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Norton Simon Museum

Museum · Founded 1922

Open, admission and hours confirmed 13 August 2026 · 36 sources

On this page 15 sections
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The Norton Simon Museum entrance
The 1969 Ladd and Kelsey entrance pavilion, clad in Edith Heath's dark ceramic tile, with two of Rodin's Burghers of Calais figures flanking the walk and the drum skylight of the entrance rotunda above.Photograph by Jmabel · CC BY-SA 4.0

About 12,000 objects assembled by one collector, Norton Simon, in roughly thirty years of buying. The strength most visitors come for is European: Old Masters from Botticelli to Goya, the only Raphael on the West Coast, three Rembrandts, six Van Goghs, and an Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection built around more than 100 works by Degas, including the unique set of 69 modele bronzes cast directly from his own wax originals. The Museum's other great strength is South and Southeast Asian sculpture: more than thirty Chola-period bronzes from Tamil Nadu, Kushan and Gupta stone carving from north India, and material from Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia and Thailand spanning over 2,000 years. That second strength was built the fastest, in the 1970s, and it is shadowed by the decade's own record: a Chola bronze bought in 1972 and returned to India in 1976 after litigation, a Cambodian temple guardian bought in 1976 and returned in 2014, and Norton Simon's own on-the-record admission in 1973 that he knew much of what he was buying was smuggled.

Norton Simon Museum at a glance
KindMuseum
Founded1922 as the Pasadena Art Institute; the present building by Ladd and Kelsey opened in 1969; renamed the Norton Simon Museum in October 1975
City and countryPasadena, United States
Address411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91105
Websitenortonsimon.org
StatusOpen, confirmed 13 August 2026
Record last verified13 August 2026

Visiting

What it costs and when it is openConfirmed 13 August 2026
Hours
  • Monday12:00 to 17:00
  • Thursday12:00 to 17:00
  • Friday12:00 to 19:00
  • Saturday12:00 to 19:00
  • Sunday12:00 to 17:00
Closed
Tuesday and Wednesday, every week. The cafe and store close 15 minutes before the Museum closes. Final entry for visitors without a membership or advance ticket is 45 minutes before closing.
Admission
  • AdultUSD 20
  • Senior, 62 and aboveUSD 15
  • Children, 18 and underFreefree at all times
  • Students with valid IDFreefree at all times
  • Norton Simon Museum MembersFree
Free entry: The first Friday of every month, 4:00 to 7:00 p.m., free for all visitors. Active military personnel with valid ID. Museum colleagues, on presentation of a business card or staff badge. Members of AAM and ICOM, on presentation of a membership card. Members of the media, on presentation of a business card or staff badge. Holders of the EBT card. Visitors who are legally blind, and caregivers accompanying visitors with disabilities
Tickets
nortonsimon.org/visit The museum's own ticket page.
Do I need to book?
No. Advance tickets are not required but are recommended to expedite check-in; general admission tickets are sold for a specific day rather than a specific entry time and remain valid for 30 days if unused
Address
411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91105 Map
Bus Pasadena Transit lines 10 and 33 stop in front of the Museum; Metro Local Line 180 also stops in front
Rail Metro A Line, Memorial Park Station at 125 E. Holly St. and Arroyo Parkway, the closest Metro Rail stop to the Museum
Car The Museum's own parking lot, upper and lower, is free of charge; limited free parking is also available on adjacent streets. Accessible spaces are provided in both lots
Website
nortonsimon.org
Telephone
+1 626 449 6840
Email
[email protected]
Before you go how long, access, photography, bags, eating, shop
How long to allow
The Museum does not publish a headline figure, but the collection is deliberately compact: it is presented as an afternoon rather than a day-long visit, in contrast to the encyclopaedic museums nearby
Access
Accessible parking in both lots with entrance ramps either side of the main stairway; a limited number of loan wheelchairs at the Admissions and Coat Check desks; both levels of the Museum connected by elevator with ADA-compliant restrooms; two wheelchair pads and slide-in seating in the theater; assisted listening devices for special programs and weekly tours; open captioning on the introductory film; ASL interpretation for special events on two weeks' notice; service animals welcome
Photography
Informal, noncommercial photography and filming is permitted in the galleries and gardens. Flash, lighting rigs, tripods, monopods, selfie sticks, costumes and props are prohibited, as are professional or commercial shoots. Works on loan from private collections or other institutions may not be photographed
Bags
Bags or personal items larger than 11 by 15 inches are prohibited in the galleries; small backpacks and baby carriers must be worn on the front or side of the body; strollers, wagons, bicycles, skateboards and scooters are not permitted inside
Eating
The Garden Cafe, run by the Patina Restaurant Group, in the Sculpture Garden; outside food is not permitted except for medical necessity, baby food or special-needs food
Shop
The Museum Store, on the entry level, also trades online at store.nortonsimon.org

Prices and hours change. We take them from the institution's own pages and print the day we read them, and you can check the current position at the source we used. Confirm before you travel.

What is inside

6 spaces, 5 photographed
  • The entrance rotunda, with the Museum Store and a painting gallery visible through the archways
    Photograph by Jmabel · CC BY-SA 4.0

    The entrance pavilion and Museum Store

    The low glass-walled pavilion beneath the grey drum skylight is the 1969 Ladd and Kelsey entrance, opening onto the travertine rotunda where the Museum Store and coat check now sit and where the two levels of the building meet by elevator and stairs.

  • Visitors in a gallery of gilt-framed European Old Master paintings
    CC0

    European Old Masters galleries

    Renaissance and Baroque rooms holding the Museum's Botticelli, Giorgione and Raphael, whose Madonna and Child with Book of about 1502-03 is the only painting by Raphael on the West Coast, alongside Zurbaran's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose of 1633 and three Rembrandt portraits, including the Self-Portrait of about 1639 and Portrait of a Boy of 1655-60.

  • The entrance rotunda during the Museum's 50th-anniversary retrospective exhibition
    Photograph by Jmabel · CC BY-SA 4.0

    The rotunda and special-exhibition space

    A circular basin at the center of the entry level, ringed by the Museum's changing program of temporary shows. It is pictured here during Retrospect: 50 Years at the Norton Simon, the exhibition that marked the institution's own half-century as the Norton Simon Museum in 2025. The rotunda's next scheduled exhibition, announced on the Museum's own site as of this update, is The Art of Kandy: Sri Lanka's Last Kingdom (1469-1815), running 4 September 2026 to 8 February 2027.

  • A gallery corridor of South and Southeast Asian stone sculpture on plinths
    CC0

    South and Southeast Asian sculpture, lower level

    Stone and bronze sculpture from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia and Thailand spanning more than 2,000 years, including more than thirty Chola-period bronzes from Tamil Nadu and monumental Kushan and Gupta stone carving. This is the area Norton Simon pursued hardest and fastest in the 1970s, and the one that produced the two restitutions this record describes below.

  • The lily pond in the Sculpture Garden, with a bronze figure and the tiled museum building beyond
    Photograph by Remi Mathis · CC BY-SA 3.0

    The Sculpture Garden

    Redesigned in the late 1990s by the landscape architect Nancy Goslee Power at the request of Jennifer Jones Simon, who asked for something "just like Monet's Giverny": a lily pond bordered by daylilies and bog plants, ringed by Rodin's Burghers of Calais, The Thinker and Monument to Balzac, and by Moore, Maillol, Hepworth and Lipchitz. The garden closed for ten months from January 2025 for a rebuild of the pond, paths and perimeter wall, and reopened to the public in November 2025; the Museum's own garden page, re-read 13 August 2026, describes the rebuilt garden as open and unchanged since.

  • The Asian Sculpture Garden

    A dozen stone sculptures set among the plantings at the garden's edge: Tamil Nadu images of Vishnu, Shiva and Uma dated as early as about 850, a bull with a Shivalingam probably from Rajasthan, and two Angkor-period lingams from Cambodia. No free-licence photograph specifically of this corner of the garden could be verified, so it is not illustrated here; the general Sculpture Garden photograph above does not show it.

What to see first

  • Adam and Eve

    Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530

    The two panels this archive holds a record of, and the object around which twelve years of Nazi-era restitution litigation, Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum, turned before ending in the Museum's favor in 2019. See the criticism section below. Both panels are confirmed ON VIEW on the Museum's own object pages as of 13 August 2026.13

    Full record in this archive

  • Madonna and Child with Book

    Raphael, c. 1502-03

    A devotional meditation piece rather than a simple portrait group: the inscription in the book the Madonna and Child hold together introduces the Nones of the Canonical Offices, the hour commemorating Christ's Crucifixion and Death, and the Christ Child's eyes are already lifted toward His own sacrifice, by the Museum's own description of the painting.25

  • Self-Portrait

    Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1639

    Rembrandt portrays himself in the beret that had marked the artistic milieu since the 16th century and a chain of the kind a noble patron awarded an artist as a mark of prestige, at a moment, the Museum's own account says, when artists were only beginning to claim their standing among the creative elite.26

  • Portrait of a Boy in a Fancy Costume, formerly known as Titus

    Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655-60

    Left visibly unfinished, which the Museum's own account says is exactly what makes it valuable as a record of the artist's method: the face and eyes fully modeled and finished while the collar, hair and costume are indicated only in a few broad, sure brushstrokes over a dark ground.27

  • The Mulberry Tree

    Vincent van Gogh, October 1889

    Painted at the asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence where Van Gogh had committed himself that spring, in the vigorous late brushwork that the Museum says turns the canvas surface into a kind of bas-relief; Van Gogh told his siblings in letters that he considered it his most successful treatment of the subject.28

  • Woman with a Book

    Pablo Picasso, 1932

    A portrait of Picasso's lover Marie-Therese Walter that the Museum's own account frames as homage to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose Portrait of Madame Moitessier Picasso had first encountered in 1921; where Ingres gave his sitter a fan, Picasso gives his the fluttering pages of a book, and the profile reflected in the mirror at right may be an abstracted Picasso self-portrait.29

  • Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, and the modele bronzes

    Edgar Degas, wax original c. 1878-81; bronzes cast c. 1919-32

    Degas alone is represented by more than 100 works here, spanning paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculpture in nearly every medium he worked in except photography - the second-largest such holding assembled by a single collector anywhere, after the Havemeyer collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by the Museum's own account - including the modele-cast bronzes and a cast of the Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.30

  • The Burghers of Calais

    Auguste Rodin, cast of the 1889 monument

    The centerpiece of the walk from the parking lot into the Museum: six men with nooses around their necks, commemorating the citizens of Calais who offered their own lives to save their city in 1347. Full-size studies of the individual figures surround it.11

  • Shiva as Tripuravijaya

    Chola dynasty, southern India, late 10th century

    One of the earliest and, by the Museum's own account, most remarkable Chola sculptures in the collection, and the piece that showed Norton Simon what these bronzes could do; he compared their command of dynamic posture to Degas's sculpture.10

  • Four bronze images of Shiva as Nataraja

    Chola dynasty, southern India; two of the four dated by the Museum to the 11th century

    Acquired in the 1970s, the same decade in which Norton Simon bought and then, under legal pressure, returned a fifth Nataraja to India. The four that remain are part of a Chola-bronze holding of more than thirty pieces, one of the largest outside India. See the criticism section below for the one that did not stay.10

Artworks recorded here

1 artwork

Exhibitions on now

From Carmelita to a bankrupt modern-art museum

The ground the Museum stands on was a private garden before it was anything else. Jeanne Carr bought the tract in 1877 and made it into an estate she called Carmelita, one of the most admired gardens in the area; the land passed through several owners before it was deeded to the City of Pasadena in 1941 on condition that part of it be kept for the city's art institute. That institute, the Pasadena Art Institute, had been founded in 1922 and incorporated in 1924, and for its first two decades it had no building of its own on the site: it merged in 1942 with the one-year-old Pasadena Museum of Art and set up its headquarters in Grace Nicholson's Chinese House on North Los Robles Avenue, now the Pacific Asia Museum.

In 1953 the institute received almost 500 works from the estate of Galka Scheyer, the dealer and champion of Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Feininger, known collectively as the Blue Four; the gift, and the archive of correspondence that came with it, was announced as making the institute one of the richest collections of modern art of its kind anywhere. The following year it renamed itself the Pasadena Art Museum and turned toward acquiring and exhibiting 20th-century art in earnest, staging the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective, with Duchamp in attendance, along with early Warhol and Oldenburg shows and a landmark Bauhaus exhibition. In 1964 the museum commissioned the Pasadena firm of Ladd and Kelsey to design a new 85,000-square-foot building on the Carmelita site, and on 24 November 1969 the new Pasadena Art Museum opened.

It did not have long to enjoy the new building. Renamed the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art in 1973, the institution carried debts from the construction that its trustees could not resolve, and by 1974 it faced bankruptcy.

Norton Simon takes over, 1974-1975

Norton Simon was a businessman before he was a collector: born in Portland, Oregon in 1907, he built a sheet-metal distribution business in Los Angeles in the 1920s, turned a $7,000 investment in a struggling juice bottler into Hunt Foods, and assembled, through mergers and acquisitions, the conglomerate Norton Simon Inc., which came to include Hunt-Wesson, McCall's, Canada Dry, Max Factor and Avis. His collecting began in the 1950s with Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne; by the 1960s he was buying Old Masters as well, starting with the 1964 purchase of the remaining inventory of the New York dealers Duveen Brothers, and he was an early trustee whose push to separate the art and science functions of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art helped bring the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into being.

His marriage to the actress Jennifer Jones in 1971 redirected his collecting. Until then his purchases had been almost entirely European; on their honeymoon in India that summer he began buying Indian art, starting with a Mughal ivory chess set, and South and Southeast Asian sculpture occupied a large part of his attention for the rest of his life. By early 1974 he was looking for a permanent home for a collection that had outgrown his self-described 'museum without walls' of long-term loans to institutions worldwide, and he took over the financially failing Pasadena Museum of Modern Art in exchange for assuming its debts. The museum closed for renovation on 24 June 1974 and reopened on 1 March 1975 with the Pasadena and Simon collections combined; in October 1975 it took the name it has kept since, the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena. Simon continued to oversee it after being diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome in 1984, made his last acquisition, Courbet's Peasant Girl with a Scarf, on 22 December 1989, and died on 2 June 1993.

"Hell yes, it was smuggled": the Nataraja and the Bhima

The same decade that built the Museum's Asian holdings produced its clearest documented case of the trade Norton Simon was buying into. In 1972 he paid the New York dealer Ben Heller for a tenth-century bronze Nataraja, Shiva as Lord of Dance, that Heller had bought from the Bombay dealer Boman Behram; two secondary accounts of the case put the price at 900,000 dollars, but Simon himself, in the New York Times interview quoted below, said he had paid 1 million dollars, and this record does not resolve the conflict. The bronze had been legitimately excavated near Sivapuram, Tamil Nadu in the early 1950s and placed under court order in the local Sivagurunathaswamy temple; sometime between 1956 and 1965, while it was supposedly with a craftsman for restoration, it was replaced with a copy and the original left the country. The story broke on 12 May 1973, when the New York Times, whose reporter David L. Shirey had reached Simon by telephone, ran the story on its front page under the headline 'Norton Simon Bought Smuggled Idol', the same week the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would exhibit the piece. Asked whether it had been smuggled, Simon answered on the record: 'Hell, yes, it was smuggled,' said Mr. Simon in a telephone interview. 'I spent between $15-million and $16-million over the last two years on Asian art, and most of it was smuggled. I don't know whether it was stolen.' The Indian government sued in Los Angeles; the statue, by then shipped to the British Museum for restoration, was impounded there by Scotland Yard; and the case settled out of court in 1976 with the Nataraja returned to India, where it is now kept in the Kapaleeswarar temple in Chennai. Simon later disputed having made the statement, but the Times's own contemporaneous report, read via an archive.org mirror after nytimes.com refused direct access, confirms the quotation exactly as printed above, as do two independent secondary accounts that also examined it.

The admission did not end the buying. The Museum's own published account of its South Indian bronzes states that its holdings include four further images of Shiva as Nataraja, two of them dated to the 11th century, among more than thirty Chola-period bronzes bought in the same general period as the one that was returned. In 1976, the same year the Nataraja went back to India, the Museum bought a tenth-century sandstone temple guardian, since called the Bhima or 'Temple Wrestler,' from a New York dealer. It had almost certainly been looted around 1972 from the Prasat Chen shrine at Koh Ker in Cambodia amid the disorder of the Khmer Rouge period, one of a set of related guardian figures that also passed through the Metropolitan Museum, Sotheby's and Christie's, all of whom eventually returned their pieces. The Norton Simon Museum announced in May 2014 that it would return the Bhima to Cambodia after nearly four decades on display; its outside counsel stated publicly that the Museum believed it held strong legal grounds to keep the statue but judged a gift more appropriate given its relationship with Cambodia, a framing that provenance researchers covering the return pointed out sat uneasily next to Simon's own 1973 statement about what he knew he was buying. Cambodia agreed in return to periodically loan other ancient sculpture to Pasadena.

Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum: two Cranachs, twelve years of litigation

The Museum's other major restitution case concerns two panels this archive holds a record of, Lucas Cranach the Elder's Adam and Eve of about 1530. They belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, the Amsterdam Jewish dealer who fled the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and died on the ship out; his firm and its stock, including these panels, passed to Hermann Goering through a series of agreements the Ninth Circuit later described as uncontested by every party to have been forced. The Allies recovered the paintings after the war and returned them to the Dutch government in 1946. In 1966 the Dutch government sold them to George Stroganoff-Sherbatoff, who claimed a family connection to the works, and Stroganoff sold them on to the Norton Simon Museum in 1971 for 800,000 dollars.

Goudstikker's heir by marriage, Marei von Saher, petitioned the Dutch government for restoration of rights in the late 1990s; a Dutch appellate court denied her petition. She sued the Norton Simon Museum in a California federal court in 2007. In 2014 a Ninth Circuit panel let her claim proceed, on the ground that it did not conflict with any settled federal policy toward foreign restitution proceedings, since the paintings had never actually been through one. On remand, the district court granted summary judgment for the Museum in 2016, holding that under the relevant Dutch postwar decrees the forced transaction had remained legally effective because nobody in the Goudstikker line had taken the formal step needed to nullify it. On 30 July 2018 a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed that judgment, but on different and narrower grounds: the act of state doctrine, which bars a United States court from declaring the sovereign acts of a foreign government, performed within its own territory, invalid. To rule for von Saher, the panel held, a court would have to invalidate at least three official Dutch acts in sequence: the 1966 conveyance to Stroganoff, the Dutch appellate court's later refusal to restore her rights, and the Dutch state's own statement that her claim to these two paintings had been settled. The Supreme Court denied her petition for certiorari on 20 May 2019, ending twelve years of litigation. The Museum said afterward that it was pleased the case was finally over, that the Ninth Circuit's decision confirmed the Norton Simon Art Foundation's title, and that it looked forward to continuing to show the paintings as it had for nearly fifty years. The ruling turned on a doctrine about the finality of foreign sovereign acts, not on a finding that the wartime forced sale was anything other than what both sides agreed it was. Both panels remain on view at the Museum, confirmed on the Museum's own object pages for Adam and for Eve as of 13 August 2026.

The building: Edith Heath's tiles, Gehry's interiors and the 2025 restoration

The building itself is Ladd and Kelsey's, from 1969, a low curvilinear structure clad in roughly 115,000 hand-crafted ceramic tiles designed by the ceramicist Edith Heath, 1911-2005, in a dark reddish-brown glaze that reads almost black from the street. After Norton Simon's death in 1993, his widow Jennifer Jones Simon, then chairperson of the board, commissioned a renovation of the galleries by Frank Gehry, carried out from 1996 to 1999, and a new Sculpture Garden from the landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power, who replaced Ladd and Kelsey's rectilinear reflecting pool with a naturally shaped lily pond at Jennifer Jones Simon's request for something 'just like Monet's Giverny.' Arthur Gensler's firm completed the sequence by remodeling the Museum's theater in 2000.

The tiles themselves became the subject of a fresh, and considerably larger, restoration in 2025. A conservation study begun in 2023 found the original glaze formula unreproducible because it contained lead, so the Museum worked with Heath Ceramics to hand-cast about 3,000 replacement tiles to a new, lead-free formula matched by eye to the original tone and texture, accounting for roughly 12 percent shrinkage in firing. That tile work was one part of a 15-million-dollar, nine-to-ten-month Exterior Improvement Project that began on 7 January 2025, the same week wildfires broke out at Pacific Palisades and Altadena elsewhere in the county: the Sculpture Garden's pond was drained, reduced in size and rebuilt in concrete with a new biofiltration system; its gravel paths were replaced with a permeable, all-weather surface; a new perimeter wall was built to cut traffic noise from Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards; a rebuilt, ADA-compliant pedestrian path and new signage were added along Colorado Boulevard, aimed explicitly at drivers who the Museum's own project materials say routinely miss what the building holds; and Rodin's The Thinker, previously facing the boulevard from the south lawn, was moved to stand beside the front steps among the Museum's other Rodin casts. The garden reopened in November 2025, in the year the Museum marked fifty years under Norton Simon's name.

What visitors say

We publish no visitor-review prose and no single aggregate score as fact; what follows is drawn from the Museum's own published material and the named press coverage in our sources. The collection is repeatedly framed, by the Museum and by outside coverage alike, as large in quality and small in footprint: built by one collector across roughly thirty years, displayable in an afternoon rather than a full day, and easy to underestimate from Colorado Boulevard, which is the stated reason the Museum spent part of a 2025 renovation on street-facing signage and a new pedestrian entrance.

What is praised, what is criticised

  • Praised: the density of major names in a building most visitors can see in an afternoon: the only Raphael on the West Coast, three Rembrandts, six Van Goghs and more than 100 Degas, including the unique set of modele bronzes
  • Praised: free admission at all times for everyone 18 and under and for students with valid ID, plus free general admission every first Friday of the month from 4 to 7 p.m.
  • Praised: the Sculpture Garden, reopened in November 2025 after a ten-month rebuild, with its lily pond and Rodin, Moore and Maillol set among the plantings
  • Criticised: the Museum's own diagnosis, stated in its 2025 renovation materials, that passing drivers on Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards routinely fail to register what the tiled building holds
  • Criticised: the Sculpture Garden, one of the Museum's principal draws, was closed to visitors for ten months during 2025 for the pond and path rebuild
  • Criticised: named criticism of the Museum's own framing of its 2014 return of a looted Cambodian statue as a voluntary "gift" rather than a restitution, when the Museum's outside counsel had also said it believed it held strong legal grounds to keep the piece
Covered the Museum's completed 115,000-tile facade restoration and Sculpture Garden rebuild as an attempt by an 'underappreciated' institution to reintroduce itself to the city, reporting the project's $15 million cost and its use of newly hand-cast, lead-free replacement tiles from Heath Ceramics matched to Edith Heath's 1969 originals.Los Angeles Times, staff report, syndicated, 1 November 2025 [20]
Argued, on the occasion of the Bhima's return to Cambodia, that the Museum's public position of magnanimity sat uneasily beside Norton Simon's own 1973 admission to a New York Times reporter that most of the roughly $16 million he had spent on Asian art in the prior two years was smuggled, and beside the Museum's continued, undisputed acquisitions of Cambodian material after that admission.anonymousswisscollector.com (provenance research), the site's editor, 24 May 2014 [16]

Ratings on other platforms

Google: 4.8 from 3,441 ratings, read 6 August 2026
A platform average is a tertiary source: it moves, it is not audited, and we quote no visitor's words.

Questions about Norton Simon Museum

Where is Norton Simon Museum?

411 West Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91105.

How much does it cost to visit?

Adult: USD 20; Senior, 62 and above: USD 15; Children, 18 and under: free; Students with valid ID: free; Norton Simon Museum Members: free. As confirmed 13 August 2026.

When is it open?

Monday 12:00-17:00; Thursday 12:00-17:00; Friday 12:00-19:00; Saturday 12:00-19:00; Sunday 12:00-17:00. Closed: Tuesday and Wednesday, every week. The cafe and store close 15 minutes before the Museum closes. As confirmed 13 August 2026.

How do you get there?

Bus: Pasadena Transit lines 10 and 33 stop in front of the Museum; Metro Local Line 180 also stops in front; Rail: Metro A Line, Memorial Park Station at 125 E. Holly St. and Arroyo Parkway, the closest Metro Rail stop to the Museum; Car: The Museum's own parking lot, upper and lower, is free of charge; limited free parking is also available on adjacent streets. Accessible spaces are provided in both lots.

What should you see first?

Adam and Eve (Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530); Madonna and Child with Book (Raphael, c. 1502-03); Self-Portrait (Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1639); Portrait of a Boy in a Fancy Costume, formerly known as Titus (Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655-60); The Mulberry Tree (Vincent van Gogh, October 1889); Woman with a Book (Pablo Picasso, 1932).

What we could not confirm

  • How many of the Museum's four remaining Nataraja bronzes, and how many of its more than thirty Chola-period bronzes generally, carry documented findspots and export histories; the Museum's own published material does not say, and we found no independent survey of the group.
  • The exact terms of the 1976 Sivapuram Nataraja settlement beyond the outcome (return to India after a civil suit); we could not locate the settlement agreement itself, only secondary accounts of it.
  • Whether any further Prasat Chen-linked Cambodian sculpture remains under review at institutions other than the Norton Simon Museum; reporting on the Bhima's 2014 return noted related pieces still held elsewhere at that time, and we have not re-checked their status.

Images

2 plates
The tiled facade at close range
The tiled facade at close rangeThe building's dark, hand-crafted ceramic cladding seen close to the entrance doors, the same tile restored and partly recast in the Museum's 2025 Exterior Improvement Project.Photograph by Jmabel · CC BY-SA 4.0
The Museum seen from the Sculpture Garden
The Museum seen from the Sculpture GardenThe tiled building seen through the trees of the Sculpture Garden, with two of the outdoor bronzes visible at the base of the wall.CC0

Sources

36
  1. 1Norton Simon Museum, Visiting the Museum: hours, admission fees, ticketing terms, dining, parking and public transport. Read 6 August 2026; re-read 13 August 2026, all figures unchanged. nortonsimon.org/visit/
  2. 2Norton Simon Museum, Visitor Guidelines: photography and filming rules, bag policy, the Sculpture Garden's 2025 closure and reopening, the General Information phone line. Read 6 August 2026. nortonsimon.org/visit/visitor-guidelines
  3. 3Norton Simon Museum, Accessibility: parking, wheelchairs, assisted listening, ASL interpretation and audio tours. Read 6 August 2026. nortonsimon.org/visit/accessibility
  4. 4Norton Simon Museum, homepage: address and General Information telephone number, read from the site footer. Read 6 August 2026; re-read 13 August 2026, hours, admission and phone number unchanged. nortonsimon.org/
  5. 5Norton Simon Museum, Museum History: the Pasadena Art Institute from 1922, the 1953 Galka Scheyer bequest, the 1969 Ladd and Kelsey building, the 1974-1975 transition to Norton Simon, and the 1996-2000 Gehry and Gensler renovations. nortonsimon.org/about/museum-history
  6. 6Norton Simon Museum, History of the Collection: the scope and pace of Norton Simon's own buying, the 1974 absorption of the Pasadena Art Museum, and the collection's present size, including the 1977 acquisition of the Degas modele bronzes. nortonsimon.org/art/history-of-the-collection
  7. 7Norton Simon Museum, About Norton Simon: his business career, his 1971 marriage to Jennifer Jones and the honeymoon trip to India, his 1984 illness and 1993 death. nortonsimon.org/about/about-norton-simon
  8. 8Norton Simon Museum, European Painting and Sculpture: the department's own account of its Raphael, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, Degas, Picasso and Rodin holdings. nortonsimon.org/art/explore-the-collection/european-painting-and-sculpture
  9. 9Norton Simon Museum, South and Southeast Asian Painting and Sculpture: the department's own account of its Chola bronzes, Kushan and Gupta stone sculpture, and holdings from Cambodia, Thailand, Tibet and Nepal. nortonsimon.org/art/explore-the-collection/south-and-southeast-asian-paintings-and-sculpture
  10. 10Norton Simon Museum, South Indian Bronzes at the Norton Simon Museum (In Focus): the four Nataraja bronzes, the Tripuravijaya of about 875, and the more than thirty Chola-dynasty bronzes in the collection. nortonsimon.org/art/in-focus/south-indian-bronzes-at-the-norton-simon-museum
  11. 11Norton Simon Museum, Sculpture Garden: the Carmelita estate and Jeanne Carr, the land's 1941 transfer to Pasadena, the 1969 Ladd and Kelsey garden, the 1990s Nancy Goslee Power redesign at Jennifer Jones Simon's request, the 2025 rebuild and reopening, and the full list of sculptures on view including the Asian Sculpture Garden. Read 6 August 2026; re-read 13 August 2026, garden confirmed open with no further change since the 2025 rebuild. nortonsimon.org/visit/sculpture-garden
  12. 12Norton Simon Museum, Building for Our Future: The Norton Simon Museum's Exterior Improvement Project: the full 2025 project scope, cost context, timeline and project team. nortonsimon.org/about/exterior-improvement-project-2025
  13. 13United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, No. 16-56308, decided 30 July 2018, via Justia: the court's own summary of the forced sale, the 1966 and 1971 conveyances, and the act of state doctrine holding. law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/16-56308/16-56308-2018-07-30.html
  14. 14Grossman LLP, 'Ninth Circuit Rules Against Heiress of Nazi-Looted Work, Which Will Remain in Possession of California's Norton Simon Museum': the fuller procedural history from the 2007 filing through the 2014 remand and 2016 district court ruling. grossmanllp.com/Ninth-Circuit-Rules-Against-Heiress-of-Nazi-Loote
  15. 15The Art Newspaper, 'US Supreme Court declines to hear appeal on Nazi-looted art', 21 May 2019: the certiorari denial and the Museum's public statement. theartnewspaper.com/2019/05/21/us-supreme-court-declines-to-hear-appeal-on-nazi-looted-art
  16. 16anonymousswisscollector.com, '"Hell yes, it was smuggled": Stolen Cambodian statue is not the first Norton Simon has returned', 24 May 2014: the 1972-1976 Sivapuram Nataraja timeline, Norton Simon's 1973 statement to the New York Times as reported by that paper, and criticism of the Museum's framing of the 2014 Bhima return. anonymousswisscollector.com/2014/05/hell-yes-it-was-smuggled-on-the-return-of-stolen-south-asian-statues.html
  17. 17Chasing Aphrodite, 'A Blast from the Past: "Norton Simon Bought Smuggled Idol"', 10 April 2012: a second, independent account of the 1973 New York Times interview, corroborating the quotation and citing the original headline. chasingaphrodite.com/2012/04/10/a-blast-from-the-past-norton-simon-bought-smuggled-idol/
  18. 18LAist (formerly KPCC), 'Norton Simon Museum to return "Temple Wrestler" statue to Cambodia', 7 May 2014: the announcement, the statue's Prasat Chen/Koh Ker findspot, and the loan arrangement offered in return. laist.com/news/2014/05/07/44022/norton-simon-museum-to-return-temple-wrestler-stat/
  19. 19Claremont Graduate University, Cultural Property Disputes Resource, 'Sivapuram Nataraja Bronze Statue': a structured case record giving the 1973-1976 dates, the provenance chain through Boman Behram and Ben Heller, and the statue's present location in the Kapaleeswarar temple, Chennai. research.cgu.edu/cultural-property-disputes-resource/cpdr/sivapuram-nataraja-bronze-statue/
  20. 20Los Angeles Times, syndicated via AOL News, 'With a $15-million renovation, this beloved museum is reintroducing itself to L.A.', November 2025: the Exterior Improvement Project's cost, the Edith Heath tile restoration and re-casting, the Rodin relocation, and the project's start date coinciding with the Pacific Palisades and Altadena wildfires. aol.com/news/norton-simon-museums-15-million-110000372.html
  21. 21Wikidata, Norton Simon Museum (Q1752085): instance of art museum, country United States, located in Pasadena, coordinates and official website, used as the machine identity and cross-checked against the Museum's own address. wikidata.org/wiki/Q1752085
  22. 22Wikimedia Commons, Category:Norton Simon Museum and its Interior and Sculpture Garden subcategories: the plates and wing photographs used on this page, with the licence of each verified per file at fetch time from extmetadata. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Norton_Simon_Museum
  23. 23Wanderlog, Norton Simon Museum listing, aggregating a Google rating of 4.8 from 3,441 ratings: cited as a tertiary datum only, read 6 August 2026. wanderlog.com/place/details/14308/norton-simon-museum
  24. 24David L. Shirey, 'Norton Simon Bought Smuggled Idol', The New York Times, 12 May 1973, p. 1, read via a web.archive.org mirror of the nytimes.com archive page (WebFetch and the in-app browser both refuse nytimes.com directly): the primary source for Simon's on-the-record statement, giving the full quotation including the closing sentence, and Simon's own figure of 1 million dollars paid to Ben Heller. web.archive.org/web/20210904223633/https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/12/archives/norton-simon-bought-smuggled-idol-a-smuggled-idol-bought-by-simon.html
  25. 25Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Madonna and Child with Book, Raphael, c. 1502-03, accession M.1972.2.P: the Museum's own account of the painting's iconography and meaning; re-read 13 August 2026, page still marked ON VIEW. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1972.2.P
  26. 26Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Self-Portrait, Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1639, accession F.1969.18.P: the Museum's own account of the beret, chain and status framing; re-read 13 August 2026, page still marked ON VIEW. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/F.1969.18.P
  27. 27Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Portrait of a Boy in a Fancy Costume, formerly known as Titus, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655-60, accession F.1965.2.P: the Museum's own account of the picture's unfinished state; re-read 13 August 2026, page still marked ON VIEW. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/F.1965.2.P
  28. 28Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, The Mulberry Tree, Vincent van Gogh, October 1889, accession M.1976.09.P: the Museum's own account of the Saint-Remy asylum period and Van Gogh's own remarks on the painting; re-read 13 August 2026, page still marked ON VIEW. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1976.09.P
  29. 29Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Woman with a Book, Pablo Picasso, 1932, accession F.1969.38.10.P: the Museum's own account of the Marie-Therese Walter portrait and the homage to Ingres's Portrait of Madame Moitessier; re-read 13 August 2026, page still marked ON VIEW. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/F.1969.38.10.P
  30. 30Norton Simon Museum, In Focus: Edgar Degas at the Norton Simon Museum: the Museum's own account of the size, range and standing of its Degas holding, including the comparison to the Havemeyer collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. nortonsimon.org/art/in-focus/degas
  31. 31Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, Edgar Degas, modeled 1878-81, cast after 1936, accession M.1977.02.70.S: consulted for the 1977 accession prefix and casting history; it does not give a count of the modele bronzes or a 'matrix' claim, which this record no longer makes. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1977.02.70.S
  32. 32Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Arabesque over the right leg, left arm in front, Edgar Degas, modeled c. 1882-95, cast 1919-21, accession M.1977.02.01.S: one of the 1977-accessioned group, its Edition field reading 'Bronze no. 14, Modele cast', consulted to confirm the 'modele cast' terminology used in this record's highlight title. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1977.02.01.S
  33. 33Norton Simon Museum, Frequently Asked Questions: the loaned-works photography rule ('Works of art on loan... may not be photographed or videotaped'), read 7 August 2026. nortonsimon.org/frequently-asked-questions
  34. 34Norton Simon Museum, Contact: departmental email addresses, including [email protected] for the Curatorial Offices, read 7 August 2026; re-read 13 August 2026, same address still listed under Curatorial Offices. nortonsimon.org/about/contact
  35. 35Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Adam, Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530, accession M.1971.1.P: confirms the panel is marked ON VIEW and gives the medium (oil on panel, one of a pair), dimensions and provenance framing used in this record's Cranach highlight and narrative. Read 13 August 2026. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1971.1.P
  36. 36Norton Simon Museum, collection object page, Eve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530, accession M.1991.1.P: confirms the panel is marked ON VIEW and gives the medium (oil on panel, one of a pair) and dimensions. Read 13 August 2026. nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1991.1.P
Last verified 13 August 2026Open, confirmed 13 August 2026Wikidata Q1752085

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