In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has
promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and
sculptures.
The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14
Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr.
Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons,
in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C.
Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry
Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.
The gift was approved by the Met’s board at a meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Scholars say the collection is among the world’s greatest, as good as, if not
better than, the renowned Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures in
institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Together they tell
the story of a movement that revolutionized Modern art and fill a glaring gap in
the Met’s collection, which has been notably weak in early-20th-century art.
“In one fell swoop this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century
art,” Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, said. “It is an unreproducible
collection, something museum directors only dream about.”
And many did. Discussions between Mr. Lauder and the Met went on for years,
first with Philippe de Montebello, its longtime director who retired in 2008,
and more recently with Mr. Campbell. While Mr. Lauder declined to say who else
courted his collection, officials in the museum world have said the National
Gallery of Art in Washington was among them. But as a New Yorker aware that his
art could radically transform one of the city’s most historic institutions, he
saw the Met as a perfect fit.
“Whenever I’ve given something to a museum, I’ve wanted it to be
transformative,” Mr. Lauder explained. “This wasn’t a bidding war. I went
knocking, and the door opened easily.”
In the New York art scene, which is heavily populated with big-time
collectors, Mr. Lauder is a singular figure. While many of his peers have made
splashy acquisitions, seduced by the latest trends, he has quietly and steadily
built a museum-worthy collection with a single focus, on Cubism.
His gift comes without restrictions so it can be displayed as curators see
fit. The Met is already beginning to receive the art, according to officials
there, for an exhibition scheduled to open in the fall of 2014.
Mr. Lauder, 80, has also spearheaded the creation of a research center for
Modern art at the Met, supported by a $22 million endowment that he has helped
finance along with museum trustees and supporters.
The collection, which Mr. Lauder began building more than 40 years ago, is a
product of taste and timing.
“I liked the aesthetic,” he said on a recent afternoon in his Manhattan
apartment. He was in the living room, staring at a still life by Picasso richly
punctuated with bits of newspaper and sand. “Back then,” he said, “a lot was
still available, because nobody really wanted it.”
It was also relatively inexpensive because the fashion was for Impressionism
and post-Impressionism.
Mr. Lauder and his younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a founder of the Neue
Galerie on the Upper East Side, are among the most influential collectors
and supporters of art in New York. But while others buy widely, often in
multiple periods and styles, Leonard Lauder stands out for his single-minded
focus.
“You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused,
disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford,”
Mr. Lauder said. “Early on I decided this should be formed as a museum
collection,” and “whenever I considered buying anything, I would step back and
ask myself, does this make the cut?”
As a result, much of his art comes from some of the world’s most celebrated
collections, including those of Gertrude Stein, the Swiss banker Raoul La
Roche and the British art historian Douglas
Cooper.
The term Cubism first appeared in a review of a 1908 exhibition at
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery, which featured early Cubist works. What
began as a collaboration between Picasso and Braque, Cubism became a pioneering
movement that redefined concepts of space and time, high and low. Those artists,
along with Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, took shapes that were familiar and
turned them upside down, dismantling the traditional perspective.
Challenging the romantic view of painting, Cubist artists also began
incorporating things like cardboard, sand, sawdust, rope, wood, wallpaper,
stencils and bits of newspaper into their paintings, drawings, collages and
sculptures. Their work paved the way for abstraction, which dominated Western
art for the next 50 years.
Often, Mr. Lauder said, it took him years to find something he wanted to buy.
“I’ve made more trips to Switzerland than I’d like to count,” he said with a
chuckle. With the help of Emily Braun, an art historian who has worked as Mr.
Lauder’s curator for 26 years, he was able to pick and choose the finest works
that came on the market.
As a result, most of the works in Mr. Lauder’s collection have a particular
historical significance. Two landscapes are from the groundbreaking 1908
Kahnweiler exhibition: Braque’s “Terrace at the Hotel Mistral,” from 1907, and
his “Trees at L’Estaque,” from 1908.
“ ‘The Trees at L’Estaque’ is considered one of the very first Cubist
pictures,” Ms. Braun said. “It created a new form of pictorial space that Braque
arrived at from his close study of Cézanne’s landscapes.”
Rebecca Rabinow, a curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s department of Modern
and contemporary art, noted other milestones included in the gift. “There are so
many firsts in this collection,” she said.
Picasso’s “Oil Mill,” from 1909, was the first Cubist painting seen in Italy,
which influenced the Italian Futurists. Another of his works, “The
Fan (L’Independent),” from 1911, is one of the first works in which Picasso
experimented with typography, in this case the gothic type masthead from a local
French newspaper. Braque’s “Fruit Dish and Glass,” from 1912, is the first
Cubist paper collage ever created.
Some of the paintings and sculptures in Mr. Lauder’s collection were
particularly radical for their time, like Picasso’s “Woman in an Armchair
(Eva),” the artist’s 1913-14 image of his mistress Eva Gouel, in which he
translated the female body into his own Cubist language. Picasso’s sculpture
“Head of a Woman,” from 1909, is thought to be the first Cubist sculpture.
That many of the works look both forward and back is of particular value to
the Met’s curators. Picasso’s embrace of African tribal art, for instance, was
crucial to his depiction of nontraditional forms.
“Cubism inspired not just Western artists, but it had a huge global impact,”
Ms. Rabinow said. “We can tell so many different stories that we could never
tell before.”
Up to now Cubism has been only sparsely represented at the Met. In fact it
only received its first Cubist paintings in 1996. In a 2010 review of an
exhibition of the Met’s Picasso collection, Holland Cotter noted in The New York
Times, “When the Museum of Modern Art was wolfing down audacious helpings of
Cubism, the Met was content with a tasting menu of Blue Period, Rose Period and
neo-Classical fare.”
This isn’t the first transformative gift Mr. Lauder has made to a museum. As
the longtime chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art (he is now its
chairman emeritus), he donated millions in art and money, most recently in 2008
when he gave the museum $131 million to shore up its endowment.
While it is the largest gift in the Whitney’s history, it came with strings.
Concerned about the future of its landmark Marcel Breuer building, which Mr.
Lauder considers the Whitney’s spiritual home, he placed a stipulation on his
gift that the building could not be sold for the foreseeable future. At the same
time, he quietly masterminded plans for the Met to take over the Breuer building
for at least eight years, after the Whitney decamps to its new home in the
meatpacking district of Manhattan in 2015.
When the Met gets Mr. Lauder’s collection, Mr. Campbell said, it will take
“pride of place” in the museum’s soon to be renovated Modern and contemporary
galleries, in its main building. Before then the collection will be exhibited as
a whole for the first time at the Met in 2014 in a show organized by Ms. Rabinow
and Ms. Braun.
Realizing how his collection could help tell so many different stories when
seen in the context of the Met’s encyclopedic holdings, Mr. Lauder did not put
restrictions on his gift.
And he stressed that his donation doesn’t mean the end of his collecting. As
recently as last month he bought a collage by Gris, which is part of the
gift.
“I’ll continue to buy and add to the Met’s collection,” he said, then paused,
smiled and added, “But only if the right things come along.”
