Upcoming Events for Exhibitions from 2010 - 2019

Mar. 06 - Aug. 19, 2013 : "monument" on the survival of Mrs. Reppin: An Artwork by Dan Flavin

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:34:10 -0800

Most artists shy away from the corners of exhibition spaces, preferring their artwork to be placed front and center on the gallery wall. This is not the case for Dan Flavin (American, 1933–1996), who, through the use of light, often installed his artwork in nooks and crannies to call attention to architectural idiosyncrasies.

Through his study of art history, Flavin became enamored with Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s use of gallery corners to exhibit artwork. Tatlin’s corner reliefs, first exhibited in 1915, did away with frames and projected into real space. This use of the corner, along with Tatlin’s use of building material to convey revolutionary social and political attitudes, drew Flavin’s interest. Flavin not only looked to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International for the titling of his own “monuments...” but also may have been intrigued by the idea that in a traditional Russian home, the corner is typically occupied by a religious icon.

Along with such artists as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, Flavin became one of the progenitors of minimalist art. Though these artists eschewed such a label, it did describe their efforts to remove ornamentation and boil down the art to the essence of their ideas. To further this concept, Flavin used the term exposition, as opposed to exhibition, because the former term implied a concept behind what was exhibited, rather than mere display.

In 1962, Flavin made a creative breakthrough with his “icon” series. These memorials used light and paint together and served as the first step toward the artwork for which Flavin became well known. These icons are square, painted surfaces (usually monochromatic) that incorporate lit light bulbs of various dimensions and are dedicated to the memory of lost friends or influences—often people Flavin knew, and occasionally art historical or literary references.

Flavin’s first artwork made exclusively from a fluorescent tube was diagonal of personal ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963). This significant step away from traditional art mediums such as painting or drawing was a personal breakthrough for Flavin because it incorporated the idea of the readymade, employed and perfected by Marcel Duchamp years earlier, with the idea of the “endless column” used by Constantin Brancusi. The availability of physical materials, combined with the theoretical endlessness of fluorescent light as a standard unit, captivated Flavin for much of the remainder of his career.

“monument” on the survival of Mrs. Reppin has all of the characteristics that make an artwork by Flavin so recognizable—the materials, the engagement with the exhibition space and the idea of a corner icon. Fluorescent lights spanning the corner project light from the sculpture and occupy the gallery to its fullest—illuminating both the corner and the adjacent walls and gallery space.

The idea of making the corner a site for a family’s religious memorials and icons may have led Flavin to install “monument” on the survival of Mrs. Reppin in this manner. In 1966, while in Germany planning his exhibition at the Galerie Rudolph Zwirner, Flavin met Mrs. Reppin, Zwirner’s mother-in-law. A British citizen living and married in Germany, she had been interned by the Allies for not divorcing her husband, who was a German soldier during World War II.

Acquired in 1969 by the Fellows Acquisition Fund for the Pasadena Art Museum, “monument” on the survival of Mrs. Reppin has never been on display in these galleries. At the time the artwork was acquired, the building at the corner of Orange Grove and Colorado Boulevards was being constructed. The interior walls matched the shape of the exterior ones, so there were only rounded galleries—no corners. It was impossible for the artwork to be installed as the artist had envisioned it—that is, until the interior gallery renovations in 1999. This piece, conceived and fabricated in Germany and fitted for European voltage, was recently conserved and retrofitted with components that work with standard U.S. electrical circuits. The Norton Simon Museum has been in close communication with the Estate of Dan Flavin during the work’s conservation and is pleased to be able to exhibit “monument” on the survival of Mrs. Reppin in its galleries.

Apr. 26, 2013 - Jan 06, 2014 : Beyond Brancusi: The Space of Sculpture

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:32:42 -0700

The Norton Simon Museum presents Beyond Brancusi: The Space of Sculpture, an exhibition that examines how the great sculptors of the 20^th century were influenced by Constantin Brancusi and his groundbreaking use of space and material. Featuring 19 works from the Museum’s renowned collection of post-war art, by sculptors as diverse as Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Barbara Hepworth, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, John McCracken and Robert Irwin, the exhibition demonstrates how sculpture moved from being a self-contained, three-dimensional object to one that engages with its surrounding space. In a variety of ways and in a variety of materials, including marble, wood, stainless steel, felt or Plexiglas, the sculptures on view illustrate some of the most innovative moments in art making in the latter half of the 20^th century. The exhibition is on view from April 26, 2013 through January 6, 2014, in the Museum’s temporary exhibition gallery.

Sep. 13 - Nov. 04, 2013 : Breaking Ground: 20th-Century Latin American Art at the Norton Simon Museum

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:00:05 -0700

In celebration of Hispanic and Latino Heritage Month, the Museum is presenting an exhibition of works from 20th-century Latin American artists. Spanning the period from 1931 to 1985, the featured artworks demonstrate how artists broke new ground, leaving behind or drastically altering artistic conventions to explore diverse forms of modernism. Although Latin American art is often presumed to be figurative and political, this exhibition makes clear that artists were engaged with a variety of subjects and themes, and that they conceived of the “figure” in radically different ways. Employing line, shape, form, color and texture, they undertook innovative approaches to figure–ground relations, using positive and negative space for various purposes. This intimate exhibition, which consists of selections from the Norton Simon Museum’s collection, features work by not only some of the most revered names in Latin American art but also artists who are less widely known. Included are the Mexican painters, lithographers and photographers Diego Rivera, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Rufino Tamayo, José Luis Cuevas and Ángel Bracho, as well as South Americans Roberto Matta (from Chile), Gego (also known as Gertrud Goldschmidt, from Venezuela) and Antonio Frasconi (from Uruguay).

In a collection that is known primarily for its holdings of European and South and Southeast Asian art, the provenance of works from Latin America merits attention. In 1953 German art dealer Galka Scheyer donated her collection to the Pasadena Art Museum, which later became the Norton Simon Museum. Scheyer had acquired works by Diego Rivera and Ángel Bracho after meeting Rivera in San Francisco in 1931. Scheyer, who acted as an agent for the Blue Four—a group formed in 1925 in Europe by Expressionist painters Vasily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger—collaborated with Rivera in sponsoring an exhibition of the Blue Four at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Later that year, she traveled to Mexico City, the site of another co-sponsored Blue Four exhibit, where she purchased Rivera’s Blue Boy with the Banana, which he painted specifically for her, and two works by Bracho.

Since the beginning of the colonial era, prints and graphics have played an important role in transmitting cultural icons and values from Europe to the New World. In the 19th century, they were instrumental in promoting nationalist sentiment and commemorating the actions of heroes and martyrs who had helped to secure independence. At the turn of the 20th century, broadsheets illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada and other Mexican artists were a popular means of informing the masses, and after the Mexican Revolution, artists made use of Posada’s motifs in posters and other forms of print media in order to reach a larger audience than painted murals allowed. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, artists throughout Latin America produced prints and posters for political and other purposes. The Tamarind Lithography Workshop, founded in Los Angeles in 1960, helped to spark a renaissance in the graphic arts in the United States and Europe and attracted local and international artists, including Rufino Tamayo and José Luis Cuevas from Mexico and Gego from Venezuela. It is fitting, then, that the majority of works in the exhibit are works on paper.

In 1971, the Pasadena Art Museum organized the first major exhibition of Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s photographs in the United States. The 66 photographs in the Norton Simon Museum’s collection, which speak to the depth and breadth of work by this modern Mexican master of photography, came from this exhibition. The prestigious Weyhe Gallery of New York, which was instrumental in representing Latin American artists in the early 20th century, gifted the piece by Antonio Frasconi. The remaining work in the exhibition by Roberto Matta was the recent gift of Terry and Sharon Bridges.

The distinctive manipulation of figure–ground relationships—and, more generally, the style—serves a particular purpose. For example, whereas Rivera creates a symphony of blues that links foreground and background and echoes the somber mood of works by the Blue Four, he makes expressive use of line, light and shadow to highlight a young peasant boy and a starkly furnished interior. Bracho achieves a similar purpose by way of contrasts in color and pattern. In a black-and-white print, he negates recession in space, floating an unconventional mix of figures and objects in a dream-like surrealist space. Through both pattern and texture, Tamayo and Bravo render their figures almost indistinguishable from the background, thereby intimating the otherworldly nature of the subject. Similarly, through abstract shapes, Matta and Frasconi make clear reference to illusionistic space but at the same time place their subjects in uncertain territory. Cuevas challenges the detailed and staid vision of Jan van Eyck with an oddly expressive and existentialist interpretation that subverts the very essence of the original. Gego mimics conventional figure–ground relations by superimposing abstract shapes and linear patterns against a colorless background that suggests infinite space. Taken together, these varied compositions remind us that modernist tenets—whether elaborated in the United States, Europe or Latin America—represented communal ground, as artists exchanged and adapted stylistic innovations for seemingly endless purposes.