Cubism: the Leonard A. Lauder Collection Free

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Cubism, the most influential Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection movement of the early twentieth century, still resonates today. It destroyed traditional illusionism in painting and radically changed the way we see the world. The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, unsurpassed in its holdings of Cubist art, is now a promised gift to the Museum. See the New York Times article April 9, about the promised gift. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Composition The Typographer— Image at right: Pablo Picasso. Nude in an Armchairsummer Pears and Grapes on a Table detailautumn Lauder Cubist Collection. Photograph by Jackie Neale. Photograph by Juan Trujillo. Book and Glass detail Purchase a copy. Help us bring life to art, and art to lives. Join today. Experience great Met exhibitions anew—or for the first time—with our lavishly illustrated, must-read catalogues. Explore rich articles and multimedia features about the Museum's current exhibitions, events and performances, announcements, behind-the-scenes activities, and more. Upcoming Exhibitions Past Exhibitions. Accompanied by an Audio Guide Cubism "Enjoy and take stock of one of the Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection transformative gifts in the museum's gift-laden history. Exhibition Galleries. The Collection. Related Videos. Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. A Closer Look. Archival Labels. Members Count Help us bring life to art, and art to lives. Books about The Met Experience great Met exhibitions anew—or for the first time—with our lavishly illustrated, must-read catalogues. Now at The Met Explore rich articles and multimedia features about the Museum's current exhibitions, events and performances, announcements, behind- the-scenes activities, and Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. Cubism: The Leonard A Lauder Collection

They even shocked themselves. It was just those repeated shocks and discoveries, Leonard A. Lauder says, that drove him to collect Cubism. The news still comes fast and furious in Lauder's Cubist collection, as a promised gift to the Met. It is news of their years together and at their best, from to It is news, too, of the upheavals in art that brought them together—and the upheavals in Europe that tore them apart. It is news of the high and low culture, from classical music to the breakfast table, that kept them reading the headlines. Most of all, though, it is news of Picasso and Braque. Could Braque's tumble of houses nestled beneath an arch of trees at l'Estaque, a port near Marseilles, have been the first Cubist painting? Could Picasso's Still Life with Fan from the year before have been the first to insert lettering with a brush? Maybe, or maybe at least the first question hardly even makes sense when Cubism had to reinvent itself every day. This art was employing signs of its possibilities to declare its independence. Their love of news spilled over into newsprint. It survives in the letters of journalor "newspaper," clipped from the masthead or hand-lettered in cunning simulation of the real thing. It survives in stories literally ripped from the headlines along the run-up to war. One can imagine the discoveries coming alone at a bar where the Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection of the day had been saved for regulars or cast aside. One can imagine them coming first thing over breakfast in the morning light. Braque called the plain letters their "certainties," in a Modernism that would ever after traffic in the uncertain. It could make do quite well with only a fragment of a certainty, like the letters jourfor "day. For half a millennium, Western art had conveyed deep space in a single act of vision. Now that vantage point had a become a moment in time—the moment of the scent of a chocolate pot, the taste of a sugar cube, the heard melody from a guitar, the touch of the sound holes in a wind instrument or the knob of a drawer jutting forward into the viewer's hand. Time could be present in the ticking of a metronome, even as single-point perspective was shattering to pieces from the motion of its hand. It could and often did abridge still further, to urnal for a comic student's thoughts of a urinal or simply to jouor "play. One plays a game, like dice for Braque or chess for Picasso, the pieces hard to discern and yet so very much at play. Picasso paints his aviation news into the work as Notre Ave Est dans l'A —perhaps because our avenue, our way forward, is through a playing card, the ace. He would always, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection seems, have still another ace in the hole, including Picasso sculptureor maybe l'A is just the letter Alike a return of art and representation to square one. Group Zero in Germany of the early s had nothing on these guys. One can fear another game as well, the game of public markets and private treasures. Collectors and curators have Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection habit of circling one another, with an eye to prices and reputations. When a museum exhibits a private collection, like the Nasher sculpture collection at the Guggenheim inone can see it jacking up market values while angling for donations. When it enshrines a collection with a reserved wing, like too many at the Met or, for that matter, the Ronald and Evelyn Lauder galleries at the Whitneyegos soar at the Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection of the museum's integrity and the public's experience of art and history. This exhibition has the bad timing to Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection a lengthy remake of the Met's fountain plaza, mostly to add the names of the Koch brothers to what you were sure was public space along Fifth Avenue. Besides, it had to be a little late to enter the game of building a collection like this infifty years after MoMA had wrapped Modernism up, right? Maybe not. Cubism can easily discourage people, much the way people fail to finish James Joyce or Marcel Proust. They see the difficulty and miss the exhilaration of taking flight. There is always a more dreamlike Surrealism or a nice Jewish boy like Marc Chagall. Apparently, that left an opportunity for Lauder, his fortune rooted in the family cosmetics business. It also fills a real need at the Met despite, just for starters, one of the best drip paintings by Jackson Pollock. With the Whitney's departure from Madison Avenue for a new Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking Districtthe Met has room to rehang its modern wing and to grow. It is also just showing off another acquisition, murals by Thomas Hart Bentonand two works from Lauder have already entered the collection. He has Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection modesty to contribute his name not to a wing for his gift but to a new research center instead. The entrance to this exhibition has a photo of work as it hangs in his home, over an old-fashioned sofa in a way that Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris might have recognized, and the catalog has twenty essays on aspects of Cubism. With luck, research and education are just beginning. The exhibition starts with Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso apart, injust past twenty-five and busy modernizing themselves. Braque had been following Fauvism in case one had any doubt that Henri Matissetoo, led art into the twentieth centurywhile Picasso had been working his way out of a gentler, more conservative style through Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and " the primitive. One can almost feel Picasso running his hand over a bronze bust of Fernande inand one can feel him looking at the shadows of an African mask and seeing nothing behind. As ever, Braque is the denser and more accomplished, with warm, glowing browns pushing right up to the edges of the composition, while Picasso has his crude hands and laconic line. Someone who remembers only Braque's elegance and Picasso's sexism has forgotten how much they helped one another to laugh. Perspective became just one sign among many, along with the cartoon tassel of a tablecloth, the letter B from a newspaper for an ear, or a musical score for the sound. As space became the space of an oval tabletop, that left the puzzle of what to do with the corners, so why not leave them unpainted or cut them away? In the space of the hand as well as the eye, negative spaces matter more anyway. A mandolin neck is palpable, but then so is the sound hole. The show's heart is Analytic Cubismthe style of roughly toin its dizzying fragmentation of objects and space. It lingers over musical instruments as signs of art and play, starting with Fernande at full length leaning on a guitar, and letters as signs of the time. It relies on conventions even as they break apart. Textures can arise from a cabinet maker's comb used to simulate them, from sand on unprimed canvas, from oil so dry as to roughen pigment, from the white silhouette of a clay pipe, from the painted or real crumpled paper of a scholar's cap, or from newsprint itself. If the paper is turning brown with age, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection the more convincing. The show includes collage, but the peaking of three dimensions in Synthetic Cubism, like Picasso's guitars in cardboard or an absinthe glass with a real cube for its sugar, is a bit of an afterthought, and by then the artists had begun to drift apart. World War I had displaced Russian nationals like Wassily Kandinsky in Paris and altered the invention of abstractionand it isolated these artists as well. They still track closely at first, with decorative patterns in color, but mass culture and mass reproduction were implicit well before. Picasso discovers the red, white, and blue of the French flag that he cannot personally defend, while Braque lends a deep purple to his love of art and music —where Jan Kubelik, the violinist, supplies the "cube" and Mozart the "art. Picasso shows the stress or the longings inwith a faceless woman's pendant and pointed breasts. He looks forward here to Surrealism and already subjects it to comedy. It took Juan Gristhough, to make things plainer and more Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. Gris packs more to the edges, while leaving things bare and glimmering in an Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection light. Tabletops have the colors of a bar as the morning lights begin to rake on the remains of the previous day. The moment had run its course, and so thankfully had a war, but art had fully entered a new century, with an influence that Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection never left. As a borrowed headline boasts for Gris referring to a fingerprint scheme for art authenticationon ne truquera plus les oeuvres d'art : one can no longer play false with works of art. Then again, maybe now Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection must play false whenever one claims it as one's own. Exhibitions have surveyed every aspect of Picasso's career, gamesmanship, and rivalry with Matissebut they may never focus so single-mindedly again on just how he made news. With Cubism, art had come down to earth as never before, but its future was still up in the air. They were making news every day. The love of the game Their love of news spilled over into newsprint. Up in the air The exhibition starts with Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso apart, injust past twenty-five and busy modernizing themselves. BWW Reviews: Reconstructing a Revolution with CUBISM: THE LEONARD A. LAUDER COLLECTION

Any art history survey will tell you that Cubism revolutionized painting, but few will show you what it was like to be on the Cubist frontline. That is where Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection rises to the occasion. As presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curated by Rebecca Rabinow and Emily Braun, Cubism is a seven-room, eighty-work explosion of line and color and cleverness. The Met show doesn't so much progress as barrel forward, leading from one burst of formal innovation to another, then another, each new breakthrough as bold as the last. Part of the excitement is watching the Lauder Collection overturn the easiest assumptions about the Cubist movement. Not all of them, of course: all four of the major artists here are almost universally Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, and Picasso--the most universally respected of them all--has more canvases on display than anyone else. Even Braque gets only 34 to Picasso's an odd choice considering Braque's crucial role in Cubism's flourishing Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection an understandable one considering that Picasso is Picasso. While it doesn't summon a new Cubist forward guard, this exhibition confidently defeats the idea that Cubism was an experiment for experimentation's sake--an idea that has persisted, in some form or other, since or thereabouts. That year, Henri Matisse Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection observed Braque's Houses at L'Estaque and brushed it off as a collection of "little cubes. Cubism also bespeaks Mr. Lauder's own tact and sharpness. There isn't a genuinely bad canvas among his choices, which cover all periods of the Cubist saga--an impressive feat of selection, since not all stages of Cubism have aged equally well. And where future installation is concerned, the Met is at liberty to arrange the Lauder canvases however it pleases--no real strictures on how or where they can be displayed, whether or not they can be separated. Considering the judicious staging of Cubismsuch trust is well placed. While the big theoretical selling point of Cubism has always been its approach to shape and form--its fragmentation of everyday objects, its reconstitution of reality using lines and planes and tongue-in-cheek allusions--this Cubist survey begins with works that astound not with shape, but with color. Wall sized-photographs of the Lauder Collection as arranged in Mr. With its rose tones and dark outlines, the first of these could almost be executed in stained glass. It is the second, with its skewed perspective and stern contours, that points the Cubist way forward. That the most astonishing selection here is a sculpture--the Head of a Woman --shows how hard Picasso was striving for a Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection synthesis in his canvases. And not striving with complete success, either. The "painting of a sculpture" gimmick that runs riot here was starting to tire out byand Picasso seemed to know it. Ah, but the next few rooms-- those are where the substance, the difficulty, and the versatility of Cubism become manifest. Always at his best when subjecting everyday sights to creative torsion, Braque applied the obscuring, decentralizing, regularizing tactics of Analytic Cubism--the movement's first major stage--to instruments and still lifes. Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection works Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection collected in a single gallery, a joyous passage despite the dour earth tones of these canvases and of Analytic Cubism as a whole. Picasso returns to the picture in the subsequent room, where he and Braque abjure sculptural tones and painted mass for new materials and new effects--wood veneer, newsprint, exposed white ground, obvious black lines that Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at once Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection and commanding. Here, the two artists are at their mutual best, creating canvases that at once speak to one another and herald Synthetic Cubism--the movement's second major stage. We know where we're headed, but the next gallery is still a knockout: Picasso and Braque exit temporarily, and Juan Gris races into view with paintings that are both controlled and concussive. Overloaded in detail, baroque in composition, hallucinatory in color, paintings such as Pears and Grapes on a Table and Still Life with Checked Tablecloth prove that Gris is this show's secret weapon. AroundPicasso and Braque decided it was time for a little stylistic overload of their own. Just not too much: round canvases, stippled dots, and patches of brash color became part of their repertoire, as Cubism revisited its austere Analytic roots. The tension between these whimsical devices and the older conventions yielded some of the best selections in Cubismincluding Braque's Mozart Kubelick and Picasso's The Scallop Shell. Color and whimsy eventually won out, as Synthetic Cubism--colored planes, discernible figures, few genuine specimens in the Lauder Collection-- became the new mode. Yet he is also a bit of an odd man out where the Lauder Collection as a whole is concerned. He isn't so much Cubism refined Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection Cubism cleaned up and repurposed. With this one, just be impressed, then head toward the gift shop. And Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection to the movements that came after it, what a strange affair Cubism was. It had few clear political aspirations, few easy tie-ins to design or architecture, and little structure, unless "Picasso and Braque painting side-by-side" or "Juan Gris trying to get a dealer" is your idea of structure. It produced few or no? It nonetheless set itself a lot to achieve, and proved able to constantly reinvent and reconfigure itself. There is little surprise that Lauder, a man versed in the highest achievements of modern enterprise, has given such a portion of wealth, energy, and devotion to Cubism: it wasn't so much a movement as an adventure. Skip to main content Skip to footer site map. Related Articles. He regularly contributes reviews of museum and gallery exhibitions, performing arts events, and read more