Norton Museum of Art

In West Palm Beach, Florida, area residents and tourists alike frequent the Norton Museum of Art. There they encounter a cultural experience to rival those of many major museums around the world. The programs and exhibits at the Norton Museum of Art earned it the nation’s highest honor, the 2008 National Medal for Museum and Library Services. The museum’s collection rivals the beauty of the area beaches. Museum visitors enjoy the permanent museum collections. These include American, Chinese and European art collections, Photography, and Contemporary Art. Famous artists represented in these collections include cubist Pablo Picasso, American genius Georgia O’Keefe and the master impressionist, Claude Monet. Exhibititions have included such greats as 17th Century Master Peter Paul Rubens, French realist Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and American photographer Ansel Adams.

What to Expect

The American Art collection alone has over 1,200 works. These include everything from sculptures and paintings to lithographs and sketches. The museum prides itself on the historical quality of each work as well as the amazing variety of artists and artforms. In one room, you will find the great female impressionist Mary Cassatt. In another room is a groundbreaking abstract by Jackson Pollack. The American West is featured in work by Charles Marion Russell. New York is represented by such diverse works as Wintry Afternoon by George Bellows and New York Mural by cubist-influenced Stuart Davis.

The European Art collection begins with the Rennaissance. Here the visitor can see works of such masters as Mariotto Albertinelli and Peter Paul Rubens. Then you move on through time to see paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Gustave Courbet. Then, from the close of the 19th century, paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin excite many visitors. The delicacy of Monet’s strokes are evident in his Gardens of Villa Moreno. The exciting history of the intersection of Paul Gauguin and the tragic Van Gogh is played out for viewers of Gauguin’s relevatory Christ in the Garden of Olives. The Christ figure is a Gauguin self-portrait with the red hair of Van Gogh. This painting is a surprise to those more familiar with Gauguin’s island scenes and is living evidence of the tragedy of Vincent Van Gogh who rejected Gauguin’s attempts to combine artistic efforts. As the 20th Century dawned so did a new era of art represented at the Norton by such greats as Miro, Matisse, Braques, and Chagall. As you wander through the European collection, time passes from art’s early realism days to the cubist and abstract of recent years.

In the Chinese Collection, which started with the museum in 1941, an impressive array of objects from vases to scrolls take the visitor on an odysesey through remarkable artistic vision. The collection boasts prehistoric jade creations dated back to the third millenium BCE. Bronze works represent the Shang dynasty (1400s-1100 BCE) and the Western Zhou Dynasty (1100-770 BCE). There are Buddhist sculptures and burial models, decorated porcelains and lacquered cabinets. Each artifact represents time periods spanning the last 2,000 years of Chinese history. One impressive site are the massive jades once at home with the Chinese emperor in the late 1700s. Some porcelains even bear Western symbols, showing the encroachment that occured several centuries ago.

Finally, the photography collection boasts over 2,000 images. These represent photography from its inception in the 1900s to the present day. The photographs show life as it was and art as it can be. Works represented include photographs by such notables as Walker Evans and Paul Strand.

Collections remain with the Norton Museum of Art, but exhibitions come and go. This and the many programs offered by the museum serve to keep Norton a lively artistic partner to West Palm Beach and its visitors. One upcoming summer exhibit will excite children and adults alike. It is The Music Behind the Magic: Disney, 1928–Today. Since 1941, the Norton Museum of Art has grown to become a world class attraction that art lovers and area visitors treasure.