Collector Without Walls ─ Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best

"The greatest painting collection in the Western United States" was the Los Angeles Times Magazine's accolade for the Norton Simon Museum, a stunning group of masterpieces assembled by one man in the brief span of thirty-five years.

A brilliant businessman with a keen mind and remarkable instincts, Norton Simon built a consumer conglomerate that included Hunt-Wesson Foods, McCall Publishing, Canada Dry Corporation, May Factor cosmetics, and Avis Car Rental, When his interests turned to art, he used his business acumen, inquisitive intellect, and aggressive style to pursue and purchase more than 8,000 works of art, For Hunt Foods, Norton Simon adopted the advertising slogan, "Hunt for the Best". The catchphrase also came to symbolize Simon's zealous pursuit of impeccable artworks as he built one of the greatest art collections of the twentieth century.

Collector Without Wall is a concise and complete illustrated history of Norton Simon's odyssey, Chronicling his acquisitions from his first $300 purchase through more than 1700 separate transactions. The reader glimpses Simon's intriguing and charismatic personality and gains insight into the collector and his collection. A fully-illustrated catalogue of all of Simon's acquisitions and deaccessions provides an invaluable tool for scholars.

The book draws from the extensive Norton Simon Museum archives and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, art dealers, and museum professionals, as well as unpublished conversations with, and writings by, Norton Simon.

Sara Campbell brings more than forty years' experience with the Norton Simon collections, including twenty-four working directly with the collector himself. She is the Senior Curator at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California and an authority on Degas sculpture. In 1969 Campbell joined the staff of the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Los Angeles and administered its "museum without walls" exhibition program that lent to museums throughout the United States. With the creation of the Norton Simon Museum in 1974, Simon appointed her as the first curator. For twenty-five years Campbell directed all aspects of the Museum's curatorial and exhibition programs and organized dozens of exhibitions drawn from its permanent collections. She has written many articles on the Simon collection and was general editor on five Norton Simon collections catalogues. She continues to advise on exhibitions, publications, and research at the museum.