Cantor Arts Center

Cantor Arts Center (officially Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, previously the Stanford University Museum of Art) is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States. The museum first opened in 1894 and consists of over 130,000 sq ft (12,000 m2) of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The Cantor Arts Center houses the largest collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of Paris and the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, with 199 works, most in bronze but others in different media. In 2024, the Cantor was ranked by the Washington Post as one of the five best college art museums in the U.S. The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.

When it first opened its doors to the public in 1894, the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum was unique, having been privately founded by a family with a general collection of world art on par with the major public museums at the time. For decades, Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford had traveled extensively, collecting American and European Old Master paintings, as well as a wide array of antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. By the turn of the century, the Stanford museum, with its large archeological and ethnological holdings as well as art, was the largest privately owned museum in the world. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was an enormous disaster for the museum. The Roman, Egyptian and Asian galleries were destroyed, and three-quarters of the building was damaged beyond repair. The Oxford Assyriologist Archibald Sayce, recalling a visit to Stanford in 1917, wrote that "the rooms of its spacious Museum were still a scene of wreckage. The magnificent collection of Greek vases it once contained had been hopelessly shattered; even the Egyptian mummies were torn and dismembered." The earthquake, along with the death of co-founder Jane Stanford the previous year, sharply curtailed the budget of the museum, which had no endowment. Faculty and administration had little interest in restoring the museum, and the building and its collection fell into disrepair. Curatorial duties ceased.

In 1917 Pedro Joseph de Lemos resigned as head of the San Francisco Art Institute to teach at Stanford, where he also served as Curator and Director of the Stanford University Museum and the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery until 1945. He reorganized the museum and began a regular series of exhibitions at both venues. But during this period the art collection was decimated by loss, sales, and gifts, and the poorly secured storage area became a quarry for local collectors and dealers. In 1945, after de Lemos' departure, the museum was officially closed in order to conduct an inventory of the art holdings. The university's art department saw the inventory as an opportunity to divest the museum of works of art lacking aesthetic merit. An enormous accumulation of worthless material was disposed of, but so too were paintings and sculptures from the original Stanford family collection judged now to be of greater value than was believed in the 1950s, including works by Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford, Norton Bush, and Thomas Hill. In 1953, the Committee for Art at Stanford was founded, with the intention of recruiting members and raising funds to reopen the museum, and in 1954, after nine years of stocktaking, the museum reopened.

Garden data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).