Yay for the Norton Simon Museum!

I've just returned from a trip to Los Angeles, where I got to go check out the Norton Simon Museum. You know, the one all the floats go by during the Rose Parade.

Well, wow. It is spectacular. If you're near there, go.

The building itself is a wonderful place to look at art. There's plenty of room, and you can see from one gallery into the next. The sculpture garden outside is fabulous. And, this is just a tremendous art collection.

The whole lower level is Asian art, with huge glass windows lighting the statues and carvings.

Norton Simon was a super-successful businessman, and clearly a guy with a great eye for collecting works of art. He paid particular attention to Degas and to Van Gogh, so the pieces by those two are really spectacular.

And, the explanations posted with the pieces are really really good. I don't know if it's because this is one person's collection and so the stories of the pieces are better known, but many paintings and sculptures had really complete descriptions including things like where the artist was living at the time a piece was made, what was going on historically, how groups of artists were influencing each other, how artists were being influenced by technology and geometry and other things, and a lot of other great information. Sometimes the labels can be really disappointing - "Attributed to such and such artist, from between this year and this year..." - but not here. They were terrific.

So, check it out. They also have pretty good pizza in the cafe.