GERHARD CASPER
Remarks at the Inaugural Dinner Celebrating
the Opening of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
at Stanford University
January 21, 1999
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I warmly welcome you to this splendid, indeed, magnificent occasion.
The first art museum I ever visited was the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Hanseatic port city where I was born and went to school. Opened in 1869, it is a very good museum, though not in the first rank of institutions worldwide. On the whole, the senses of aesthetics and philanthropy, and especially the combination of the two, on the part of Hamburg merchants were somewhat underdeveloped. Apparently, Leland Stanford Jr., accompanied by his mother, saw the then new museum on his first trip to Europe as a twelve-year-old in 1880.
When I went there first, it was with my home room at school. We had been taken on an excursion to the Kunsthalle. Actually, we did not tour the entire museum. Instead, we spent two hours with two pictures (I remember one of these to have been 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 door opening to art when, a few years ago, on a visit to the National Gallery in London, I noticed a very diverse group of English school children, under the inspired guidance of their teacher, sit in a circle on the floor in front of a Gainsborough, doing exactly what 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—it seems to be the rule rather than the exception not to own a Gainsborough, let alone Gainsboroughs in the plural—the opening line makes the absence of Gainsboroughs at home stand for the lack of exposure to the arts. A couple of lines later, the poet says that his father had been to the theater only once in his life, at the beginning of the century.
A museum at a university, in some ways, is a luxury comparable to owning Gainsboroughs. Jane Stanford, however, in her commentary 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 but it eventually and after many difficulties became so much part of Stanford's mission (especially thanks to Lorenz Eitner and Wanda Corn) that even the formidable university-wide restoration challenges that we faced after the 1989 earthquake did not deter President Kennedy and other university leaders—including, and especially, the university's board chairman after 1992, John Freidenrich—from assuming the restoration and, indeed, expansion as a necessity. I have been a joyful co-conspirator.
Art in a permanent collection permits us to spend hours in front of a painting or a sculpture and to come back. 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—Bernard thought he was from the Indian subcontinent—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 reopening and enlargement of our museum as the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. 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 under this, our founders' 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 from the beginning of their collecting activities to all times and all continents, as is still the case with the Cantor Center. This catholicity will help the university to introduce its students to different ways of looking at the world, different expressions of the human condition in history and diverse cultures.
I do not want to be misunderstood. The role of an art museum at Stanford is not solely educational. It is also to provide the university community and the larger community around Stanford with the sheer aesthetic pleasure that comes from viewing art. Viewing art is among the phenomena whose marginal utility fortunately rises with exposure: Good art increases subsequent demand for good art in many persons as appreciation grows. It can become, in the words of my economist friends Gary Becker and George Stigler, a “beneficial” addiction.
Arguably, it had become so for Leland under his parents', especially his mother's, guidance. Even on his first trip to Europe as a twelve-year-old, in 1880, he was taken to galleries and museums in Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg (remember: Leland got there before I did), Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Florence, Rome, and Naples. On the second grand tour, three years later, Leland began at the Victoria and Albert in London (then the South Kensington Museum) and proceeded to visit dozens of other museums before getting to the National Archeological Museum in Athens. One can only admire the seriousness with which the parents wanted their son to get addicted to art.
I am a little less certain about the enthusiasm with which we should regard Jane Stanford's taste in architecture. The Germano-Greek austere neo-classicism that the Leland Stanford Junior Museum building owes to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens posed great difficulties as we contemplated expansion. The world often forgets that the visual art that 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 competititve architectural design has been so important to me. While I normally credit my many years in Chicago with having honed this commitment, it may also be the case that my generation, which grew up in the fifties, first became conscious of contemporary architecture's sculptural potential as we encountered the most celebrated building of that decade, Le Corbusier's church at Ronchamp. This was made particularly easy if, as Regina and I did, you attended Freiburg, a university on the eastern border of France—just a short distance from Ronchamp.
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts was the second building project, after Antoine Predock's Allen Center, for which, with the guidance of the university's architect, David Neuman, we designed a design competition. I know that Jim Polsheck and Richard Olcott, our two design architects, remember the event the same way I do: as extraordinarily lively with Tom Seligman, Ruth Halperin, David Neuman, and the university president expressing fairly strong views on a number of design aspects.
In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Jim Polshek recounted my objections to a proposed wall, in his words, a “bit of scenography, to set the stage.” According to the interview, Jim said, I quote: “I was very keen on that wall. Casper felt that it was artifice, and he was not incorrect.” Thank you, Jim: that is the most sweeping concession anybody has made to me in my seven years at Stanford. I shall even forgive you that, in the same interview, you referred to our tight fiscal management of the project as “fiscal shenanigans.” I am sure I speak not just for myself, but also for Tom, Iris, and everybody in this room when I say that we could not have wished for a better working relationship than the one we had with Jim and Richard and that we could not have wished for an aesthetically, and in every other respect, more satisfying outcome.
Turning to the fiscal aspects of the reconstruction and expansion, I remind you that it was undertaken when the university faced $160 million worth of Loma Prieta-caused expenditures. Even Green West, the old university library, will not reopen before the fall. Figuring out what to do about the museum posed intriguing problems: For instance, how were we to react when FEMA excluded from its consideration some gaping cracks (you could see the blue sky through them) that it claimed were due to the 1906 earthquake? Private philanthropy literally came to the rescue, supporting most of this project quietly as we were trying to address all the other needs of the university.
I am deeply grateful to the over 700 donors who had a part in providing this splendid museum for Stanford. Large and small gifts were made and all of them were crucial, given how often we operated on a shoestring. The Committee for Art at Stanford worked extraordinarily hard to sustain interest and support during the long period of closure.
I begin with and emphasize all donors because, as I go on to recognize a few especially, I should like to stress that Tom Seligman, Mona Duggan, and I know and appreciate the significance of every contribution made.
The substantial gift that launched the building campaign came from Carmen Christensen, recently augmented by another commitment from the Christensen Fund for the endowment effort. The gift that rescued the building campaign and our ambitions concerning the new wing was, of course, the generous naming gift from Iris and Bernie Cantor who, as it were, were putting their money where their Rodins were.
And then permit me to single out contributions to the museum from Jill and John Freidenrich, Ruth and Bob Halperin, Burt and Deedee McMurtry, Doris and Don Fisher, the Pigott Family, Phyllis Wattis, Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley, and Bob and Margrit Mondavi. There were a couple of very significant anonymous donors who want to be among all those I cannot name by name here and now.
As provost at the University of Chicago, I had responsibility to find a director for that university's fine arts gallery. The discussions were not easy because the candidates were distrustful of the university's priorities. However, in the end, the appointment was simply a matter of budget, staff, and other mundane subjects. Tom Seligman, on the other hand, was recruited in Don Kennedy's presidency to head a museum that, at best, had a virtual existence. A feat of this kind I have never had to accomplish. Without Tom's faith, optimism, organizational talent, attention to detail, steadiness, calm, and childlike innocence—or what he pretends to be his innocence—we would not be able to give this king without a kingdom a realm that he will now rule with the same forbearance and awareness of revenue constraints that have characterized the last seven years. Tom, thank you!