Message from Emily Talbot, Vice President of Collections and Chief Curator

 

Dear Members and Friends,

The year 2025 was a momentous one for the Norton Simon Museum community. We celebrated the institution’s 50th anniversary as the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, while undertaking the most significant renovation of our campus in more than 25 years. I hope many of you have had a chance to visit since the completion of our Exterior Improvement Project, and that you have enjoyed immersing yourselves in our newly spruced-up surroundings. Don’t miss our special anniversary exhibitions, Gold: Enduring Power, Sacred Craft (through February 16) and Retrospect: 50 Years at the Norton Simon Museum (through January 12), both of which offer new ways of interpreting the Museum’s collections and achievements over the past five decades.

In the spring and fall, we open two new exhibitions in the Focus Gallery. Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer is organized by Curator Gloria Williams Sander, and includes works of art and archival documents drawn from the Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection at the Norton Simon Museum. Its title inspired by the affectionate greeting in artist Lyonel Feininger’s letters to Scheyer, the exhibition reveals the social dynamics that shaped the German-born art dealer’s promotion of European modernism in the United States, considering Scheyer’s life and legacy through the personal relationships that she developed with artists and close associates.

In September, the Focus Gallery will feature The Art of Kandy: Sri Lanka’s Last Kingdom. Curated by Assistant Curator Lakshika Senarath Gamage, this exhibition highlights a discrete group of objects made in Kandy, the royal capital of Sri Lanka between the 15th and early 19th centuries. Through a varied assembly of works—all gifts to the Museum over the past three decades—the exhibition tells an expansive story about royal patronage, Buddhist devotion and the creative imagination, showing how a diverse religious and cultural population coexisted and produced art that transcended boundaries.

Now that the renovation outdoors is complete, the Museum’s staff members are turning our attention to important upgrades inside the building. In the late spring and summer, we will take a brief hiatus in exhibition programming as the curatorial staff focuses on improvements to our art storage facilities. During this time, some of our most beloved paintings will travel to major exhibitions in the United States and abroad to be enjoyed by international audiences. From March through June 2027, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s At Renoir's Home, rue St-Georges (1876) and The Pont des Arts, Paris (1867–68) will travel to the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery, London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for the traveling exhibition Renoir and Love. In May, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) will be highlighted in a major retrospective of the Spanish artist’s work that opens at the National Gallery, London before traveling to the Musée du Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago through June 2027. We look forward to seeing these key works from our collections in new contexts, and to debuting reciprocal loans from the borrowing institutions in our own galleries in the years ahead.

First among these will be Édouard Manet’s powerful and provocative The Execution of Maximilian, on loan from the National Gallery, London between November 13, 2026, and March 1, 2027. One of four paintings by Manet depicting the death by firing squad of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, and his generals, the National Gallery’s version was damaged during the artist’s lifetime and cut into fragments that were sold following his death in 1883. Manet’s friend and fellow artist Edgar Degas acquired the fragments with the goal of reconstituting Manet’s composition, an ambition that the National Gallery finally realized after purchasing the fragments from Degas’s posthumous studio sale in 1918. The display at the Norton Simon Museum will bring together Manet’s large-scale painting with the photographs and archival documents that informed his creative process, offering an in-depth account of a fraught historical event and the ways in which its meaning was understood and interpreted through visual art and material culture.

As we close out our 50th year, I find myself reflecting on this museum community and my gratitude for the enthusiasm and commitment that you show for this institution and its collections and programming. On behalf of the Museum’s President, Walter Timoshuk, our board members and staff, I thank you for bringing this joyful spirit to our galleries, and I look forward to embarking on the next era for the Norton Simon Museum together.

With warm wishes for the New Year,

Emily Talbot
Vice President of Collections and Chief Curator

-First published in our Winter 2026 Newsletter.