Autumn Updates from Cantor Foundation
Autumn has been a busy time for the Foundation, with special programs centering on Foundation gifts to museums, loans of artworks, openings of scholarly exhibitions accompanied by catalogues funded by the Foundation, and receptions for Foundation-sponsored shows. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation is sponsoring an exhibition and catalogue featuring the Museum’s superb Alfred Stieglitz Collection. At the beginning of the 20th century, Stieglitz (1864-1946) was America’s pioneering dealer in modern art. His collection includes works by O’Keeffe, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Hartley, Marin, Demuth and Dove. The show, which is on view until January 2, 2012, is the first time the Met’s entire Stieglitz Collection — including many works on paper that are rarely on view — will be exhibited together, although the collection was acquired by the Met in 1949.
At the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, visitors are able to see The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy until December 31. This showing is part of a seven-museum tour organized by FRAME (French Regional & American Museum Exchange) and made possible by a leadership gift from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. The Mourners is composed of 37 devotional figures representing medieval monks mourning the death of the second Duke of Burgundy. They were carved by Jean de la Huerta and Antoine le Moiturier and exemplify what have been described as the “most important artistic innovations of the late Middle Ages.” The exhibition was also seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After San Francisco it will go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In 2009 the Cantor Foundation donated Auguste Rodin’s bronze St. John the Baptist Preaching to the Iowa State University Museums. The University was about to open a museum devoted to the first artist-in-residence on an American college campus, Christian Petersen. Petersen credited this Rodin as having inspired his own sculpture. After Rodin’s St. John arrived on campus, the museum staff received a grant from the Foundation to bring the sculpture directly to the students. Aided by relevant faculty, the museum staff found ways to visually and literally discuss the relationship between art and seemingly unrelated areas of study, like physics and business. Lynette L. Pohlman, Director and Chief Curator of the University Museums, reports the sculptures “have engaged thousands of students, faculty and staff at temporary exhibition sites as they have been integrated into curriculum across campus.”
With assistance from a Cantor Foundation grant, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University has published a scholarly catalogue to accompany its special exhibition Rodin and America: Influence and Adaptation 1876 – 1936. The exhibition, which runs through January 1, 2012, is a major scholarly endeavor to create a better understanding of Rodin’s influence on American artists. Because sculpture shows are very difficult to travel – this one includes 107 sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs by 42 artists from 44 collections throughout the United States – written catalogues of such shows are exceedingly important to current and future scholars, students, and the general public. This fully-illustrated catalogue features essays by eight scholars who examine aspects of the American response to and reaction against Rodin’s “dominating presence.”
Also opening this fall was a major exhibition at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (see photo above) of more than 40 Rodin sculptures borrowed from the Cantor Foundation and from Iris Cantor personally. The Rodins will be at the Nelson-Atkins through 2013 and is only the second exhibition to be installed in the lobby of the Museum’s highly celebrated Bloch Building. The loans center on Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, his sculptures of hands, and his monuments to the Burghers of Calais, Balzac, Claude Lorrain, et. al. The Museum is providing its visitors with digital, smartphone, and mobile guides to the works on view.
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