Iris and B. Gerald Cantor and the Cantor Foundation’s commitment to the art of Rodin has played a major role during the last half-century in fostering continuing research on Auguste Rodin.  

The most enduring contribution to Rodin studies was Mr. Cantor’s support, beginning in 1969, for Rodin scholarship at Stanford University.   The Rodin Research Fund, under the direction of Professor Albert Elsen, America’s foremost Rodin scholar, enabled Ph.D. candidates specializing in Rodin and early modern sculpture to conduct research in the United States and abroad.  The Fund provided scholarships, research grants, and travel fellowships.  Recipients of these funds were dubbed “Cantor Fellows.” 

Extensive archival research materials, including manuscripts, reminiscences, photographs from Rodin’s lifetime, and other biographical materials, were also donated to Stanford.  Today, the University is an important center for Rodin research, second only to the Musée Rodin in Paris.

“Cantor Fellows” now occupy curatorial and professorial positions at major museums and universities, many continuing their Rodin-related research, teaching, and publishing.  Kirk Varnedoe, the first Cantor Fellow, now deceased, was a MacArthur Fellow and Director of Painting and Sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  Among the other Fellows are Daniel Rosenfeld, most recently Director of the Colby College Museum of Art; Stephen C. McGough, former Director of the Crocker Art Museum; Joanne Paradise, Senior Collection Curator at the Getty Research Institute; Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Rosalyn Jamison, editor of Professor Elsen’s extensive  catalog of the Cantor’s Rodin gifts to Stanford;  Joanne Ortel, Professor of Art History at Beloit College; Bette Talvaccia, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; and Kenneth Wayne, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Noguchi Museum.

"I cannot imagine how I could have done my dissertation without your assistance. Being a ... Cantor Foundation Dissertation Fellow was unquestionably an asset to me in gaining access to resources here in France. I was proud to say I had a grant from your foundation... It would not be an overstatement to say that you are fully responsible for launching my career."
-Kenneth Wayne, writing as a doctoral student in 1993 and today Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Noguchi Museum

Research by these Cantor Fellows has appeared in publications and has influenced major exhibitions planned and implemented with Cantor support.  One of the most important of these was the 1981 Rodin retrospective, Rodin Rediscovered, curated by Albert Elsen and the National Gallery of Art.

Other publications and exhibitions on Rodin to which Cantor funding was important include Rodin: The Shape of Genius by Ruth Butler, the recognized authoritative biography of the sculptor; Rodin and Balzac, a publication and touring exhibition (Stanford University); Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, a publication and exhibition (Stanford University); Rodin: The B. Gerald Cantor Collection, a publication and exhibition (The Metropolitan Museum of Art); Rodin: The Cantor Gift to The Brooklyn Museum, a publication and exhibition (Brooklyn Museum of Art); and Rodin and Balzac: The Story of a Sculpture, an exhibition (Centro Cultural Consolidado in Caracas, Venezuela).

The Cantors and the Foundation also furthered an appreciation for Rodin’s work by commissioning large-scale Rodin-authorized posthumous bronzes using the lost-wax process – the one he preferred – so people could see the sculptor’s work as he intended it to be. For the 1986 exhibition Rodin: Sculpture from the B. Gerald Cantor Collections at The Metropolitan Museum, Mr. and Mrs. Cantor commissioned the Monument to the Burghers of Calais, and for the 1981 exhibition at the National Gallery, Mr. and Mrs. Cantor commissioned The Gates of Hell. These works had not been cast using the lost-wax method during Rodin’s lifetime.