on Nov. 27, 2011. Revised and expanded in early 2012. It's 1922, and nothing much is up in Pasadena. Not among the orange groves, not along the leafy streets. Just as the little old ladies like it. But wait. Down in the Arroyo Seco, a crew has just started erecting some kind of stadium. On Pepper Street, Mallie Robinson's 3-year-old son may already be showing signs of amazing athleticism. Over at Polytechnic School, a tall 10-year-old named Julia McWilliams is developing the taste and aplomb that will make her America's best-known chef.

Starting Monday, Memorial Day, select museums around the country will offer free admission to all active duty military personnel and their families through Labor Day, Sept. 3. The program is a partnership between the Department of Defense, the National Endowment for the Arts and Blue Star Families, a nonprofit group providing support for military families. The museum program was started in 2010 and is now in its third year. To obtain free admission, visitors must present a valid piece of identification showing active duty in the military or National Guard and Reserves.

NEW YORK — Federal agents have threatened to seize from Sotheby's a 10th century Cambodian sandstone statue, alleging the auction house planned to sell it despite warnings that looters had stolen the piece from its rightful place, adorning an ancient temple in the former Khmer kingdom. Court documents filed Wednesday in New York say the statue of an ancient warrior was torn from the Prasat Chen Temple in Koh Ker in northern Cambodia sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, when the Asian nation was engulfed in civil unrest.

At the Norton Simon Museum, an exhibition examining the L.A. area's postwar printmaking boom begins with a different sort of graphic. It's not a Richard Diebenkorn lithograph, an Ed Ruscha screenprint or any of the 150 or so other works in "Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California. " Gracing the title wall is a six-foot-wide bubble diagram - what "Proof" curator Leah Lehmbeck calls "a map of all the complexities, crossovers, key institutions and people covered in the show," which runs at the Pasadena museum through April 2. PHOTOS: Richard Diebenkorn The exhibition delves into an important chapter in American art history: the L.A.-based renaissance in the '60s and '70s, during which printmaking was embraced as a contemporary art form.

Collector Without Walls Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best Sara Campbell Yale University Press: 496 pp., 2,250 illus., $65 Of all the eccentricities attributed to Norton Simon, his lack of interest in publishing scholarly books about his art collection is among the most baffling. Was Simon, one of the 20th century's premier collectors, spurning the academic establishment to which he didn't belong? Or just being himself, a brilliant contrarian and proud of it?

FOR decades, leaders of the Norton Simon Museum balked at the advice of Dean Martin and assorted other sages who sang of what it takes to reap the glory of love: "You've got to give a little, take a little." Now, after keeping its trove of European Old Masters and Impressionists to itself for more than 30 years by nearly always refusing to lend them to other institutions, the Pasadena museum is loosening up in a way that might have pleased Martin.

While designing what is now the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in the late 1960s, architects John Kelsey and Thornton Ladd expressed a belief: Space that houses art "can be part of the event and experience. " When it opened in 1969 as the Pasadena Art Museum, observers saw art in the striking curvilinear exterior, which was clad in mottled tiles that appeared to change color with the sun, and in the curved interior walls conceived to showcase modern art. An early review by The Times pronounced the structure "eye-catching" and "undoubtedly superior to its only local competition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. " After forming the firm Ladd & Kelsey in 1958, the two USC graduates built a number of major projects over the next quarter-century, including main buildings at CalArts in Valencia and Busch Gardens, a theme park in Van Nuys.

Jennifer Jones Film Series Where: Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena When: 2 p.m. each Saturday in October Price: No charge beyond the $8 museum admission Information: (626) 844-6990; http://www.nortonsimon.org/jennifer-jones-film-series