“A Collector’s Personal Perspective.” Leonard A. Lauder discusses his Cubist collection with The New York Times: http://met.org/1s2XZAH
The collection, featuring masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris, goes on view to the public for the first time on October 20!
"This collection is a thirty-five year effort. Thirty-five years of study, travel, buying, selling, perseverance, mistakes, refinement—you name it, there it is." —Leonard A. Lauder
The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, the most important group of Cubist artworks still in private hands, has never been on public display. The 80 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger will go on view on October 20! http://met.org/1vF758j
Leonard A. Lauder with Pablo Picasso’s “Two Nudes,” 1909.
$1 Billion Gift Gives Met a New Perspective (Cubist)
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: April 9, 2013
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.
Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection; 2013 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
"Woman in an Armchair (Eva)" by Pablo Picasso, 1913.
Multimedia
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. At first a collaboration between Picasso and Braque, Cubism
became a pioneering movement that redefined Western concepts of space
and time, high and low. Those two 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.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 9, 2013
An earlier version of an image appearing with this article on the home page misstated the name of a Picasso painting. It is “Woman in an Armchair (Eva),” not “Women in an Armchair (Eva).”
A Cubist Trove
For more than 40 years
Leonard A. Lauder, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon, has been
diligently and deliberately putting together a world-class collection of
Cubist art that rivals those of such institutions as the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and
the Pompidou Center in Paris. Consisting of 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14
Légers and 14 works by Gris, it has been promised to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. In this feature, Emily Braun, the curator of the Leonard
A. Lauder Cubist Collection and a distinguished professor at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses highlights.
Related Article »
Use the ← and → keys to navigate
Enlarge Images
Introduction by Emily Braun
"Trees at L’Estaque"
Georges Braque, 1908
Braque began to invent Cubism by breaking down traditional linear perspective and light/dark modeling in emulation of Cezanne’s work.
"The Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’Air)"
Pablo Picasso, 1912
The painting “Our Future is in the Air” was an inside Cubist joke referring to the groundbreaking inventions and new perspectives that were being forged by Braque and Picasso.
"Fruit Dish and Glass (Fruit et verre)"
Georges Braque, 1912
Collages were a revolutionary Cubist art form in which readymade objects and materials, such as wallpaper, object labels and music sheets were incorporated into fine art.
"The Violin (Mozart/Kubelick)"
Georges Braque, 1912
Their wordplay and images combine jokes and erudite references –high and low- as well as to inside allusions to the Cubist movement and commentary on world events.
"Woman in an Armchair (Eva)"
Pablo Picasso, 1913
In synthetic Cubism the artist took abstract planes of colors and built them up toward a representation.
"Figure Seated in a Café (Man at a Table)"
Juan Gris, 1914
Gris took the analytic Cubism of Picasso and Braque and turned it into a style all of his own.
"The Typographer"
Fernand Léger, 1917-18
It shows Léger’s affinity with the anonymous working man as seen in the standardized parts of the figure and his fascination with the trappings of modern Paris.
沒有留言:
張貼留言