Press Releases October 18, 2007

Rodin authority will deliver the gene & georgia mittelman distinguished lecture in the arts November 7th at the University of Connecticut

Storrs, CT-The William Benton Museum of Art has announced that the Gene & Georgia Mittelman Distinguished Lecture in the Arts will be "A Taste for Rodin" by Dr. Ruth Butler, an internationally recognized authority on Rodin and professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, November 7, at 5 pm in Konover Auditorium in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Butler will discuss the history of American interest in Rodin: collecting, connoisseurship, and scholarship as a context in which to understand B. Gerald Cantor's collection, a portion of which is on exhibition at the Benton Museum through December 16. Immediately following the lecture, the public is invited to the Benton Museum for a reception and to view Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.

The lecture and reception are free to the public.

About Dr. Ruth Butler
As a student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Dr. Butler did her dissertation on Rodin's early work, and she has been researching and writing about him ever since. In 1981 she was one of the curators of Rodin Rediscovered, the exhibition at the National Gallery that put Rodin on the map in modern terms. In 1993 her major biography of Rodin entitled Rodin: The Shape of Genius was published. This coming spring, Yale University Press will publish her new book, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin. From 1998-2005, Dr. Butler served on the Conseil d'Administration of the Musée Rodin in Paris.