The Norton Museum of Art: Make Room for a Bigger Art Crush

Some museum visits begin with a favorite artist. Others begin with the happy suspicion that you might find several new ones. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, makes a strong case for the second approach: its collection includes over 8,200 works, with concentrations in European, American, and Chinese art, as well as contemporary art and photography. Consider that permission to be gloriously undecided.

A Personal Collection Goes Public

The Norton’s story starts with a collector who decided to share. Ralph Hubbard Norton, the former head of the Chicago-based Acme Steel Co., moved to West Palm Beach upon retirement. His collection of paintings and sculptures became the basis for a museum founded in 1941 with his first wife, Elizabeth Calhoun Norton.

The late Art Deco/Neoclassical building, designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, opened to the public on February 8, 1941. The museum’s mission centers on preserving the beautiful things of the past for the future. A straightforward ambition, yes—but one with plenty of room for an expanding collection and an evolving building.

There’s something especially appealing about that shift from private pleasure to public possibility. A collection becomes a place where someone else can develop an entirely different favorite. No matching tastes required.

The Building Has Ambitions, Too

The Norton has hardly stood still. In 2001, the 45,000-square-foot Gail and Melvin Nessel Wing increased the museum’s size to 122,500 square feet. Then came another substantial chapter: a $60 million master plan unveiled in 2013, designed by British architect Norman Foster.

The plan would nearly double gallery space and add an education center, auditorium, and restaurant. The new West Wing added a 43-foot-high Great Hall, while a neighboring parking lot became a 9,000-square-foot sculpture garden. That is quite the career change for a parking lot.

A new entrance and forecourt along South Dixie Highway re-established the axial layout of the original 1941 building. The museum broke ground in 2016, closed for renovations in July 2018, and reopened on February 9, 2019, with 12,000 square feet of additional gallery space, new classrooms, a restaurant, a 210-seat auditorium, and the sculpture garden.

That is quite the career change for a parking lot.

Let Your Taste Take the Stairs

On the ground level, the galleries showcase contemporary and 20th-century American and European art alongside a comprehensive collection of Chinese works. It’s an invitation to resist the urge to give yourself a single artistic identity. You can be a contemporary-art person and a Chinese-art person. The museum police are not a thing.

Upstairs, the paintings include works by late Medieval Italian painter Jacopo Da Firenze, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Giovanni Panini. There are also examples of Chinese export porcelain. Let the change in company reset your attention rather than turn the visit into a checklist.

The contemporary holdings received a substantial gift in 2018: more than 100 works from Howard and Judie Ganek’s collection. The gift included pieces by Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha, Kara Walker, Donald Judd, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Pipilotti Rist, among others. Those names offer plenty of reasons to keep your curiosity open-ended.

Let the change in company reset your attention rather than turn the visit into a checklist.

New Eyes, Later Nights

Photography gets more than collection space here. In 2012, the Norton launched the Rudin Prize for Emerging Photographers, initiated by Beth Rudin DeWoody. The biennial $20,000 prize goes to an emerging photographer who has never had a museum show—a reminder that a museum can look forward as well as back.

The inaugural winner was Analia Saban, nominated by John Baldessari. Later recipients included Rami Maymon in 2014, Elizabeth Bick in 2016, and Kristin-Lee Moolman in 2020. For photography lovers, the prize adds another thread to follow beyond the galleries.

Then there’s the calendar: the Norton hosts Lectures & Conversations, Special Performances, Art Classes and Workshops, and an Artist in Residence Program, among other offerings. Art After Dark takes place on Friday nights, when the museum stays open until 10 pm. If your ideal evening involves art rather than an early exit, Friday has your name on it.