Art World
Cantor Center Gifted Thousands of Works by Warhol, Diebenkorn, and Jacob Lawrence
SLIDESHOW: Three separate donations for Stanford's art museum.
SLIDESHOW: Three separate donations for Stanford's art museum.
Benjamin Sutton
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The Cantor Center for Visual Arts can’t believe its luck! The Stanford University museum announced this morning that it is the beneficiary of three gifts that will see it acquire a huge trove of works by Jacob Lawrence and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as some 3,600 contact sheets and negatives for photos shot by Andy Warhol.
The gifts significantly increase the Cantor’s holdings of each of the artists. The set of 15 works by Lawrence—five paintings, an illustrated book, and nine prints—was donated by Dr. Herbert J. Kayden and his daughter Joelle Kayden in memory of their wife and mother, Dr. Gabrielle H. Reem. Their gift makes the Cantor’s the largest collection of Jacob Lawrence works on the West Coast. It also includes a painting by the artist’s wife. The gifted works will be showcased in a 2015 solo exhibition, his first in the Bay Area since 1993.
The 26 Diebenkorn scketchbooks, which contain a total of over 1,200 drawings and sketches, were donated by his widow Phyllis G. Diebenkorn, with the support of the artist’s daughter Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant and his son-in-law Richard Grant, who is the executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation. The Diebenkorns all attended Stanford. Richard studied art there in the 1940s, receiving his degree in 1949, and later pursuing art studies at arch-rival, University of California, Berkeley.
The Warhol contact sheets and negatives, meanwhile, were shot by the Pop artist on his Minox 35EL between 1976 and his death in 1987, and come directly from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Cantor’s director Connie Wolf will teach a class in the spring of 2015 based on the archive.
This huge trove of several thousand objects constitutes a major boon to the Cantor, whose collection already numbered more than 40,000 artworks.