The first art museum I ever visited was the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Hanseatic port city on the Elbe River where I was born and went to school. Apparently, Leland Stanford Jr., accompanied by his mother, saw the then-new museum on his first trip to Europe as a 12-year-old in 1880.
I first went there on a field trip with my elementary school homeroom. Rather than tour the entire museum, we spent two hours with two pictures. (I remember one was a lake-and-mountains landscape by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler.) We were expected to describe and analyze in detail what we saw.
I was reminded of this introduction to art a few years ago at the National Gallery in London. I noticed a group of English schoolchildren, under the inspired guidance of their teacher, sitting in a circle on the floor in front of a Gainsborough, doing exactly as we had done.
The 20th-century German poet Gottfried Benn began one of his last poems with the line: "In my parental home there were no Gainsboroughs." As this is hardly a remarkable fact about anybody's home, the opening line makes the absence of Gainsboroughs stand for lack of exposure to the arts.
A museum at a university, in some ways, is a luxury comparable to having Gainsboroughs at home. Jane Stanford, however, in a 1902 address to the Board of Trustees on the Founding Grant, referred to galleries of art as "necessary and appropriate to a university of high degree." This is a truth that is hardly self-evident. However, it has become so much part of Stanford's mission that even the formidable campuswide restoration challenges that we faced after the 1989 earthquake did not deter the University leaders of the time from recognizing the restoration and, indeed, expansion of the Stanford Museum as necessary and appropriate.
That restoration and expansion has been achieved splendidly. Earlier this year, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford was inaugurated. What does it mean to us?
Art in a permanent collection permits us to spend hours in front of a painting or a sculpture and to come back to it again. The point was beautifully made by a man who viewed the recent regrouping of Rodin's Burghers of Calais in Memorial Court. He was overheard by Bernard Barryte, chief curator of the Cantor Center and the person responsible for the rearrangement of the Burghers. The old gentleman looked at the statues for quite a while and then turned to a young woman, perhaps his daughter, and said: "I would go to school here just to be able to look at these statues every day."
Stanford's emphasis on the arts and humanities will be greatly enhanced by the Cantor Center. In this emphasis, we will be reassured by the fact that our founders thought of the arts and humanities as necessary for the institution's object: "to qualify students for personal success and direct usefulness in life." The educational goals of a university can hardly be stated more pragmatically than by a reference to success and usefulness. Yet beneath this pragmatism lurked, as it were, a more complex view of human aspirations. "Cultivation and enlargement of the mind" were sine qua nons.
This complex view is confirmed by what all three Stanfords, including Leland Jr., collected. Their preference for art and artifacts was not narrowly parochial but extended to all eras and all continents, as is still the case with the Cantor Center. This catholicity will help the University introduce students to different ways of looking at the world, different expressions of the human condition in history and diverse cultures.
Of course, the role of an art museum at Stanford is not solely educational. It is also to provide the University community -- including returning alumni and parents, donors and friends -- as well as the larger community around Stanford, with the sheer aesthetic pleasure that comes from viewing art. Exposure to good art often increases subsequent demand for good art. It can become, in the words of my economist friends Gary Becker and George Stigler, a "beneficial" addiction.
I must admit that I already am addicted to the magic performed by the architects on the austere neoclassical original building of the museum. The world often forgets that the visual art we are most exposed to on a daily basis is architecture. It has the wonderful, but also frequently distressing, quality of being inescapable. This is why Stanford's architecture and architectural design competitions have been so important to me.
I strongly encourage you to visit campus and the Cantor Center, to spend a few hours in front of a painting or sculpture, and to come back time and again. I believe you will find your education furthered, your mind cultivated and enlarged, and yourself beneficially addicted to good art.
