B. Gerald Cantor

Bernard Gerald Cantor (December 17, 1916 – July 3, 1996) was an American investment banker who was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Career Cantor's parents were Rose (née Schwaidelson) and Julius Cantor, Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Born in the Bronx on December 17, 1916, Cantor attended DeWitt Clinton High School. He and his first wife, Leona (deceased) had one son, Jay, who chose not to follow his father into the financial world.

Cantor studied law and finance at New York University between 1935 and 1937 and soon afterwards became a securities analyst on Wall Street. After serving in the army in the South Pacific during the Second World War, he established B.G. Cantor and Company, which would later become Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., a New York City-based partnership that was among the biggest institutional brokers of Government securities in the United States. He stepped down in December 1995 because of declining health. He was also a co-owner of the Kansas City Kings of the National Basketball Association for a time.

Art collection After he married Iris Bazel in 1977 the couple became among the most important benefactors of fine art in New York through the founding of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. From 1984 to 1987, the Cantors gave 58 Rodins and the money to install them in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. "Rodin at Rockefeller Center: Sculpture from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation" was mounted at the Rockefeller Center, New York, in 1998. Later, the exhibition "Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession" was organized and toured internationally by the foundation, travelling, among others, to Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Albany Institute of History & Art, Albany; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Cantor was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum from 1985 to 1990. In later years, he was an honorary trustee and a member of the visiting committee for the museum's department of European sculpture and decorative arts. He was also a life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1972 to 1985 and subsequently an honorary trustee.

Philanthropy Cantor has donated to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Cornell University.

When the White House unveiled the redecorated Oval Office in 1993, it displayed a bronze cast of Rodin's "Thinker," which President Clinton had personally arranged to borrow from the Cantor collection.