Emily Talbot, Acting Chief Curator, Norton Simon MuseumSaturday, March 2, 2019Working from a live model was a vital aspect of Henri Matisse’s artistic practice. He depended on the women who posed for him for creative inspiration, and several of them became trusted studio assistants and surrogate family members. This lecture focuses on three important women—the Italian known as Laurette, the former ballet dancer Henriette Darricarrère and the Russian Lydia Delectorskaya—to explore the ways...

Curator Gloria Williams Sander explores the Norton Simon's collection of cartoons by Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, which tell the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas. 

Encounters with the CollectionAssistant Curator Stephanie Rozman provides a closer look at two pillars from the Bharhut Stupa Railing, Female Deity (Yakshi) and an Amorous Couple (Mithuna) and The Great Departure of Siddhartha from the Norton Simon collection. 

Yve-Alain Bois, Professor of Art History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton UniversitySat, October 13, 2018As a young enlisted soldier in World War II, Ellsworth Kelly spent a brief spell in Paris. After the war, following two frustrating years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he returned to the French capital for a longer period. Postwar Paris offered Kelly the chance to quickly master the pictorial language of modernism, and by age 26, he had already painted his...

Encounters with the CollectionAssistant Curator Emily Talbot shares with viewers one of her favorite works in the Norton Simon collection: Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Cirque Fernando, Rider on a White Horse from 1887–1888.

Colin B. Bailey, Director, Morgan Library & MuseumSat, May 5, 2018In his comic novel The Outcry, published in 1911, Henry James characterizes the American robber baron collectors as the "conquering horde . . . only armed now with huge chequebooks instead of spears and battle-axes." The creation of outstanding private collections of European art in America was a phenomenon of the Gilded Age. James based the character of the American banker, Breckenridge Bender—"the wretch who bagged Lady...

Emily Talbot, Assistant Curator, Norton Simon MuseumSat, March 10, 2018Beloved by museum visitors today, Degas’s Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen was deeply divisive when it was first exhibited at the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. Although some viewers welcomed the tinted wax figurine as an exciting new direction in realist art, many others were disturbed by Degas’s unidealized treatment of the dancer’s body and facial features, which he reinforced by outfitting the statuette in a...

Chief Curator Carol Togneri shares with viewers one of her favorite paintings in the Norton Simon collection: Guercino’s beloved Aldrovandi Dog from c. 1625.

Larry Keith, ‎Head of Conservation and Keeper at The National Gallery, LondonSat, February 24, 2018The way in which Rembrandt handled his paint—whether the immaculate finish of his early works, or the so-called rough manner of his later paintings—has been important to an appreciation of his works. His technical mastery always was valued as a vehicle of expression. As his fame and the value of his works increased over the centuries, the nature of his method also became a principal means of...

Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA,Saturday, May 18, 2013Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA, first became acquainted with Dan Flavin both personally and professionally while working on the interior installation illuminating the reopening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1992. In this lecture, to coincide with the installation of the artist's "monument" on the survival of Mrs. Reppin, Mr. Govan discusses Flavin’s career, arguing that it was...

George Shackelford, Deputy Director, Kimbell Art MuseumSat, January 20, 2018George Shackelford discusses Degas’s lifelong preoccupation with the human body—particularly the female nude—and the means he employed to understand and render the body in works of art, both two- and three-dimensional.Presented in conjunction with Taking Shape: Degas as Sculptor. 

Anne T. Woollett, Curator, J. Paul Getty MuseumSat, December 9, 2017By 1640, after nearly a decade of extraordinary achievement as a portrait and history painter in Amsterdam, Rembrandt rose to fame and prosperity. Self Portrait at the Age of 34 (London, National Gallery), in which Rembrandt portrays himself in the rich accoutrements of fur and velvet, has often been seen as an index to the master’s status at that time. Anne Woollett examines the ways in which this painting, with its...

In 2016, Giovanni di Paolo's masterpiece, "Branchini Madonna,” from 1427, underwent conservation work and technical analysis at the J. Paul Getty Museum. In this video, Norton Simon Curator Gloria Williams Sander interviews Yvonne Szafran, Senior Conservator and Head of Paintings Conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum, about this study and its findings.

Susan Landauer, Independent Art Historian and CuratorSeptember 16, 2017In early 20th-century San Francisco, the introduction and assimilation of European modernist art sparked widespread excitement and controversy. When Galka Scheyer arrived in 1925, she was immediately embraced by San Francisco’s fledgling avant-garde. Through her energetic lecture circuit and her position as European representative of the Oakland Art Gallery, she also introduced German Expressionism, Dadaism and...

Victoria Dailey, Writer and Independent CuratorMay 13, 2017Although Los Angeles had a small group of modern artists in the 1920s, modernism was little known and often disparaged by most of the city’s art world. When Galka Scheyer organized the first Blue Four exhibition in Los Angeles in 1926, one artist remarked: "It reminded me of crawling things—of worms or things mouldering in the ground, Ugh! It was awful." Such an uninviting climate did not deter Scheyer, affectionately called "Little...

Gloria Williams Sander, Curator, Norton Simon MuseumSaturday, April 22, 2017Alexei Jawlensky nicknamed Emmy Scheyer "Galka," the Russian name for a small crow, known to be exceptionally intelligent, energetic and gregarious. These characteristics served Scheyer in her mission to introduce the American public to the avant-garde art of European modernists, especially the Blue Four. Scheyer’s activity to educate, cultivate and place their work in private and public collections was nothing short...

Curator Gloria Williams Sander discusses the life of Galka Scheyer, the enterprising dealer responsible for the art phenomenon the “Blue Four”—Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, and how her art collection and archives entered the Pasadena Institute of Art, now the Norton Simon Museum.

Assistant Curator Emily Talbot examines the improvisational nature of Edgar Degas’s work in three-dimensional form, and the importance of the Norton Simon’s collection of Degas’s modèle bronzes.