Stanford has long been a world center for Rodin studies, its collection unsurpassed outside the sculptor’s own estate in France. Most of the holdings came from the late financier B. Gerald Cantor, left, who began giving away his massive trove in 1974 and for decades worked closely with the late Professor Albert Elsen to shape Stanford’s collection. Only now, though, is a catalog available.
Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (ed. Bernard Barryte, Oxford, 2003), gives new meaning to magnum opus—and not just because it weighs 7 pounds. The 662-page volume is the work of many hands. Elsen, who devoted a lifetime to Rodin and spent years on the project, died suddenly in 1995. His former student, co-author Rosalyn Frankel Jamison, PhD ’86, completed his manuscript, and a long line of graduate students, curators and others took part in this hefty piece of scholarship. The encyclopedic details and pictures of each work are impressive—but Elsen dug deeper to fathom the why, not just the what and how, of Rodin’s creations and their critical reception over the years.
Among the book’s gems is a memoir by Kirk Varnedoe, MA ’70, PhD ’72, chief curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He reveals that the two men who put Rodin on the campus map started as adversaries in 1968, when Elsen publicly denounced the wax polish used on Cantor’s collection. Fortunately for Stanford, they patched it up and became close friends.
