Iris Cantor, a collector and philanthropist who provided the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and other US art institutions with millions of dollars worth of support, died on Sunday in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 95, according to a release from her foundation, which did not state a cause.
Cantor was a transformative force in the American art world, with her patronage significantly reshaping some of the nation’s top museums. She helped steward the legacy of her husband, B. Gerald Cantor, who died in 1996; through a foundation in her name, she also made donations to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and others.
Met director Max Hollein said in a statement, “Her legacy is one of imagination, conviction, and unwavering belief in the essential role museums play—not only in what they show, but also in what they help us understand about ourselves and the world around us.”
Signs of her patronage are visible not only within museum walls but on them too. The Met, for example, features multiple expansive galleries named after Cantor, including a rooftop gallery where commissions are exhibited annually and a long hall in the galleries for 19th-century European sculpture.
In 1999, following a steady stream of donations from the foundation, Stanford University rechristened its art museum the Cantor Arts Center. In 2023, the Brooklyn Museum, the institution that Cantor credited with stoking her interest in art, renamed its outdoor plaza after her.
“Throughout her life, she has been an incredible friend and generous supporter of the Museum, from gifting our renowned collection of sixty-six Auguste Rodin sculptures and drawings to endowing public programs and publications,” Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak said in a statement. “Now, our beloved outdoor plaza will honor Iris and her enduring legacy of support for the Museum while undergoing a green transformation, bringing even greater joy to the millions who visit.”
Her husband, who went by the name Bernie, amassed one of the largest collections of Rodin sculptures held privately, and with Iris, he dispersed them to museums across the nation. In 1983, they gave more than 80 of them to the Met and the Brooklyn Museum; at the time, the donation was worth $7 million. Both institutions still regularly exhibit these Rodins, with the Met showing its sculptures in galleries bearing the Cantors’ names.
While Bernie was the driving force in creating the Rodin collection, Iris caught the Rodin bug and went on to pursue the passion herself, too. She made a documentary about The Gates of Hell, a lost-wax cast of which the Cantors owned. Iris then made a documentary about the work that still today appears in exhibition about this monumental sculpture.
Together with Bernie, she appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year between 1991 and 1996. Their listing specified an interest in sculpture by Rodin, something few other collectors on the list have ever noted as a collecting area.
Iris Cantor was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. According to a biography on the foundation’s website, she set out to become a broker in the world of Wall Street. While working in finance, she met Bernie, a financier. They married in 1977 and established their foundation the year after.
Iris’s philanthropy extended beyond the art world. In 1986, she underwrote a breast imaging center at the University of California, Los Angeles, the same school where she would go on to found a women’s health center in 1995. Then, in 2002, she founded another women’s health center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
She was also a longtime supporter of New York University, lending her name to a film center at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Yet it is within the art world that Cantor’s impact can be seen most prominently. She became a trustee at the Met in 1995 and remained on the board for nearly two decades afterward. She was vice chair at the Brooklyn Museum from 1991 to 2001, during which time she endowed a new auditorium there. She was also a trustee at LACMA and the North Carolina Museum of Art, the latter of which has a courtyard named after her.
More signs of her influence are still to come. The LACMA is currently readying a new set of galleries that will be accompanied by a fresh sculpture garden bearing the Cantors’ names.
That she left such a lasting mark on all these institutions was in keeping with her overall philosophy.
“One of the guiding principles I embraced alongside Bernie is that fine art should be accessible to the public and, to the greatest extent possible, part of our daily lives,” she said in a 2022 interview for the Met’s website. “Enabling others to marvel at great works of art, just as we did, became a driving force. Beyond this, art should contribute in a meaningful way to the life of a community and to our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and even where we might be headed. And there is still no better place for all of this to happen than at museums, which preserve and showcase the results of human creativity.”
