Blog

New Year’s Update: Happy 2012

A major installation of more than 40 Rodin sculptures from the Foundation collection and from Iris Cantor’s personal collection, continues at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (see photo of sculpture during installation).  The show will be up 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.

Last June a small exhibition of Rodin sculpture opened at the Laguna College of Art + Design.  This show was recently named one of the top ten exhibitions in Southern California in 2011 by The Orange County Register.  This accolade is remarkable when you see which institutions presented the other winning exhibitions:  LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, MCA San Diego, Getty, Hammer, among others.  Congratulations to Laguna College of Art + Design!

The Laguna exhibition will soon go on to the Harris Gallery at the University of La Verne (California).  The show here will be enlarged by sixteen additional works, most of them portraits by Rodin.  Opening February 6, the show closes March 29.  It will be a grand opportunity to see Rodin in an intimate setting.

More news!  The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently announced that the 2010 Foundation-sponsored exhibition Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 703,256 visitors, making it the most highly attended show at the Met since 2001.  Great news.

Three years ago the Cantor Foundation donated Auguste Rodin’s bronze St. John the Baptist Preaching to the Iowa State University Museums.  The University then was about to open a museum devoted to the first artist-in-residence on an American college campus, Christian Petersen.  Petersen credited this Rodin sculpture as having inspired his own work. After Rodin’s St. Johnarrived 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 developed ways to visually and literally discuss the relationship between art and seemingly unrelated areas of University study, like physics and business.  Now the Rodin is integrated into the curriculum across campus, and is exhibited in appropriate and diverse University-wide settings.  Lynette L. Pohlman, Director and Chief Curator of the University Museums, reports the Rodin and Petersen sculptures “have engaged thousands of students, faculty and staff at temporary exhibition sites as they have been integrated into curriculum across campus.”

Foundation-related healthcare has also been in the news.  Physicians from the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital are often on New York television responding to advancements in healthcare and especially women’s healthcare.  Late last year Dr. Tessa Cigler and Dr. Linda Vahdat were both interviewed on WABC about new guidelines for breast cancer screening.

In addition, Dr. Cigler participated in a live chat via Twitter with ABC News senior medical correspondent Dr. Richard Besser, discussing breast cancer treatments and patient care. The chat generated 825 tweets and reached an audience of 474,794 followers during its first 24 hours.