Cantor Arts Center (officially Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, previously the Stanford University Museum of Art) is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States.
The museum first opened in 1894 and consists of over 130,000sqft (12,000m2) of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The Cantor Arts Center houses the largest collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of Paris and the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, with 199 works, most in bronze but others in different media.[2] The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.
History
When it first opened its doors to the public in 1894, the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum was unique, having been privately founded by a family with a general collection of world art on par with the major public museums at the time. For decades, Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford had traveled extensively, collecting American and European Old Master paintings, as well as a wide array of antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. By the turn of the century, the Stanford museum, with its large archeological and ethnological holdings as well as art, was the largest privately owned museum in the world.[3]
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was an enormous disaster for the museum. The Roman, Egyptian and Asian galleries were destroyed, and three-quarters of the building was damaged beyond repair. The Oxford Assyriologist Archibald Sayce, recalling a visit to Stanford in 1917, wrote that "the rooms of its spacious Museum were still a scene of wreckage. The magnificent collection of Greek vases it once contained had been hopelessly shattered; even the Egyptian mummies were torn and dismembered."[3][4]:84
The earthquake, along with the death of co-founder Jane Stanford the previous year, sharply curtailed the budget of the museum, which had no endowment. Faculty and administration had little interest in restoring the museum, and the building and its collection fell into disrepair. Curatorial duties ceased.[3]
In 1917 Pedro Joseph de Lemos resigned as head of the San Francisco Art Institute to teach at Stanford, where he also served as Curator and Director of the Stanford University Museum and the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery until 1945.[5] He reorganized the museum and began a regular series of exhibitions at both venues. But during this period the art collection was decimated by loss, sales, and gifts, and the poorly secured storage area became a quarry for local collectors and dealers. In 1945, after de Lemos' departure, the museum was officially closed in order to conduct an inventory of the art holdings.[3]
The university's art department saw the inventory as an opportunity to divest the museum of works of art lacking aesthetic merit. An enormous accumulation of worthless material was disposed of, but so too were paintings and sculptures from the original Stanford family collection judged now to be of greater value than was believed in the 1950s, including works by Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford, Norton Bush, and Thomas Hill.[3][4]:22
In 1953, the Committee for Art at Stanford was founded, with the intention of recruiting members and raising funds to reopen the museum, and in 1954, after nine years of stocktaking, the museum reopened.[3]
Athena, by 19th century Italian sculptor Antonio Frilli, presides over the marble vestibule.
In 1963, as part of the university's revitalization of the humanities under Dean Robert R. Sears, Professor Lorenz Eitner was instated as chair of the department of art and architecture. Assisted by faculty, staff, and The Committee for Art, Eitner began to revive the museum. Over the next 25 years, galleries were gradually refurbished, collections were significantly strengthened, and a program of exhibitions, educational services, and publications was put in place. 1985 saw a major development when professor Albert Elsen worked with art collector B. Gerald Cantor and other donors to open the B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden.[3]
Facade of the new wing.
The museum suffered severe damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and was forced to close. In 1991, Stanford hired Thomas K. Seligman to direct the rebuilding of the museum. Polshek & Partners of New York (now Ennead Architects) won the architectural competition, with Richard Olcott as principal designer. Groundbreaking took place on October 26, 1995, and the museum reopened in late 1999 as the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, named after Iris and B. Gerald Cantor.[3] The project cost $36.8 million, which included a seismic retrofit of the entire building, and construction of a new 42,000 square foot wing including galleries, a sculpture terrace, auditorium, bookshop and cafe. The Rodin Sculpture Garden was renovated, and new gardens were installed for displaying contemporary art.[6]
Gates of Hell (detail) in the Rodin Sculpture Garden.
In 2011, Stanford University announced the donation of 121 paintings and sculptures from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence,[7] of Atherton, California. The collection, mostly of post-WW2American art, includes works by Mark Rothko,[8]Richard Diebenkorn,[9]Manuel Neri,[10]Frank Lobdell[11] and Willem de Kooning,[12] and Jackson Pollock's Lucifer ("probably the privately owned 20th century American artwork most coveted by museums nationwide").[13] To house and display this collection, a new museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, was built directly adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center. Designed by the same architect who designed the new wing of the Cantor, Richard Olcott of Ennead Architects, the Anderson Collection opened in 2014. The building has 15,000 square feet of exhibition space.[14][15] Like the Cantor, the Anderson Collection is free and open to the public.
Collection
The Cantor Arts Center's collection houses over 38,000 items, including African Art, American Art, Ancient Art, the Andy Warhol Photography Archive, Art of Asia and Oceania, Art of the Indigenous Americas, Auguste Rodin, Eadweard Muybridge, European Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, Photographs, Prints and Drawings, Richard Diebenkorn Sketchbooks, Sculptures on Campus, and collections and memorabilia of the Stanford Family.[16]
In January 2021, the Cantor Arts Center established the Asian American Art Initiaive (AAAI) with specific focus on the study, acquisition, preservation, and exhibition of works by Asian American artists. The initiative is headed by the founding co-directors Aleesa Alexander and Marci Kwon.[17]
Gallery
West entrance of the new wing and Rodin Sculpture Garden
The museum's front steps
Archeology mosaic on the facade of the Cantor Arts Center
Rome mosaic on the facade of the Cantor Arts Center
Sculpture mosaic on the facade of the Cantor Arts Center
Duane Hanson was an American artist and sculptor born in Minnesota. He spent most of his career in South Florida. He was known for his life-sized realistic sculptures of people. He cast the works based on human models in various materials, including polyester resin, fiberglass, Bondo, and bronze. Hanson's works are in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Smithsonian.
The Thinker is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, situated atop a stone pedestal. The work depicts a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent philosophy.
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
The Burghers of Calais is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in twelve original castings and numerous copies. It commemorates an event during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais, a French port on the English Channel, surrendered to the English after an eleven-month siege. The city commissioned Rodin to create the sculpture in 1884 and the work was completed in 1889.
The Kiss is an 1882 marble sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
The Gates of Hell is a monumental bronze sculptural group work by French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from the Inferno, the first section of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It stands at 6 metres high, 4 metres wide and 1 metre deep (19.7×13.1×3.3 ft) and contains 180 figures.
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
Bernard Gerald Cantor was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
The Walking Man is a bronze sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. This sculpture was made in 1907.
In 1994, Jim Mason, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, arranged for two groups of men from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea to carve the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University. The men were from several communities or villages of the Iatmul people and the Kwoma people.
Frank Lobdell (1921–2013) was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
Iris Cantor is an American philanthropist based in New York City and Los Angeles, with a primary interest in medicine and the arts. Cited as among the 50 top contributors in the United States, as head of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, her foundation has donated several hundred million dollars to museums, universities and hospitals since 1978.
Hope Gangloff is an American painter based in New York City who is known for her vividly-colored portraiture.
Cybele is a sculpture by French artist Auguste Rodin. It is one of the first of Rodin's partial figures known as "fragments" to be displayed as sculpture in its own right, rather than an incomplete study.
Andromeda is a sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin, named after Andromeda. It is one of the sculptures produced as part of his The Gates of Hell project and appears on the left door next to the personification of Day and on the right door as part of the group showing a falling winged genius.
Despair or Despair at the Gate is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin that he conceived and developed from the early 1880s to c. 1890 as part of his The Gates of Hell project. The figure belongs to a company of damned souls found in the nine circles of Hell described by Dante in The Divine Comedy. Other title variations are Shade Holding her Foot, Woman Holding Her Foot, and Desperation. There are numerous versions of this work executed as both plaster and bronze casts and carved marble and limestone.
Mask of a Weeping Woman is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, initially produced as a pair with Weeping Woman for the first version of his The Gates of Hell in 1885. The two pieces were intended to appear on the centre of each panel. They were later moved by Rodin himself, who instead placed Mask on the lower part of the left panel.
Harry W. Anderson, also known as Hunk Anderson, was an American businessman, art collector and philanthropist. He was the co-founder of Saga Foods Co., a food company for college dormitories. With his wife, Mary Margaret Anderson, he donated works of art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and to the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
Albert Edward Elsen, Jr. was an American art historian and educator. A scholar of the work of Auguste Rodin, Elsen was the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
1 2 Osborne, Carol M. Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art, 1870–1906. Stanford University Museum of Art, 1986.
↑ Edwards, Robert W. (2015). Pedro de Lemos, Lasting Impressions: Works on Paper. Worcester, Mass.: Davis Publications Inc. pp.18–36, 44–48. ISBN9781615284054.
Elsen, Albert E. and Rosalyn Frankel Jamison. Rodin's Art: The Rodin Collection of Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center of Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN0-19-513381-1
Joncas, Richard. Building on the Past: The Making of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Stanford: The Center, c. 1999.
Osborne, Carol M. Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art, 1870–1906. Stanford University Museum of Art, 1986.
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West entrance of the new wing and Rodin Sculpture Garden
