Iris Cantor, an arts patron and philanthropist who with her investment banker husband amassed — and then bestowed to various museums — one of the largest private collections of Rodin sculptures in the world, died on Sunday at her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 95.
Her death was announced by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, of which she was chairwoman. Through the foundation, she granted hundreds of millions of dollars to support medical and educational institutions, as well as the visual and performing arts.
After working as a model and stockbroker, she joined the bond brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald in 1967 as an executive secretary. Ten years later, she married the founder, B. Gerald Cantor. In 1978, the couple formed a charitable organization that, when Mr. Cantor died in 1996, stood to disburse the fruits of a fortune estimated at some $500 million.
In the three decades since, Mrs. Cantor, who rose to become the vice chairwoman of Cantor Fitzgerald, emerged as one of the nation’s leading private philanthropists.
The Cantor foundation’s major beneficiaries include the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Stanford University, the Musée Rodin in Paris, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
Grants from the foundation have also expanded the teaching and performance space at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, helping to pay for a film center and a professional proscenium theater.
“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,” Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum, said in a statement. Several of the museum’s galleries, including one on the roof, are named for Mrs. Cantor.
She also donated a collection of 66 Rodin sculptures and drawings to the Brooklyn Museum, which named an outdoor plaza in her honor in 2023.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded the Cantors the National Medal of Arts.
After a younger sister died of breast cancer, Mrs. Cantor established the Iris Cantor Breast Imaging Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1986. She funded a women’s health center at U.C.L.A. in 1995 and another one, in 2002, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she founded the Iris Cantor Men’s Health Center in 2012.
Mrs. Cantor was born Iris Bazel, the eldest of three daughters, on Feb. 14, 1931, in Brooklyn. Her father, Albert, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was a lumber salesman. Her mother, Fannie (Barsky) Bazel, managed the household.
Iris was raised in Crown Heights, three blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, which she visited regularly with her sisters, Binnie and Enid. She attended Erasmus Hall High School.
Her marriage to Mr. Cantor was her third, and she had no children or immediate survivors.
Mr. Cantor, known as Bernie, saw his first Rodin sculpture, “The Hand of God,” at the Met as a young man in 1947. The piece moved him deeply, he said, as “a source of strength, power and sensuality.” He and Mrs. Cantor eventually collected some 750 Rodin sculptures and sketches.
Since its founding, the Cantor foundation has donated some 450 Rodin sculptures and drawings to museums around the world and helped fund museum renovations and expansions.
In an interview with the Metropolitan Museum in 2022, Mrs. Cantor said, “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.”
She added: “There is still no better place for all of this to happen than at museums, which preserve and showcase the results of human creativity.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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