The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, formerly the Stanford University Museum of Art, and commonly known as the Cantor Arts Center, is an
art museum
An art museum or art gallery is a building or space for the display of art, usually from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership and may be accessible to all or have restrictions in place. Although primarily con ...
on the campus of
Stanford University in
Stanford, California
Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is the home of Stanford University. The population was 21,150 at the 2020 census.
Stanford is an unincorporated area of ...
. The museum first opened in 1894 and consists of over of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The Cantor Arts Center houses the largest collection of sculptures by
Auguste Rodin outside of
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
, with 199 works, most in bronze but others in different media.
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
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist, co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891) along with her husband, Leland Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, Leland ...
had traveled extensively, collecting American and European
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.
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
The Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce (25 September 18454 February 1933) was a pioneer British Assyriologist and linguist, who held a chair as Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919. He was able to write in at least twe ...
, 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."
The earthquake, along with the death of co-founder
Jane Stanford
Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford (August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905) was an American philanthropist, co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891) along with her husband, Leland Stanford, as a memorial to their only child, Leland ...
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.
In 1917
Pedro Joseph de Lemos
Pedro Joseph de Lemos (25 May 1882 – 5 December 1954) was an American painter, printmaker, architect, illustrator, writer, lecturer, museum director and art educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to about 1930 he used the simpler name Ped ...
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
Thomas Welton Stanford (1832–1918), also known as Welton Stanford, was an American-born Australian businessman, spiritualist and philanthropist, most notably toward Stanford University, which was founded by his older brother Leland Stanford. A ...
Art Gallery until 1945.
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.
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
Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not ...
,
William Bradford,
Norton Bush
Norton Bush (February 22, 1834 – April 24, 1894) was an American landscape painter. He did landscape paintings of California, Panama, Nicaragua, Peru and Ecuador, with a focus on Luminism.
Early life
Norton Bush was born on February 22, 1834 ...
, and
Thomas Hill.
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.
![Stanford Museum p1070122](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Stanford_Museum_p1070122.jpg)
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
Albert Edward Elsen, Jr. (October 11, 1927 – February 2, 1995) 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.
Career
Born ...
worked with art collector
B. Gerald Cantor
Bernard Gerald Cantor (December 17, 1916 – July 3, 1996) was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Career
Cantor's parents were Rose (née Delson) and Julius Cantor, Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Born in the Bronx ...
and other donors to open the B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden.
![Cantor Arts Center exterior wing 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Cantor_Arts_Center_exterior_wing_1.JPG)
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
Ennead Architects LLP (/ˈenēˌad/) is a New York City-based architectural firm. The firm was founded in 1963 by James Polshek, who left the firm in 2005 when it was known as Polshek Partnership. The firm's partners renamed their practice in mid- ...
) 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
Iris most often refers to:
*Iris (anatomy), part of the eye
*Iris (mythology), a Greek goddess
* ''Iris'' (plant), a genus of flowering plants
* Iris (color), an ambiguous color term
Iris or IRIS may also refer to:
Arts and media
Fictional ent ...
and
B. Gerald Cantor
Bernard Gerald Cantor (December 17, 1916 – July 3, 1996) was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
Career
Cantor's parents were Rose (née Delson) and Julius Cantor, Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Born in the Bronx ...
.
The project cost $36.8 million, which included a
seismic retrofit
Seismic retrofitting is the modification of existing structures to make them more resistant to seismic activity, ground motion, or soil failure due to earthquakes. With better understanding of seismic demand on structures and with our recent exp ...
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.
![Gates of Hell sculpture by Rodin top detail](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gates_of_Hell_sculpture_by_Rodin_top_detail.JPG)
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, of
Atherton, California. The collection, mostly of
post-
''Post-'' (stylized in all caps) is the third solo album by American singer-songwriter Jeff Rosenstock. It was released on January 1, 2018, without any promotional lead-up. The album was released on Polyvinyl Record Co. in the United States an ...
WW2
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
American art
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial arc ...
, includes works by
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Lat ...
,
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) 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 bega ...
,
Manuel Neri
Manuel John Neri Jr. (April 12, 1930October 18, 2021) was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is re ...
,
Frank Lobdell
Frank Lobdell (1921 - 2013) was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
Life and career
Frank Lobdell was born on August 23, 1921 in Kansas City, Missouri, Kansas City, Miss ...
and
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...
, and
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...
's ''Lucifer'' ("probably the privately owned 20th century American artwork most coveted by museums nationwide"). 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
Ennead Architects LLP (/ˈenēˌad/) is a New York City-based architectural firm. The firm was founded in 1963 by James Polshek, who left the firm in 2005 when it was known as Polshek Partnership. The firm's partners renamed their practice in mid- ...
, the Anderson Collection opened in 2014. The building has 15,000 square feet of exhibition space. 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
African art describes the modern and historical paintings, sculptures, installations, and other visual culture from native or indigenous Ethnic groups of Africa, Africans and the African continent. The definition may also include the art of the ...
, American Art, Ancient Art, the
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the Art movement, visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore th ...
Photography Archive, Art of Asia and Oceania, Art of the Indigenous Americas, Auguste Rodin,
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge (; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first ...
, European Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, Photographs, Prints and Drawings, Richard Diebenkorn Sketchbooks, Sculptures on Campus, and collections and memorabilia of the Stanford Family.
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.
Gallery
References
Further reading
*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.
*Joncas, Richard. ''Building on the Past: The Making of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University''. Stanford: The , 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.
External links
*
Museum History Interactive TimelineBrowse the collectionsCantor Arts Centerwithin
Google Arts & Culture
*
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Stanford University places
University museums in California
Art museums and galleries in California
Museums in Santa Clara County, California
Neoclassical architecture in California
Art museums established in 1894
1894 establishments in California
Museums of American art
Asian art museums in California
Buildings and structures in Palo Alto, California
Buildings and structures destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
African art museums in the United States