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Iris Cantor Lauded by Lupus Fundation

[caption id="attachment_1768" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Iris Cantor, Richard DeScherer, Willie Geist, Mayor Bloomberg[/caption] The S.L.E. Lupus Foundation and the Lupus Research Institute honored Iris Cantor, Chairman and President of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, at its annual Life Without Lupus Gala in November. Mrs. Cantor was celebrated as a trailblazer in bringing the power of philanthropy to transform medical research and care. Particularly fitting, the award was presented by Herb Pardes, M.D., retired president and chief executive and current executive vice chairman of New York-Presbyterian Hospital's Board of Trustees. There Ms. Cantor led the creation of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center as well as New York's first Men's Health Center, also named in her honor. In her acceptance remarks, she noted that "philanthropy and innovation go hand in hand. Through philanthropy we can accelerate the path from concept to practice." With close to 600 members of Metropolitan New York's philanthropic, government, business, art, music, society and healthcare communities...

January 9, 2015

News

Jean d’Aire, Second Maquette

Jean d'Aire is one of the Burghers of Calais. In 1347, during the Hundred Years' War, King Edward III of England laid siege to the French port of Calais. No food entered the city for 100 days. The King, camped outside the city with much of his Court, offered to end the siege if citizens of Calais would surrender the keys to the city gates – and would sacrifice their lives. Six citizens, or “burghers,” volunteered. In 1884 the city of Calais decided to commemorate this remarkable act of patriotism by commissioning a monument to the event. Immediately intrigued by its possibilities, Rodin submitted a proposal and it was chosen by the committee in charge. In Rodin's winning entry, the burghers – a bit larger than life size – mill about in a small group as if in the Calais town square. They prepare to begin their march to the...

December 16, 2014

Spotlight

Rodin Exhibition Opens at Dixon Gallery and Gardens

A new exhibition of 49 works by Auguste Rodin and three portraits of him by others opened in October at Memphis' Dixon Gallery and Gardens. The show is an extraordinary insight into the French artist's capacity to fill his bronzes with emotion, movement, and multiple meanings, a capacity that transformed sculpture at the beginning of the 20th Century from an art of description to one of evocation. The Dixon Gallery's presentation of Rodin: The Human Experience, Selections from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Collections honors the memory of John Buchanan, who was Director of the Memphis museum in 1988 when it exhibited its first Rodin exhibition. Buchanan, who went on to direct the Portland Art Museum (Oregon) and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, died in 2012. “We thought that dedicating Rodin: The Human Experience to John would be a way of indicating the debt of gratitude that we owe him,”...

December 15, 2014

News

Cantor Collections Exhibition to Travel to Six Museums

[caption id="attachment_648" align="alignnone" width="300"] 2012 exhibition at University of Laverne[/caption] Beginning in October, a new exhibition organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation begins a three-year tour of American art museums. The show, entitled Rodin: The Human Experience, Selections from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Collections, continues the Cantor tradition of sharing its great Rodin sculpture collections with the public. Opening at Memphis' Dixon Gallery and Gardens on 19 October 2014, the exhibition reveals all aspects of Rodin's work as the artist who bridged the divide between tradition and modernism in sculpture. From the Dixon it travels to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown PA, where it opens on 28 February 2015. The exhibition, comprised of 32 pieces, will be augmented at these first two venues with the addition of 18 Rodin portrait bronzes and two portraits of Rodin. Following these showings, the exhibition travels to the Honolulu...

September 18, 2014

News

Iris Cantor Health Centers at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital Featured in Annual Report

In its most recent annual report, the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College featured the Iris Cantor Women’s and Men’s Health Centers, lauding their work in clinical care, research, and health education. Dr. Orli Etingin, Director of the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center, is shown receiving an award earlier in the year for her exceptional leadership. To read the entire article in bigger print, click here. ...

September 17, 2014

News

Guess Who We Caught Enjoying the Cantor Sculpture Garden at LACMA!

[gallery columns="2" ids="1260,1380"] Californians have the good fortune of being able to enjoy Rodin's iconic sculpture in some beautiful out-of-door settings. Recently Modern Family, one of television's most popular and honored shows, filmed at LACMA and we caught four of its stars enjoying the Museum's B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden....

April 16, 2014

News

Iris Cantor Receives Bard Graduate Center Award for Outstanding Patronage in the Arts

[gallery columns="2" ids="1376,1375"] Iris Cantor, President and Chairman of the Cantor Foundation, was honored on April 9 by the Bard Graduate Center for her support for the arts. She received the Center's Iris Foundation Award for outstanding patronage. Other awardees were Dame Rosalind Savill for outstanding achievement in scholarship, and Dr. Finbarr Barry Flood, outstanding mid-career scholar. The awards were presented by Susan Weber, Founder and Director of Bard Graduate Center. In introducing Mrs. Cantor, Ms. Weber recognized her exemplary support for the arts and the cultural institutions that present them, as well as her inspiring work in improving health care for women. She expressed "gratitude for your passionate commitment to enriching museums and other educational institutions across the country. Your achievements as a patron and an advocate for the arts and scholarship inspire us all. This is the true spirit of the Iris Award, and we are delighted to salute and celebrate...

April 14, 2014

News

Cantor Foundation Sponsors Carpeaux Exhibition and Catalogue at Metropolitan Museum

[gallery ids="1343,1334,1336,1337,1339,1341"] The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux opened to critical acclaim on March 10 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sponsored by the Cantor Foundation, with additional support provided by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund and the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the show is another in a series of important exhibitions about sculpture that have been presented to the public through significant support from the Cantor Foundation. This exhibition of 160 works (including sculptures, paintings, and drawings) is organized around major projects that Carpeaux (1827–1875) undertook during his brief career. Groupings of drawings and models trace the evolution of such masterpieces as the Musée d’Orsay’s marble Prince Impérial with his Dog Nero and the Metropolitan’s own Ugolino and His Sons, also in marble. The artist’s genius for portraiture and modeling in clay shines particularly in this major retrospective. (Carpeaux's work was to be an important influence on Rodin, who was a child of 13 when Carpeaux died. The...

April 13, 2014

News

Stanford Goes Hands-On with Rodins

Stanford University surgeon Dr. James Chang is fascinated by Rodin's hands. He has developed and is teaching a course titled "Surgical Anatomy of the Hand: From Rodin to Reconstruction" in which he combines 3D scans of the sculpture with medical imaging of human bones, nerves, and blood vessels. Currently Stanford's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Arts is featuring a collaboration between Dr. Chang and its Curator of European Art, Bernard Barryte. Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology, and Surgery, on view at the museum until August 3, explores Rodin's hands as art and as science. In the exhibition Chang and his students describe the medical conditions that inform each of the hands. Rodin was fascinated by the expressive capacity of hands and he often exhibited them apart from the rest of the body. Although art scholars have long been interested in the medical issues of some of Rodin's hands,...

April 12, 2014

News

Spotlight on “Study for the Monument to Claude Lorrain”

Claude Gellée, known as Claude Lorrain, was perhaps the most important seventeenth century French-born painter. He wanted to be a landscape painter when painting landscapes was not considered of great importance, so he disguised his scenes by including figures and by giving the finished paintings historical or narrative titles. In this way he gave his work the "moral weight" required at the time. Two hundred years after Claude's death, when Rodin was invited to participate in a competition organized by Claude's native city of Nancy, the sculptor went straight to what he perceived to be Claude's greatest interest, landscape as revealed by light. Meant to be seen high atop a pedestal enlivened at its base by the figure of Apollo driving his chariot pulled by two horses, the figure of Claude is caught in mid-step, twisting his body around to glimpse the rising sun, the source of his delight in nature. ...

April 9, 2014

Spotlight

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