Cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder was 43 when he bought his first Cubist paintings in 1976. Since then, he acquired 79 more, creating what is considered the most important collection in private hands of works by four preeminent Cubist artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.
Lauder pledged the whole collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 2013, and it’s now on view on its entirety for the first time. “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” presents 81 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture.
During the press opening for the exhibit, Lauder said he has always been fascinated by the complexity of Cubism. “Every painting has a clue in it,” he said. “Cubism spoke to me in a way that no other period did.”
Cubism is considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. It started in the early 1900s, when established ideas were being questioned by thinkers like scientist Albert Einstein and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The Cubists negated the two dimensions of traditional painting, and developed a technique that presented the world from different angles and fragments.
“The notion is of multiple view points, combined into one single panel,” explained Jessica Dawson, an art critic who writes for the Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal. “That's very much the idea of modern life, where we have a glance here and a glance over there, and to be able to capture those multiple viewpoints in a single space, that is the essence of cubism and what makes it so modern,” she said.
Dawson said one of the highlights of the show for her is a Picasso study for "Les demoiselles d'Avignon" from 1907. The piece shows a nude woman surrounded by a drapery. “So much of that painting is about where does the drapery end and where does the figure begin,” she said.
Another highlight, said Dawson, are paintings showing the collaboration between Braque and Picasso. The exhibition quotes from Picasso in 1909: “Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or he came to mine. Each of us HAD to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished until both of us felt it was.”
The show is on view from Oct. 20 to Feb. 16, 2015.
