Leonard Lauder’s Cubist Passion Exhibition

Leonard Lauder started small. When he was six years old, he began collecting postcards, focusing on pictures of Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach. A self-professed “history buff,” he moved on to posters of World War II, developing a fascination with the visual language of propaganda. From there, he began acquiring posters by Toulouse-Lautrec and eventually picked up a Picasso, “Carafe and Candlestick” (1909), his first Cubist oil painting.

Then came the 1983 show at the Tate, “The Essential Cubism,” which inspired Lauder to focus his collecting. With the guidance of art historian Emily Braun and other scholars, he carefully built what is being billed as the most important grouping of Cubist works still in private hands. The entire collection, a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum, can now be seen for the first time by the public in the first-floor special exhibition galleries, where more than 80 paintings, collages, sculptures and works on paper are on view through February 16.

Lauder, chairman emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies, zeroed in on the Big Four—Georges Braque (1882-1963), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Juan Gris (1887-1927), and Fernand Léger (1881-1955). They were the pillars of Cubism, “the most influential avant-garde movement of the first half of the 20th century,” the wall text states at the outset. Braque and Picasso are credited with founding the movement, with Braque having the distinction of initiating the style with “Trees at L’Estaque” (1908), one of two landscapes displayed at a Paris gallery in 1908 in a groundbreaking show devoted to his work. Both kick off the current exhibit, following photos of Lauder’s residence on the Upper East Side, with trophies from the collection dotting the walls.

The Cubists pioneered a radical new way of seeing the world. They dispensed with traditional perspective and opted for shallow, two-dimensional spaces that offered views of objects from unusual angles and shapes that pushed outward not inward. Soft, round modeling of figures was replaced with sharp, jagged edges and a collision of geometric forms and overlapping planes.

The bulk of the show is devoted to founding members Braque and Picasso in the years 1909-1914, with an illuminating look at the collaborative, and quite competitive, nature of their relationship. Both lived in the Bateau-Lavoir, an artists’ enclave in Montmartre in Paris. They painted by day and critiqued each other’s work by night. A painting by Braque wasn’t finished until Picasso said it was, and vice versa.

Braque seems to have single-handedly redefined painting when, after spotting faux wood-grained wallpaper in a shop window in Avignon, he purchased some and incorporated a section into “Fruit Dish and Glass” (1912)— the first papier collé (collage) and thrillingly shown here. Picasso and other revolutionaries soon followed suit, adding snippets of newspapers, advertisements, sheet music and other mass-produced items to their fine art canvases to tease viewers and offer clues to the meaning of their pictures.

Above all, the Cubists reveled in visual and linguistic puns. Their works were puzzles that had to be decoded and studied to see the complex, underlying truth. Color offered a “way in.” The exhibit devotes a section to illustrating how Picasso and Braque expanded their monochromatic palettes in spring 1912 and reintroduced color to enhance and help unlock the significance of their art.

Lauder’s collecting zeal continues to this day. His purchases of works by the four “essential Cubists” were made with an eye to building a history of the movement and donating the works to a museum—not to profit off them. As he says in an interview with collection curator Emily Braun that prefaces the show’s exhaustive catalogue: “Much of the fun, what drives me, is the pursuit. I want to conserve, not possess.”

His holdings are the result of more than 30 years of careful study and dedication. When he decided to set his sights on building a world-class, museum-worthy collection of Cubist art, he dove in and read obsessively about the subject: “I got every book I could lay my hands on—especially the catalogues raisonnés [a listing of works with notes]—and read them again and again…and again.”

Travel and the hunt for key pieces followed. He disputes the claim of one detractor that, in Lauder’s words, “anyone with a few billion dollars could walk up and down Madison Avenue and assemble the same collection,” responding: “Yes unlimited money can buy some icons, but collecting rare works from the past is a journey that can’t simply be bought. It takes time, patience, and a good eye.”

And Leonard Lauder.