The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation is committed to philanthropic leadership in two principal arenas: medicine and the arts. The Foundation awards grants for programs, facilities, and endowments to distinguished medical, education, and cultural institutions in the United States and internationally. In the medical arena, the Foundation has for decades supported institutions at the forefront of biomedical research and clinical care, emphasizing healthcare for women. In the arts, the Foundation continues to support exhibitions and other programs that encourage appreciation for the visual and performing arts, promote scholarship, and otherwise enhance cultural life. Furthering the Cantor legacy in the visual arts, the Foundation’s activities in this arena have focused on the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his contemporaries.
Recently the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation has pledged its support to a named exhibition endowment at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where we recently provided funds that were used to modernize the audio-visual systems of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium. This modernization enables the Auditorium to continue to serve as a very popular programming venue for the Museum and its community.
Recent grants also have gone to a number of scholars to assist their research into the life and the work of Auguste Rodin. Among these Cantor Fellows are:
- Dr. Barbara Larson of the University of West Florida, who is studying The Gates of Hell in preparation for a book on the debate between Catholicism and science in early Third Republic France.
- Anne Carolien Willemijn Lindenhovius, who studied Rodin’s illustrations for Baudelaire’s poem “Les Fleurs du Mal” for her dissertation at the University of Utrecht. The Foundation supported her research at the Musée Rodin.
- Musicologist Olivia Mattis who used her fellowship to support research about Rodin and music in the archives of Paris’ Musée Rodin. Her article “Sculpture’s Beethoven: Rodin and Music” was delivered at the 2011 conference “Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, 1800-1900” at Stony Brook Manhattan.
