FREE CUBISM: THE LEONARD A. LAUDER COLLECTION PDF Rebecca Rabinow,Emily F. Braun | 392 pages | 18 Nov 2014 | Yale University Press | 9780300208078 | English | New Haven, United States Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection 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.