During a beautiful evening out in early Oct 1999, 6 years after the end of her married man, Jennifer Jones Simon threw away a coming-out party. Not for herself, an Oscar-winning actress who had got married industrialist and art gatherer Norton Simon in 1971, but for the museum that he based in Pasadena.
Jones and the museum's staff projected the occasion as the bringing out of a major restoration that raised the collecting and made the institution a lot asking over. The issue was an declaration that the museum was back up -- and that Jones, who died Thursday at the age of 90, had adopted afresh role that would get her cultural legacy.
Simon, who was the Americas greatest art gatherer of his time, built among the world's biggest individual collections accumulated since Second World War. He took hold of the failing Pasadena Art Museum in 1974 and reopened it as his own up museum the following year. It kept to be a destination for art aficionados after his death in 1993.
But concerns began to circle in the art world. Would the foundation, which had all of the time controlled as a rather individual enclave with limited world access, turn into a mausoleum? Or worse, would it be closed down and the collection disassembled?
Jones, who had become the museum's chairman and board chairman, started to allay cares in 1996 with the declaration that designer Frank Gehry, a while friend of the Simons and a trustee of the museum, would transform the constructing interior -- raising ceilings, adding up skylights, improving artificial lighting and dividing long hallways into smaller galleries for more familiar viewing. Landscape painting designer Nancy Goslee ability would make a garden oasis behind the museum with a rambling pond and graves stationed along walkways and nestled among plantings.
The physical changes, along with added to public access, added a wave of fresh appreciation for the museum and what Simon had achieved as a collector. Long known to specialists as accepting among the better collections in the state, the museum has widened its audience, appealing about 170,000 visitors a year.
While a glittery celebration brought in an appreciative crowd together to the completed project, Jones was in her component, appearing fabulous and accepting little credit for what had been achieved.
She said that Simon had admitted the jewels, and she just admitted the setting.
Decades after almost of the historical arts worth having were believed to be had by museums, Simon accumulated 12,000 pictures, carvings, drawings, prints and photos made over seven centuries -- with particular strength in European pictures and Indian and south-east Asian sculpture.
Without any conventional training in artwork, Jones was never entirely at home in the art world, and she was much seen as a front man at the museum, albeit a glamourous one. But Simon swept her into a area of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Degas, an exciting realm of galleries and high-ticket auctions, wherever on one affair they erroneously bid versus each other -- she in the sale room, he on a phone.
Behind the scenes, Jones evolved into more the film star married woman of a notoriously tough man of affairs and art deal-maker. At her suggestion, the couple took a honeymoon trip to Republic of India, where Jones' concern in yoga and easterly doctrine sparked her husband's concern in art that he had never seriously believed, launch what became a major accumulation.
Her Hollywood connections added members of the film community, letting in writer-director Billy Wilder and player Cary Grant, to Simon's museum and base boards, though they some of the times felt like dresses up.
Since Wilder told me: "Cary Grant and I'd drive to Pasadena for board meetings. We all of the time had a really good lunch on a nice grouping of people. And then there would be a meeting, but no discussion. Norton Simon ruled."
Simply as his health failed, Simon carried tremendous faith in the woman he called Mrs. Simon. While I visited them in 1990, while they were living in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I pressed him about the future of his collection.
All over the years he had thought about many choices, including merging his museum with the J. Paul Getty Museum and giving his collection to UCLA. He told that he had believed selling all the art and putting the income into his wife's institution for mental wellness programs.
"But you did not," Jones said, "and I'm glad you did not. You've put such passion and beloved and energy into your collection, trading it or giving it up would be too pitiful."
Afterward his death, she worked with the museum's staff to transform what had long been an parochial institution into a vibrant, receiving ethnical center -- with expanded public hours and a program of concerts, lectures and changing expositions.
Lifetime with Norton Simon was not easy, but Jones accepted big joy in his donation to Southern California cultural life and finally made her own place in it. While I paid her a visit calling for access to the museum's files to write an independent biography of Simon, her only concern was that the book be about the man and his art, not about her.
Jones and the museum's staff projected the occasion as the bringing out of a major restoration that raised the collecting and made the institution a lot asking over. The issue was an declaration that the museum was back up -- and that Jones, who died Thursday at the age of 90, had adopted afresh role that would get her cultural legacy.
Simon, who was the Americas greatest art gatherer of his time, built among the world's biggest individual collections accumulated since Second World War. He took hold of the failing Pasadena Art Museum in 1974 and reopened it as his own up museum the following year. It kept to be a destination for art aficionados after his death in 1993.
But concerns began to circle in the art world. Would the foundation, which had all of the time controlled as a rather individual enclave with limited world access, turn into a mausoleum? Or worse, would it be closed down and the collection disassembled?
Jones, who had become the museum's chairman and board chairman, started to allay cares in 1996 with the declaration that designer Frank Gehry, a while friend of the Simons and a trustee of the museum, would transform the constructing interior -- raising ceilings, adding up skylights, improving artificial lighting and dividing long hallways into smaller galleries for more familiar viewing. Landscape painting designer Nancy Goslee ability would make a garden oasis behind the museum with a rambling pond and graves stationed along walkways and nestled among plantings.
The physical changes, along with added to public access, added a wave of fresh appreciation for the museum and what Simon had achieved as a collector. Long known to specialists as accepting among the better collections in the state, the museum has widened its audience, appealing about 170,000 visitors a year.
While a glittery celebration brought in an appreciative crowd together to the completed project, Jones was in her component, appearing fabulous and accepting little credit for what had been achieved.
She said that Simon had admitted the jewels, and she just admitted the setting.
Decades after almost of the historical arts worth having were believed to be had by museums, Simon accumulated 12,000 pictures, carvings, drawings, prints and photos made over seven centuries -- with particular strength in European pictures and Indian and south-east Asian sculpture.
Without any conventional training in artwork, Jones was never entirely at home in the art world, and she was much seen as a front man at the museum, albeit a glamourous one. But Simon swept her into a area of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Degas, an exciting realm of galleries and high-ticket auctions, wherever on one affair they erroneously bid versus each other -- she in the sale room, he on a phone.
Behind the scenes, Jones evolved into more the film star married woman of a notoriously tough man of affairs and art deal-maker. At her suggestion, the couple took a honeymoon trip to Republic of India, where Jones' concern in yoga and easterly doctrine sparked her husband's concern in art that he had never seriously believed, launch what became a major accumulation.
Her Hollywood connections added members of the film community, letting in writer-director Billy Wilder and player Cary Grant, to Simon's museum and base boards, though they some of the times felt like dresses up.
Since Wilder told me: "Cary Grant and I'd drive to Pasadena for board meetings. We all of the time had a really good lunch on a nice grouping of people. And then there would be a meeting, but no discussion. Norton Simon ruled."
Simply as his health failed, Simon carried tremendous faith in the woman he called Mrs. Simon. While I visited them in 1990, while they were living in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I pressed him about the future of his collection.
All over the years he had thought about many choices, including merging his museum with the J. Paul Getty Museum and giving his collection to UCLA. He told that he had believed selling all the art and putting the income into his wife's institution for mental wellness programs.
"But you did not," Jones said, "and I'm glad you did not. You've put such passion and beloved and energy into your collection, trading it or giving it up would be too pitiful."
Afterward his death, she worked with the museum's staff to transform what had long been an parochial institution into a vibrant, receiving ethnical center -- with expanded public hours and a program of concerts, lectures and changing expositions.
Lifetime with Norton Simon was not easy, but Jones accepted big joy in his donation to Southern California cultural life and finally made her own place in it. While I paid her a visit calling for access to the museum's files to write an independent biography of Simon, her only concern was that the book be about the man and his art, not about her.
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