The Lauder Collection at the Met
CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
In the five years before World War I, Cubism stopped Western art in its tracks, turned it upside down and inside out, and set it on multiple paths to abstraction. Now, a century on, this dynamic style is reshaping the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thanks to the public-minded largess of one man, the collector and lifelong New Yorker Leonard A. Lauder.
Starting Monday, visitors can enjoy and take stock of one of the most transformative gifts in the museum’s gift-laden history: the 81 Cubist works that Mr. Lauder, the chairman emeritus of Estée Lauder, has promised the Met or enabled it to purchase.
This initial look comes in the form of “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection,” an exhilarating exhibition laid out with a sharp sense of history and some humor by Rebecca Rabinow, a Met curator, and Emily Braun, an art historian and private curator who helped Mr. Lauder assemble his collection. A personal, thought-through assembly of artworks, the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, as it will henceforth be known, comes with no restrictions. It is a sterling act of philanthropy.
Mr. Lauder focused exclusively on the four horsemen of the Cubist apocalypse: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, who all worked in Paris in the first quarter of the 20th century. In seven galleries, the works — roughly half on canvas and half on paper (including collages), along with two sculptures by Picasso — outline the genesis of the modernist movement that set the stage for almost all others. Most date from 1907 to 1918; several represent key turning points.
As usual with all things Cubist, and despite Braque’s essential contributions, Picasso is the star and resident demon here, a sharp-eyed collaborator and relentless innovator. And this is not just because he is represented in here by twice as many works: 34, compared with Braque’s 17 and 15 each for Gris and Léger.
At first, Picasso and Braque worked under the spell of Cézanne from different directions. The show opens with three Braque canvases in which he bids farewell to Fauvism and starts chopping the landscape into Cézanne’s cylinders, spheres and cones, most notably in the monumental “Trees at L’Estaque” from 1908, perhaps the most powerful Braque in a New York museum.
This is followed by a stunning all-Picasso gallery with two studies for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” signaling the arrival of this volcanic masterpiece. They make way for three imposing figurative paintings that look to Cézanne’s portraits and bathers, and some outstanding 1909 forays into still life and landscape. Picasso’s scratchy, light-filled watercolor “The Chocolate Pot” all but dissolves reality. “The Old Mill,” a tiny canvas with stacked forms (towers, boat, water and mountains), helped ignite Futurism.
Then the two artists join forces (tied together like mountaineers, as Braque described them) to invent and elaborate Cubism’s space-shattering styles. First, the shifting scaffoldings, shimmering brushwork and multiple perspectives of Analytic Cubism crest in 1911, to be followed by the brighter, more definite planes — alternately solid and stippled — of Synthetic Cubism.
One of the most singular works in the show is Picasso’s 1913-14 Synthetic marvel, “Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair,” with its flattened, segmented body softened by the realities of tufted upholstery, eyeleted muslin, an unmistakable navel and some carefully parted armpit hair. Mr. Lauder rescued it in a 1997 auction of works owned by the New York collectors Victor and Sally Ganz. It is heartwarming to see it safe in a public collection.
A crucial bridge between Analytic and Synthetic was collage, invented by Braque in the autumn of 1912 when he pasted pieces of wood-grain wallpaper to a charcoal drawing in the South of France. (The Lauder gift includes two of the earliest he made.)
Collage opened art to mass-produced and found materials: after the wood-grain, more wallpaper, then newsprint, and eventually, the deluge. Soon Cubism would be spouting language and would jolt sculpture out of its centuries-old figurative rut, toward constructed forms and assemblage.
These are glimpsed in the two Picasso sculptures here. In the 1909 bronze “Head of a Woman (Fernande),” which suggests someone in a rooster suit, Picasso tries to sculpt Cubism before it has jelled on canvas. (It is, unbelievably, the Met’s second cast of this work.) The cast and the painted bronze of “Glass of Absinthe” of 1914, resembles, like its sister at MoMA, several small objects stuck together, and is topped with a real perforated tin absinthe spoon.
In this steeplechase, Gris and Léger, whose works have their own galleries in the show, were among the earliest, most inventive adapters of Cubism. By 1912, each was carving his own distinct style from its rich possibilities.
Gris seems to gently chisel his shallow forms and shadows into planes of brushy whites and pale tints, depicting both Parisian houses and his mother’s face in the examples here. He then turned to dark, intricate puzzlelike works that make painting indistinguishable from collage, culminating in the magnificent “Still Life With Checked Tablecloth” of 1915, with its not-so-hidden bull’s head front and center. Gris has rarely looked better, at least in New York, than here.
The gallery of 15 drawings and paintings by Léger makes for a beautiful finale. First he worked with light and shadow in his own looser way, separating line from color and giving Cubism a rolling, almost gestural energy. Then, in a small but polished 1918 version of the painting “The Acrobats in the Circus” and three graphite drawings from the 1920s, he developed a taut vocabulary of shaded curving forms to depict people, buildings and machines.
The back and forth between Picasso and Braque is always there. In the exhibition’s third gallery, a pairing of canvases nearly identical in size and subject exemplifies their very different sensibilities, neatly pinpointed in the works’ labels. Braque’s “Still Life With Clarinet (Bottle With Clarinet),” is delicate, aflutter, favoring long, quavering diagonal lines and drifting eddies of brush strokes in tans, grays and creams that lighten toward the center. Picasso’s “Pedestal Table, Glasses, Cups, Mandolin” is more emphatic, and anchored with lots more black. He prefers shorter horizontal or vertical lines that sometimes extend to the canvas edge. His composition darkens toward the center, culminating in a black sphere that is the mandolin’s sound hole but also reads as a fist clenched in challenge. Along the bottom of the canvas, Picasso preens a bit, depicting twists of rope in several modes of line or brushwork, attesting to both Cubism’s enduring loyalty to reality and its capacity for endless play.
After these two paintings, the first canvas on the left in the next gallery, “Still Life With Fan: ‘L’Indépendant,' ” seems to fulfill the Braque requirements to a T (the slanting, lightening, fluttering and so forth). Except the painting is by Picasso, a nonchalant retort, “Yeah, I can do that, too.”
It’s no surprise to learn that Braque occasionally held something back. On the adjacent wall, a label for one of his earliest collages notes that he discovered the wood-grain wallpaper in 1912 while summering with Picasso. But he waited until the fall, when Picasso had returned to Paris, to begin experimenting with it. As nearby works attest, Braque would share his innovation with Picasso soon enough.
The Lauder gift fills one of the biggest gaps in the Met’s encyclopedic embrace. Long tentative about 20th-century art in general, the museum was all but squeamish about Cubism. It owned no Cubist or proto-Cubist paintings by any of the four artists here until the 1990s, when three donors provided 12 canvases, finally giving the Met a very nice foothold.
Now the foothold expands into a broad foundation. Put more bluntly, the great Cubist collection in the Museum of Modern Art is no longer the only show in town. And just wait: Comparing the Modern’s and the Met’s holdings in this area will probably become a favorite art-world pastime. To get started, see the Lauder exhibition and then name-check through the Cubist paintings by the Lauder Four on MoMA’s website. It can sharpen your appreciation of the quality of both collections: the Modern’s long game, played over seven or eight decades, and Mr. Lauder’s end run, which started only in the early 1980s.
One of the greatest aspects of this gift is Mr. Lauder’s faith that the Met curators know best how to present these works — and with whatever they choose. The lack of stipulations implies a kind of purity of intention in contrast to some of the Met’s other big donors of 19th- and 20th-century art, who insist that their gifts must, for the most part, be displayed together.
Mr. Lauder’s gift is for the Met, and for generations of curators and art lovers, more than for his own self-aggrandizement. The art itself, given unconditionally, is more than enough to keep his name alive.