Iris Cantor, Philanthropist and Art Collector, Dies at 95

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 her younger sister Binnie 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.