The Cantor Arts Center and the Rodin Garden Nobody Expected

The Cantor Arts Center and the Rodin Garden Nobody Expected

The Cantor Arts Center on Stanford's campus at 328 Lomita Drive is free, world-class, and contains the largest collection of Auguste Rodin bronzes outside Paris — a fact that surprises everyone who hears it and shouldn't, because Stanford was founded by a railroad baron who believed that a university without art was just a very expensive library.

The Rodin Sculpture Garden sits outside the museum entrance, and it stops you before you even get inside. Twenty bronzes stand among the trees — The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, studies for The Thinker — and they are arranged with enough space between them that each piece commands its own conversation with the California light. Seeing Rodin outdoors, in sunshine, against palm trees and sandstone, changes the sculptures in a way that the dim halls of a Parisian museum cannot. The bodies look warmer. The anguish looks more like stubbornness. The whole garden feels like an argument that art belongs outside.

Inside, the collection spans ancient to contemporary — Egyptian sarcophagi, Indian temple carvings, Rothko, Diebenkorn, and a Southeast Asian gallery that would anchor any museum but here feels like a quiet room in a larger house. The building is light-filled and unhurried, and the galleries are sized for looking rather than impressing.

What visitors miss: The Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden adjacent to the Cantor, in an open woodland clearing. Carved wooden figures from the Sepik River region stand among the eucalyptus like visitors from another world who have decided to stay, and the garden has the meditative quality of a place that most people walk past on their way to somewhere busier. Don't. The carvings are extraordinary, the setting is otherworldly, and you will have it to yourself.

Silicon Valley is defined by what's next — the next product, the next round, the next disruption. The Cantor insists that what came before matters just as much, and it makes the case with Rodin in the sunshine and a quiet garden where the past stands still and waits for you to notice.