Bernie– as almost everyone called B. Gerald Cantor– sold peanuts, popcorn, and hot dogs at Yankee Stadium when he was in his early teens growing up in the Bronx. He preferred to work during Sunday doubleheaders only, and didn't have much time to watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
How come doubleheaders? "You could sell more things between games," Bernie told me. "You couldn't do that at single games, and it wasn't worthwhile."
Bernie always knew how to make money. He was the founder of what is now Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., one of the biggest institutional brokers of government securities in the United States. But he also knew how to give money away, as well as art. He became one of the richest men in America and one of the heaviest hitters in the history of philanthropy.
"My whole feeling is that I want to give things away while I'm still alive and can have the pleasure of seeing people enjoy them," he said.
Bernie, who died July 3,1996, at the age of 79, was one of my partners when I bought ARTnews from Newsweek in 1972. (Years later, he sold his shares.)
As the writer Richard Shepard once wrote, "Cantor revels in giving. He delights in seeing others delight in what he delights in." What Bernie delighted in was the sculpture of Auguste Rodin.
Bernie's "love affair" with the art of Rodin, as his wife, Iris, called it, began while he was still in his 20's. "I am not a frustrated artist. I never even cared for the visual arts when I was at school, although I was always good at math," he said. When he was a young broker on Wall Street, he visited the Metropolitan Musuem of Art. He was most struck by a marble of Rodin's Hand of God. He felt drawn to it.
The Hand of God, 1898
Photograph by Steve Oliver |
Two years later he spotted a small bronze Hand of God in a Madison Avenue gallery and bought it. It was the start of his collection. Bernie had just started his business, and the cast cost the equivalent of two months' rent for his apartment. In the mid-1950's he bought Rodin's The Kiss, and that's when his serious collecting began. "It brought back to me the feeling I had before," he said.
He described that feeling as "a source of strength, power, and sensuality." When I asked him to elaborate, he said: "Truthfully, I can't tell you more. Something hit me." The feeling became what he later called his "magnificent obsession". Although he and his wife collected impressionist, postimpressionist, and expressionist sculpture and paintings, they assembled the world's most comprehensive Rodin collection.
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The total number of Rodins now in the private Cantor collection is about 300. The Cantors or their foundation donated more than 450. Altogether, the Cantors gave away many millions of dollars, as well as other works of art, to about 150 cultural medical, and educational institutions. The list included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Stanford University, and the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. This list will continue to grow. Iris Cantor plans to carry on the foundation's work.
The real richness of the Cantors' gifts, as the writer Bonnie Barrett Stretch noted, often lay less in the amounts of money involved than in their careful tuning to the needs of each institution.
For instance, the B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, which opened in 1983, evolved from the recognition that the college needed not just a permanent exhibition devoted to Rodin but a flexible space that would enlarge its small visual-arts program. Thus the final gift, Stretch wrote, consisted of the college's first art gallery plus a few fine smaller works that would not overwhelm the future direction of the collection.
Another example was a gift of $5 million to the Metropolitan- one of many he gave to the museum- which completed the funding needed for the southwest wing. This was made after consultation with the director and curators and was tailored to have a significant impact.
A turning point in Cantor's views about what he would do with his collection came in 1967, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited many of his bronzes. "The pleasure it gave him to mingle anonymously with the crowds and overhear their enthusiastic reactions to Rodin's work shaped his personal mission as a collector-educator," wrote Bernie's close friend, the late Albert Elsen, the Stanford University art historian and leading scholar on Rodin.
In 1969 Bernie established fellowships for research on Rodin for graduate students at Stanford, under the direction of Elsen. The first recipient was Kirk Varnedoe, who is now director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. "I was wet behind the ears when Bernie first got behind me, and I always appreciated it," Varnedoe said recently. He added: "I remember the first time I walked into his office. Here was this guy in a jumpsuit. I had expected a big man in a blue suit."
"Never forget where you came from," Bernie would say. He never forgot.
Milton Esterow
Editor and publisher, ARTnews
Reprinted courtesy of the publisher, ARTnews Magazine
48 West 38th Street, New York, New York, 10018/Tel: 212-398-1690
© 1996 ARTnews L.L.C. All rights reserved
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