The end of the calendar year is a time for first and last chances at the Cantor Arts Center, and the opportunity to revisit favorite works across campus. Loose in Some Real Tropics: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Stoned Moon” Projects, 1969–70 opens at the Cantor on Saturday, Dec. 20, and runs through Mar. 16, 2015. In 1969, American artist Robert Rauschenberg was invited by the NASA Art Program to document the launch of Apollo 11, the…

When Allison and Dan Rose moved into their historic Palo Alto home, their art was essentially limited to Pottery Barn and Z Gallerie buys. It was interior designer Jon de la Cruz who suggested the couple consider elevating their acquisitions. Four years later, the walls of their 1905 Craftsman are decorated with contemporary works from the likes of John Chiara, Gabriel Orozco, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra and Hiroshi Sugimoto. “We started buying a…

…around 1969 that they found their niche in postwar American art, mentored by the Stanford art history professor Albert Elsen and the Bay Area artist Nathan Oliveira, who was also on the faculty, as well as a star-studded cast of dealers, some of whom—like Arne Glimcher, the founder of the Pace Gallery—offered an education of another kind. The Andersons had passed on a piece by Louise Nevelson at Pace but had second thoughts, and six months later…

…hich painting was composed and paintbrushes moved the paint in recognizable fashion. Pollock’s drips obliterated all that. Yet this painting speaks to a fierce compositional control even as the paint fell to the canvas. There are two Rothkos, Pink and White over Red, from 1957 and Untitled (Black on Gray) from 1969. Between these two paintings is a whole autobiography, an interior landscape from which all color has been drained. They are each ver…